The U.S. Department of Education tells the Trib’s education team that DeVos on Monday called out special education leaders gathered in Arlington, Va., at the Office of Special Education’s Leadership Conference.
DeVos, who has been a champion of charter schools and alternatives to traditional public classrooms, continued to tout school choice to the group. She referred to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling requiring a public school district to pay private school tuition for a special education student as a major victory for children with disabilities.
Fighting hunger has long been a priority for our family.
Frances Wolf (Commonwealth of Pa. photo)
Tom and I have seen firsthand how hunger affects families and communities and we are personally committed to ending hunger in Pennsylvania.
For years, we have worked as volunteers in our local soup kitchen, York Daily Bread, as well as others across the commonwealth – and we have supported both those in need and the organizations serving them.
That’s why I have been passionately advocating for a very specific component of Tom’s 2017-18 budget proposal – a $2 million investment to enhance our school breakfast program and help more students have the start to the day that they need to be successful.
It simply breaks my heart that 1 in 5 children – over 520,000 – right here in our great state of Pennsylvania don’t always know where their next meal will come from.
And many of them show up to school in the morning with an empty stomach, not having eaten anything since the night before.
As you can imagine, many of them cannot focus on their studies, lack energy and struggle with behavioral problems.
This is nothing short of devastating – as a mother and as a Pennsylvanian. And, it has an enormous impact on our schools and our kids’ future.
Improving our schools, and ensuring that our children and educators have the resources they need to succeed has been my husband’s top priority as governor. Tom and his team have fought for improving education from preschool through higher education in Pennsylvania since day one.
And, thankfully, that fight has produced real results for our students. Working with the legislature, Tom has successfully secured historic increases in education funding over the last two years.
But even with great schools and teachers, kids who are hungry struggle to concentrate and perform well in school.
Ask any teacher and they’ll tell you that food is a basic school supply, just like textbooks and pencils. When kids struggle with hunger, it’s harder for them to learn.
This $2 million is a relatively small investment compared to other state government programs, but it will have an enormous return. This investment will help the commonwealth leverage up to $20 million dollars in federal funding.
We know that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. It impacts a variety of outcomes in our children. We don’t need the research to tell us this. We see it as parents and teachers – both in academic progress, as well as behavior and the number of visits to the school nurse every day.
I am passionate about this because expanding access to breakfast in our schools is a smart investment and one that I know will have a lasting impact on our students and on Pennsylvania.
Pennsylvania’s greatest resource is our young people and the public schools that prepare them to be our future leaders. Our goal is to support them in this great endeavor by providing the resources and opportunities they need to make the most of their educational experiences and to help prepare them for a competitive job market.
When children start the day with the nutrition they need, it has long-lasting consequences for the entire state – they grow up smarter, healthier, and stronger – and that means a smarter, healthier, stronger Pennsylvania.
Frances Wolf is the First Lady of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. She writes from Harrisburg.
Congress is making momentous decisions that could fundamentally reshape U.S. health care with a serious negative impact on our most vulnerable children. The House of Representatives already voted in favor of $880 billion in cuts to Medicaid, the program that covers one in three American children.
Local critics have focused on the immense harm that would come from taking $2 billion away from Pennsylvania by 2020 and threaten healthcare that reaches 2.8 million residents.
Pennsylvania schools stand to lose more than $40 billion in Medicaid reimbursements that pay for healthcare for disadvantaged children and special-education services delivered on site. That will mean employing fewer nurses, physical therapists, speech pathologists, and other professionals. Vision, hearing, asthma and mental health screening programs may go away. It will also become more difficult to integrate the necessary support and technologies that empower disabled students to learn alongside their peers.
We know that our most vulnerable families need access to high quality medical care, safe and affordable housing, and jobs with family-sustaining wages so that students are well positioned to take full advantage of learning opportunities available in our public schools. We use the term “collective impact” to describe the team effort needed to support our neighbors in need.
Abandoning a 50-year, bipartisan commitment to children’s health undermines society’s “collective impact” and will have long-term repercussions. Studies demonstrate that children enrolled in Medicaid experience a lifetime of reduced disease and disability compared with their uninsured peers. They also do better academically and go on to secure higher paying jobs and contribute more in taxes.
Slashing Medicaid will have the opposite effects: higher healthcare costs, increasingly strained government budgets, students less able to benefit from educational opportunities and a workforce less prepared to take on the challenges of a technology-driven global economy.
The sad reality is that the most vulnerable students — those in need of medical treatment or physical assistance — would lose the most. But they won’t be alone. Many of the services funded by Medicaid are legally mandated. As federal funding dries up, schools will have to reallocate money from elsewhere.
When federal and state mandates on schools are not funded at the state and federal level, the burden for paying for these mandates is shifted to the local taxpayer. The potential cut in Medicaid reimbursement to schools combined with state-mandated pension payments and unfunded state-mandated charter school tuition payments adds to the financial burdens of school districts, leading to a combination of unpopular cuts in educational programs combined with unpopular property tax increases.
Our great country can do better than this.
Michael Faccinetto is president of the Bethlehem Area School District School Board and president of the Pennsylvania School Boards Association. Joseph Roy is the superintendent of the Bethlehem Area School District.
East Stroudsburg Area School District and its taxpayers paid cyber charter schools $3.7 million last year. That total has climbed consistently for at least the last five years.
The Pennsylvania school code requires that all state funding follow a student regardless of his or her choice of school. Funds are allocated directly to public school districts. Then, charter schools seek a tuition reimbursement from the district that sends the student.
Public schools are obligated to pay, but institutions have clashed on how much. Calculations are currently based on the expenses of the sending school. They do not consider what it actually costs the charter school to educate a student.
“In my opinion, it’s destructive to the public education system,” said Principal Bill Vitulli of Smithfield Elementary School. “Is it reasonable to pay cyber charter schools who don’t have nearly the same costs we do?”
Vitulli also manages the district’s own cyber program, East Stroudsburg Area Cyber Academy. It currently has about 90 students enrolled full-time and closer to 60 attending part-time, he said. All classes are taught by district instructors.
“Cyber charter schools don’t really have any different expenses than we do in our program,” he said. “They might have to hire more staff, but they don’t have all the costs of building maintenance, sports teams or after-school activities.”
Vitulli estimated an annual cost of $2,500 to educate a single, nonspecial student in the district cyber program. He did not have an exact figure available, he said.
Chief Financial Officer Jeffrey Bader said cyber academy costs are included in district’s other expenses; however, he estimated the program costs less than $4,000 a year per student.
Right now, the district pays charter schools $12,735 for each student or $29,731 for each special education student.
In October 2015, East Stroudsburg school district had 202 students enrolled in nine different cyber charter schools, according to Pennsylvania Department of Education records. That total includes 51 special needs students, who have higher tuition costs.
Commonwealth Charter Academy had the largest population of East Stroudsburg area students that year. CCA had 84 district students enrolled as of October, including 21 special education students. It remains one of the most attended by students from Monroe and Pike Counties for the last five years.
“Our costs aren’t the same; they’re just different,” said CEO Maurice Flurie, who formerly worked as assistant superintendent for Lower Dauphin School District.
“The general expectation is that it’s less, but that’s not necessarily true,” he said. “Some things cost exponentially more, like equipment maintenance or technology infrastructure.”
It costs CCA a little over $11,000 a year to educate a nonspecial student, Flurie said. CCA currently has more than 9,000 students enrolled across the state.
“We have costs no school district has,” he said. “When traditional schools have Keystone Exams or PSSA tests, kids ride the same buses to school — there’s no added costs. We have to put teachers on the road, rent spaces and feed staff. It costs us $800,000 to $1 million a year just to administer tests.”
Testing performance is one of the indicators used by the state Department of Education to measure educational effectiveness. Those numbers comprise a weighted score, called a School Performance Profile.
Online education programs generally have lower SPP scores than brick-and-mortar schools. Cyber charter schools scored an average of 50.9 between all 14 institutions operating in Pennsylvania.
CCA scored 47.5 during the last school year.
“We care about our kids making progress over time,” said Flurie. “In most cases, students come to us because something wasn’t working at their other school. That’s not appropriately reflected in an SPP score.”
About 72 percent of CCA students are at least one grade level behind at enrollment, Flurie also said. While about 80 percent return the next year, about 20 percent seek another institution.
“It doesn’t take into account the amount of kids leaving and coming in,” he said. “Some students plan on being with us just for middle school, so they’re going to test better as a ninth grader at a new school.”
East Stroudsburg had a district-wide SPP score of 69.6, based on the average results of its ten individual schools. Its cyber program does not have a separate score. Those students’ performances are reflected in the results of the physical school they would have attended.
“The general consensus is that cyber school isn’t necessarily the best way to teach,” said Principal Vitulli of East Stroudsburg’s program. “Success in cyber learning — even in our district — is not as good as being in a brick-and-mortar school.”
The program has grown substantially since he took over three years ago, Vitulli also said. He estimated the program on its own could likely rate well above the 50.9 average SPP cyber school score.
“It’s hard data to get,” he said. “You can’t compare because cyber schools are not being held to the same standards as brick-and-mortar schools.”
There were few fireworks Wednesday as Education Secretary Betsy DeVos testified before a House appropriations subcommittee on the Trump administration’s 2018 budget proposal. DeVos deflected much of the skepticism she received and continued to push the administration’s support of school choice.
President Trump’s proposal, which has drawn sharp criticism from educators and lawmakers alike, calls for $1.4 billion to expand school choice — namely vouchers and charter schools — but slashes $10.6 billion from after-school programs, teacher training and federal student loans and grants.
In her opening statement, DeVos said Trump’s budget proposal would return power to states and school districts and give parents a choice in their child’s education.
Democrats, including New York Rep. Nita Lowey, accused DeVos of taking money from public schools to fund school choice.
“We’re not proposing any shifting of funding from public schools to private schools,” DeVos responded. “In fact, all of the proposals set forth in the budget commit to fully funding public schools as we have.”
“If you’re pouring money into vouchers, the money is coming from somewhere,” Lowey said.
Many Republicans, while upset about proposed cuts to career and technical training programs, expressed support for DeVos.
“We are beginning to see the early stages of a much-needed, robust discussion about how we begin the process of getting our federal budget under control,” Rep. Steve Womack of Arkansas said.
Democrats questioned DeVos about whether she would allow federal funds to go to private schools that discriminate against particular populations.
Rep. Katherine Clark of Massachusetts brought up Lighthouse Christian Academy, a school in Bloomington, Indiana that receives $665,000 in state vouchers and denies admission to children of LGBT parents.
“Is there a line for you on state flexibility?” Clark asked.
“You are the backstop for students and their right to access quality education. Would you in this case say we are going to overrule and you cannot discriminate, whether it be on sexual orientation, race, or special needs in our voucher programs?” Clark added. “Will that be a guarantee from you to our students?”
DeVos sidestepped the question.
“The bottom line is we believe that parents are the best equipped to make choices for their children’s schooling and education decisions,” DeVos said. “Too many children today are trapped in schools that don’t work for them. We have to do something different than continuing a top-down, one-size-fits-all approach.”
DeVos’s appearance before Congress was her first public seating since a rough confirmation hearing before the Senate back in January.
The day Ayden came home from school with bruises, his mother started looking for a new school.
Ayden’s a bright 9-year-old with a blond crew cut, glasses and an eager smile showing new teeth coming in. He also has autism, ADHD and a seizure disorder. (We’re not using his last name to protect his privacy.) He loves karate, chapter books and very soft blankets: “I love the fuzziness, I just cocoon myself into my own burrito.”
“He’s so smart but lacks so much socially,” says his mother, Lynn.
She says Ayden was suspended repeatedly from his school in St. Lucie County, Fla., starting in first grade, for outbursts like throwing a chair. And during “meltdowns,” he was physically restrained by being held in a bear hug from behind or penned in with gym-style mats for up to 45 minutes.
“Not just sometimes, it was every single day!” Ayden says. “That kind of stress gets me all worked up and it makes my tics go crazy!”
One day, Lynn says, Ayden came home with marks all over his body from being restrained. “That was my final straw.” She started looking for another school.
The bill passed by the U.S. House to repeal the Affordable Care Act, now being considered by the Senate, would make deep cuts to Medicaid — which threatens millions in special education dollars for local school districts.
The money pays for items such as therapy equipment, portable stair climbers, or a device that might help visually impaired students do their schoolwork, as well as certain aides.
Medicaid, the health insurance coverage for low-income and disabled individuals that is jointly paid for by states and the federal government, reimburses schools for health-related services for special education students.
In Pennsylvania, schools receive about $143 million annually for these services.
Federal law requires schools to have individualized education plans for each special needs child and to provide appropriate services.
In other words, said Steve Robinson, spokesman for the Pennsylvania School Boards Association, schools are mandated to meet the needs of special education students. The federal cuts would push costs to either the state or local communities.
“The state is going to be challenged to come up with those dollars,” he said.
“Under the proposed change, there could be restrictions to: hearing-impaired services, nursing services, occupational therapy services, personal care and physical therapy services, psychological and social work services, speech and language and specialized transportation services, among many other critical support systems,” said Casey Smith, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Education.
In a letter opposing the bill, the School Superintendents Association and a host of other organizations in the Save Medicaid in the Schools Coalition noted to congressional leaders that “school-based health services are mandated on the [s]tates and those mandates do not cease simply because Medicaid funds are capped by the [American Health Care Act]. As with many other unfunded mandates, capping Medicaid merely shifts the financial burden of providing services to the [s]tates.”
Pittsburgh Public Schools uses some of these funds to pay for things like care assistants for medically fragile students who might need one-on-one support and for programs such as the district’s CITY Connections, which helps students with disabilities ages 18-21, said Amy Filipowski, executive director of the program for students with execeptionalities at the district.
“We would lose that reimbursement as a district and have to fund that … on our own,” she said.
ACA is working well in Pennsylvania, state insurance commissioner tells U.S. senators
The bill, which cuts Medicaid spending by more than $800 billion, passed the House earlier this month in a narrow 217-213 vote.
San Antonio — As information about the academic struggles of Pennsylvania’s cyber charters has become more accessible, the full-time online schools have increasingly enrolled students from the state’s least-educated communities and most-disadvantaged school districts, according to a new study to be presented here Sunday as part of the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association.
The result, according to researcher Bryan Mann of Penn State University?
Cyber charter have become an inequitable corner of Pennsylvania’s school-choice system, leaving the state’s neediest students with another bad option that their peers from better-off school districts largely avoid.
“This may be the educational policy equivalent of asking someone in a food desert to pick between two fast food restaurants and hoping they make a healthy choice,” Mann wrote in a pre-conference email interview.
In Pennsylvania and across the country, full-time online charter schools have come under withering scrutiny. Studies by the Center for Research on Educational Outcomes at Stanford University have found at both the national and state level that students in the schools learn at a dramatically slower pace than their peers in traditional brick-and-mortar schools. Last fall, Education Weekpublished a major investigation into the sector, highlighting concerns about students not using the schools’ educational software and about extensive lobbying efforts by the for-profit management companies that dominate the industry…
Read the full story here: May require an Education Week subscription.
HARRISBURG — A proposed rewrite of the state charter school law would allow public schools to keep almost $30 million by adding deductions for costs that computer-based schools don’t have.
Democrats contend the state could provide five or 10 times as much relief for school districts if it more aggressively linked charter payments to the actual cost of educating their students.
In 2014-15 Pennsylvania’s 500 school districts paid about $1.5 billion in tuition to charter schools, according to Education Department data.
The legislation, authored by state Rep. Mike Reese, R-Westmoreland County, would create a special commission to examine how much districts should be paying to cyber schools.
The legislation would also make changes to the way the state oversees charter schools, how they are approved and how their teachers are rated.
“The reforms embodied in my legislation are critical to improving and strengthening our Charter School Law, which was groundbreaking upon its enactment in 1997 but has become outdated over time,” Reese said in a memo to other lawmakers.
Charter school operators think the deductions proposed by Reese’s bill are too drastic.
“We are happy with some of the provisions” in the legislation, said Ana Meyers, executive director of the Pennsylvania Coalition of Public Charter Schools. “However, the cuts for cyber schools are steep.”
Her group hopes the new deductions are eliminated from the bill, Meyers said.
Overall, the legislation has largely shed most of the controversial elements, said Jonathan Cetel, executive director of the Pennsylvania Campaign for Achievement Now, an independent advocacy group lobbying for innovations to improve school performance.
“It reflects years of compromise and negotiation,” he said. “All that remains are commonsense policies that meet the needs of both charter schools and traditional public schools.”
Cetel added that he hopes the proposed commission would resolve the controversy over how much school districts should be paying to charters.
“I used to think a commission is what you did to kill an idea,” he said. But, Pennsylvania’s success with basic education funding and special education funding commissions suggest the approach can generate solutions, Cetel said.
Lobbyists on all sides of the issue agree it’s time the state update the charter law. But there is no consensus on how to do it and whether Reese’s legislation covers all the bases.
The most universally welcomed part of the proposal is the portion that would create the funding commission.
“We’d like to see something happen,” said Mark DiRocco, executive director of the Pennsylvania Association of School Administrators.
His group would like to see the funding commission created. They have reservations about a plan in the bill that would assess the performance of charter school teachers using a different process than the one used by teachers in conventional public schools.
The school administrators’ group has, thus far, taken a neutral position on the bill. It’s the same stance taken by the Pennsylvania Association of School Business Officials, said Hannah Barrick, director of advocacy for the business officials’ group.
One of the things the business officials’ group likes is that Reese’s proposal includes “immediate relief” for schools, even if it’s short of what school district leaders think they are over-paying to cyber and other charter schools, she said.
Pennsylvania’s current way of paying charter schools is based on the cost of educating each student in the conventional school system. There are now seven deductions intended to reflect that charters may not have all the costs of conventional schools. But those deductions aren’t enough, she said.
Many school districts have begun to run their own computer-based programs to provide an alternative to losing students to outside cyber schools. In those cases, school officials have found that their costs for computerized classes are at least half what they pay in tuition to cyber schools, Barrick said.
A big chunk of those overpayments are tied to special education costs, Democrats said Wednesday morning.
They estimate that charter schools receive almost $200 million a year in special education payments above the cost of teaching the special education students enrolled in their classes.
In Gov. Tom Wolf’s first year in office, he lobbied for reforms that would have saved school districts about $160 million on their charter school tuition bills, state Rep. Mike Sturla, R-Lancaster said. Sturla said charters are getting overpaid by as much as $300 million a year.
The special education overpayments come from two things, said state Rep. Mark Longietti, D-Mercer County.
Charter schools charge the local school district more in tuition for special education students. And local officials complain that students they hadn’t identified as needing special education are classified as special-ed students when they enroll in cyber school.
Second, the special education tuition rate is based on an average of the cost of providing services, and many of the students getting special education services in cyber schools are getting services that cost less than the average, he said.
Longietti was one of eight Democrats who authored bills intended to provide fixes to Reese’s legislation. The Democrats on Wednesday afternoon tried to get their bills amended into Reese’s bill on the House floor. Most of those amendments were rejected, though the House did add language suggested by state Rep. Mike Schlossberg, D-Lehigh County, that would bar charter schools from advertising that they offer free education and require them to say their costs are covered by tax dollars.
His bill now awaits a final House vote, which could happen as soon as next week. If passed in the House it would go to the Senate. Similar measures passed both the House and Senate in 2015, but the two chambers failed to reach a final agreement.
John Finnerty reports from the CNHI Harrisburg Bureau for The Meadville Tribune and other Pennsylvania newspapers owned by Community Newspaper Holdings Inc. Email him at jfinnerty@cnhi.com and follow him on Twitter @cnhipa.
The PA Principals Association is one of 42 diverse groups 42 diverse groups from all over Pennsylvania that signed on to show support for the $2 million school breakfast initiative included in the state’s 2017-18 budget proposal. The letter urges Pennsylvania legislators to support the Governor’s budget proposal to make sure more students are getting school breakfast. Right now, 1 in 5 kids in Pennsylvania struggles with hunger. School breakfast is critical to ensure that kids get the basic nutrition they need, but too many kids who may need a school breakfast are missing out. Today, less than half of kids who qualify for in-school breakfast are actually receiving it. It doesn’t have to be that way. This is a solvable problem.
Monday, July 17, 2017
San Antonio — As information about the academic struggles of Pennsylvania’s cyber charters has become more accessible, the full-time online schools have increasingly enrolled students from the state’s least-educated communities and most-disadvantaged school districts, according to a new study to be presented here Sunday as part of the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association.
