ROARING SPRING — The Spring Cove School Board approved a resolution urging legislative reform in Pennsylvania cyber charter school funding during its Monday meeting.

The unanimous approval came after the board voted to adopt the district’s 2025-26 budget reflecting no tax increase and expenditures of $35.3 million, including the already-approved $2.7 million for a new roof at the Central High School, which will come from the district’s capital projects fund.

With revenues of $30.3 million, the district will face a deficit of about $2.4 million. By adding about $600,000 from its budgetary reserve, that number will be brought down to about $1.8 million.

The remaining deficit will be covered by the general fund, district business manager Steven Foor said. With an unassigned fund balance of $2.4 million, the district would have about $600,000 remaining after covering the deficit.

Cyber charter costs for the 2023-24 school year totaled about $1 million — nearly half the deficit the district faces for the upcoming school year.

According to Foor, cyber charter tuition rates for the 2024-25 school year stood at about $12,150 for a basic education student and about $23,635 for a special education student.

According to Superintendent Betsy Baker, the district offers its own online school that costs about $3,000 per student, “making an alternative cyber school an unnecessary taxpayer expense.”

“I feel like I’m a broken record, but it is not sustainable,” board member Amy Acker-Knisely said. “Something has to be done. And I want to reiterate — we are not against school choice.”

According to the board’s resolution, the state House of Representatives approved a bill that would cap school district’s annual tuition payments to cyber charter schools at $8,000 per student, establish a cash balance ceiling of 12% of their spending and prohibit financial incentives to parents who enroll their children in cyber charter schools.

If that $8,000 cap were to take effect, Spring Cove would pay about $400,000 a school year for the district’s 47 students who use outside cyber charter schools instead of $1 million, Acker-Knisely said.

The resolution also stated that an audit released by state Auditor General Tim DeFoor showed the fund balances of the five largest cyber charter schools increased “by 144% from $254 million in 2019-20 to $619 million in 2022-23,” which reveals “that cyber schools receive far more taxpayer money than is necessary to educate students online.”

The audit showed that those funds were being used for “questionable expenditures unrelated to direct student instruction,” the resolution read.

In her report, Baker said those expenditures included such line items as a monthly fuel stipend of $400 for full-time employees, purchasing $4 million in gift cards as incentives for students and families, sponsoring professional sports teams and buying cars for their CEOs.

“They are not funded based upon the actual cost of the cyber charter education,” Baker said. “If they were, they would not be able to accumulate such huge fund balances because they would need the money they are receiving to operate their schools.”

Baker said the 10 outside cyber charter schools that district students attended during the 2024-25 school year “are performing in the lowest 5% of schools” in the state. She then cited Susan Spicka, executive director of Education Voters of PA, who spoke at the state House Education Committee meeting on April 5, saying “the 2023-2024 school year cyber charters accounted for 20% of student dropouts, despite enrolling just 5% of public school students in grades 7-12.”

“The average four-year cohort graduation rate for a cyber charter is 65% compared with 88% in school districts,” Baker said. “The average six-year cohort graduation rate for cybers is 75% compared to 92% for school districts.”

The resolution then denounced the “current cyber charter school funding system for its misuse of taxpayer funds” and called upon lawmakers to “immediately enact meaningful reforms,” including stricter financial oversight, strengthen state Department of Education oversight of cyber charter academic performance and “hold publicly funded cyber-charter schools to the same standards, expectations and regulations as all other public schools.”

“We need our state legislators’ support on this,” board President Troy Wright said. “This is why there will be tax increases. It’s not sustainable.”