DALEVILLE, Ind. (AP) - Two Indiana online charter schools that state officials say inflated their enrollments by thousands of students could soon be forced to close.
The state Department of Education stopped providing state funding to Indiana Virtual School and Indiana Virtual Pathways Academy as it seeks to recover more than $47 million from them over the improper enrollment figures. A state audit found that more than half of the schools’ some 7,000 students weren’t active in any classes for at least six months during the 2017 calendar year.
Those schools have shared administration and are authorized under state law by the Daleville School Board, which voted Thursday to move toward revoking their operating charters within several weeks.
The board held its meeting after being notified last week that the two online schools were no longer operational and after receiving calls from many parents saying they couldn’t obtain their child’s transcripts, Daleville Superintendent Paul Garrison said. Representatives of the online schools maintain they are still functioning.
Garrison said the online schools have a legal obligation to keep providing services to students and provide an orderly shutdown if they do close.
“The utter lack of communication with students and parents, miscommunication, and failure to adequately provide student services that we have seen over the course of the past week is simply unacceptable,” he said.
An attorney for the online schools, Mary Jane LaPointe, said they need as much time as possible to work with the state Education Department to graduate students or find new schools for them.
“If Daleville pulls out, these schools no longer are licensed to operate, and the state essentially will have to take over,” she said. “It’s going to be a bigger mess, I fear, than it is now.”
The online schools have about two weeks to respond to the charter revocation notice and seek an appeal hearing.
The Daleville board’s action comes two weeks after the State Board of Education voted to reduce the online schools’ enrollment counts by half for the past two academic years. The Education Department then sent letters saying Indiana Virtual Pathways Academy owed $25.6 million to the state and that Indiana Virtual School owed $21.7 million.
Percy Clark, superintendent of the two schools, said in response to the state audit that the State Board of Education was treating his schools differently from traditional schools, which don’t have state funding cut for students who withdraw after enrollment reporting dates. He also said the state action was based on incomplete audit results and could force the immediate closure of the schools, harming what he called 2,500 “active and engaged students.”
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