Brayden Gill, (left) 13, and his sister, Amylee, 11, play with a friend at Fairview Park during a break from their studies at Agora Cyber Charter School. Mirror photo by Russ O’Reilly

In the Altoona Area School District alone, there were 253 students in cyber charter schools last year.

One of them, Amylee Gill, 11, of Altoona, has been attending Agora Cyber Charter School since kindergarten.

“I get to do school in my pajamas,” she said at Fairview Park with her parents.

After talking with a reporter, she ran off to play with her brother, Brayden, 13, who also attends Agora, and a girl they made friends with at the park.

Brayden, 13, now attends Agora after leaving traditional brick-and-mortar school last year, parents Kelli and Torae Gill said.

The school district could not strike the right balance of academic rigor for Brayden, who has autism, Kelli Gill said.

“He was not being challenged enough in school. He came home one day saying his tests had pictures of fish on them. He said, ‘I need to be challenged more,'” Kelli Gill said. And at other times he would come home frustrated to tears because of homework that made no sense to him, she said.

Amylee has been attending Agora since her year after preschool because she has food allergies that are touch-sensitive. A mere sneeze by a student next to her who had eaten something she was allergic to could have been a danger.

“They wouldn’t let her carry an EpiPen in school because it was considered a weapon,” Kelli Gill said.

With the Gills at the park were Agora Cyber Family Coach Coordinator Pam Keth and middle school principal Heather Bianconi.

Both Keth and Bianconi have children but none are in cyber charter schools.

However, “I would not hesitate to go for cyber charter if an issue arises,” Bianconi said.

Agora has local employees

Although Agora is headquartered in Philadelphia, it has local employees in the regions it serves. Those include “family coaches” who are the bridge between home and school, Keth said.

“They visit families in their homes, and they host events around the area so kids have an opportunity to get together. A responsibility they have is to monitor students’ attendance, so they watch kids to see what’s going on.”

Agora school officials including CEO Michael Conti were upset by a comment by an Altoona Area School District official that cyber charters, naming Agora specifically, allowed students to miss up to 10 days without logging in.

The essence of the comment from Altoona Area Superintendent Charles Prijatelj was that a student of the cyber charter may log on only every 10 days.

And once they are eventually sent back to the school district, they are way behind academically and struggling to be successful, Prijatelj said.

It is true that a student may miss no more than 10 days unexcused and continue to be enrolled in a school, either cyber or traditional school.

The law enforced by the Pennsylvania Department of Education is that students of any school who are at anytime in the school term absent from school for 10 consecutive school days, “shall thereafter be removed from the active membership roll” unless the district has been provided with evidence that absence may be legally excused or if compulsory attendance prosecution has been pursued against the parents.

But if a student misses nine days of cyber school and logs on the 10th day, “the timer restarts,” Conti said.

But both he and Keth, who oversees family coaches, stressed that Agora does not take absences lightly.

Agora has 650 employees. Almost 400 of them are union members teaching classes every day, Conti said. “We have one of the strictest attendance policies of all cyber charters. They have to be in attendance for three-fifths of the day for them to be counted. Teachers take attendance in each and every class.”

Family coaches work to re-engage students after three unexcused absences, Keth said.

“We look at kids and say, ‘These kids are now at three unexcused absences; they need a SAP (School Attendance Plan) to improve attendance. They do that in every public school,'” Keth said. “Make no mistake, we are a public school, just like every other public school, so we have to adhere to those laws including those about attendance. … When kids get to 10 days of unexcused absences, it doesn’t always mean that they are ‘booted out.’ When a student hits that 10-day mark, we look at a couple of things. We may have kids with medical conditions and have a medical excuse for those 10 days.”

After that, the question remains of whether students’ attendance improves.

“Our objective at that point is to get family coaches out there. Everybody is doing their part to get the kids re-engaged. so a family coach will go to the home. Maybe they moved and didn’t tell us. That happens. We have a different procedure for that. But the kids are not being dropped from our rolls. Our job is to re-engage them.”

System doesn’t

fit everyone

At the same time, if cyber education isn’t working for a student, Keth said, she has no issue with suggesting to families that they should consider returning to their traditional school district.

“Brick-and-mortar school has been around for very long time. It doesn’t mean it works for everyone. Cyber education provides another option. And cyber doesn’t work for everyone either. We have those conversations with families too.”

However, school data collected by the state shows Agora has a problem with regular attendance of its students. A measure of students’ regular attendance data is shown on the state’s future ready index of all schools.

Agora’s percentage of students with regular attendance is at 60 percent. Altoona Area High School’s rate is not stellar either at 77.7 percent, but it is considerably higher than Agora.

“Regular attendance” is defined by the state as the percentage of students who attend on a regular basis, in other words, the number of students enrolled for 60 or more school days and present 90 percent or more of school days.

The state average of all schools’ (including cyber and traditional schools) students regular attendance is 85 percent.

Comparing cyber charter schools alone, Agora’s regular attendance rate of 60 percent is fourth from the lowest rate of the state’s 15 cyber charters last year.

“What I can tell you is that these are not apples to apples comparisons, even among cybers,” Conti said. “Many schools do not require the live classroom component mandated by Agora. Their idea of attendance is that a student logs in the morning once and that then counts as an entire day of attendance. Not at all what happens here,” he said, stressing again that teachers take attendance in each class and students must be in attendance for three-fifths of the day for them to be counted.

The way Agora’s cyber education works is students can see their teacher in a video feed, but teachers can’t see the student because of privacy laws. However, they communicate through an online communications hub.

The teacher logs in and uploads a PowerPoint lesson. Teachers can see who logs in. They can then communicate with each student. Teachers can break students into groups. All of the class is monitored and recorded.

“We can go back and look at any class at any time,” Bianconi said.

Graduation rates lower

Comparing graduation rates of all the state’s 583 cyber charters, brick-and-mortar charter schools, vocational-technical schools and traditional public schools, the worst rates are by cyber charters.

The state’s 13 cyber charter schools in the 2017-18 school year filled the bottom quartile of all schools for graduation rates.

Agora, at No. 12 from the bottom of all 583 schools, had a four-year cohort graduation rate of less than 49 percent.

The cohort graduation rates are a calculation of the percentage of students who have graduated with a regular high school diploma within a designated number of years since the student first entered high school.

Standardized test scores are another area where cyber charters are at the bottom.

Agora students’ standardized test scores in English, math and science are also all far below the statewide average. The percentage of students scoring proficient or advanced in math was less than 13 percent last year.

Superintendents of public school districts lament the fact they get kids back behind academically.

“But the key word there is ‘back.’ When those kids sometimes come to us, they could be two, three years behind in their curriculum. And they spend maybe a year with us. We can’t get them two, three years ahead in one year,” Keth said. “That deficit has happened over a longer period of time. We don’t have a magic wand. It’s not like they leave there with As and come back with Ds.”

“The kids have been failed in system after system and come to us sometimes as a last resort. Parents come sometimes desperate because they don’t know where else to go.”

Mirror Staff Writer Russ O’Reilly is at 946-7435.