HARRISBURG — Commonwealth Court has rejected an appeal from a cyber school seeking to keep secret documents detailing reimbursement requests from parents for the costs of activities with their children.

The dispute centers on an open records request filed by Susan Spicka of Education Voters of Pennsylvania, who was seeking Community Class Registration forms submitted by parents of children attending classes through Commonwealth Charter Academy.

Education Voters of Pennsylvania was represented by the Public Interest Law Center during the appeal process.

However, this dispute is also playing out amidst the broader controversy over cyber school funding and complaints from advocacy groups promoting public school funding, that cyber school spending isn’t required to meet the same transparency requirements as traditional public schools. Cyber schools are funded with tax dollars and are paid a tuition rate tied to the cost of educating students in the school districts in which the cyber students reside. School district officials complain that the varying rates are not connected to the cyber schools’ costs of educating students and that, generally, when school districts run their own cyber programs, the costs per student are far less than what it costs to educate students in traditional classrooms.

Gov. Josh Shapiro’s budget has proposed setting a statewide cyber school tuition rate of $8,000 per student, a move that would save school districts close to $400 million.

Spicka told Capitolwire that the records request came after she’d learned that the cyber school was giving parents cash payments if they filled out the reimbursement form to offset the cost of activities outside of school.

“We filed a RTK (Right-to-Know) request seeking copies of these forms (with all identifying information redacted) to better understand how CCA was spending Pennsylvanians’ tax dollars,” she said, noting that if officials in traditional public schools were planning to provide cash payments for outside activities “like horseback riding or dance lessons or fees for youth sports activities,” the school board would be required to publicly vote on the policy and approve all payments at board meetings.

“Cyber charter schools receive more than $1 billion in tuition payments from school districts each year and spend these dollars with far less transparency and accountability than the school districts from which they receive the funding,” Spicka said. “Homeowners who struggle to pay for their medicine and other necessities after they pay their property tax bills should know that cyber charter schools are using their tax dollars to pay for the leisure activities of students enrolled in cyber charters. State lawmakers should understand that cyber charters are spending the property tax dollars that are drained out of the schools and communities they represent on cash payments to cyber charter families.”

The cyber school appealed the Office of Open Records’ decision to Dauphin County Court and lost again. There, the county judge rejected the cyber school’s argument that the records should be exempt from the open records law, pointing to an earlier decision by the state Supreme Court in a dispute over whether surveillance video taken on a school bus should be considered a public record. The county judge concluded that, in the school bus video case, the justices had ruled that FERPA doesn’t automatically provide cover to exempt records from disclosure and that the redaction provisions in state and federal law suggest that the law does provide a means to release the information while keeping personally identifiable information secret.

The cyber court had also argued then that if the records were released, the parents’ handwriting would be disclosed and that would amount to an impermissible violation of the parents’ privacy rights. Federal law indicates that students’ handwriting is personally identifiable information, so their parents’ handwriting should be, as well.

The county court rejected that argument and in its decision, Commonwealth Court agreed.