Virtual charters: public schooling, at home

Some of the parents of Fiel's students taught more intensively in the first three months of the school year in order to take most of December off. One woman travels for one week every month and takes her child with her, doing the lessons out of hotel rooms. A few parents are team teaching, with the mother handling some subjects and the father doing others, or teaching in foreign languages. In one case, the mother, father, and nanny are teaching the children in English, German, and Russian.

One thing that PAVCS educators know they will do differently next year is to offer more intensive technical training to parents. More than 100 families who have students enrolled in the virtual school had never had a computer at home before, and some parents are finding it difficult to keep up with the lessons online. Principal Maslayak considers introducing technology to families an added benefit of cyberschooling. And since the only requirement for parents to teach their children through PAVCS is that they be able to read, some parents are learning more than just technology.

As Maslayak points out, "In many cases, you'll find parents learning alongside the children."

Faster than you can say "click here," the challenges to virtual charter schools are being raised.

Concerned about money being siphoned off from regular public schools, the Pennsylvania School Boards Association claims that online schools do not have a right to exist as charters under the current law.

When a student goes to a charter school, the home school district must hand over that student's allotment of public funds to the charter school. At the Pennsylvania Virtual Charter School (PAVCS), tuition and other expenses add up to an estimated $7,000 per student.

Local schools never appreciate losing funding. But until recently their loss of students - and money - had been limited by the number of spaces in local charter schools. With cyber-charter schools, however, geography is not an issue. Students from across the state have enrolled in PAVCS, and some teachers oversee students from more than 100 miles away.

In April, the Pennsylvania School Boards Association filed a lawsuit challenging the legality of cyber-charter schools. Arguments are expected to be heard this spring.

"The charter-school law envisions a place where children go to school. For example, charter schools must provide a physical description of the school - but cyberschools exist in cyberspace," says Thomas Gentzel, executive director of the association. In addition, he says, "The state's attendance requirement requires parents to 'send' their child to a day school, with the exception of home-schooling. So that raises the question: Are the cyberstudents in compliance with the compulsory attendance law?"

The association helped draft two bills in the Pennsylvania Legislature that would treat cyber charter schools separately from usual charter schools. Until these schools' status is clarified, Mr. Gentzel says, they don't have a right to receive public funding.

PAVCS points to a section in the current charter-school law addressing the attendance requirement; it states that computer and satellite technology can be used to deliver instruction to students.

"Some who wrote the law say they had virtual [schooling] in mind, some say they didn't," says Michael Maslayak, principal of the Pennsylvania Virtual Charter School.

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