| SEARCH OnWEAC |
|---|
WEAC does not support the “virtual charter schools” that several Wisconsin school districts have established. Such charter schools were not established to meet the needs of the school districts’ own students, but to obtain more funding from the state and other school districts. A large majority of the students are nonresident students who “open-enroll” into the district with the virtual charter school. The virtual charter school provides all educational materials via the Internet and the mail to the students in their homes.
The charter school law was crafted to allow local school boards and educators to use their knowledge of their local community to establish charter schools to fit the needs of that community. The charter school law was never intended to be combined with the open enrollment law to establish schools with little or no student (or financial) connection to the chartering community. Yet that is what is being done by most of the virtual charter schools established in Wisconsin. School districts, pushed by unfair revenue caps, see potential financial benefit from the open enrollment money that comes from the nonresident students’ home districts. The result has been that scarce education dollars are taken from the state and fellow school districts and used to fund the virtual charter and provide a “profit” for the chartering school district. In addition, a significant amount of the money going to virtual charter schools is spent to publicize the schools through radio, TV and print media in order to attract students and increase the enrollments of the virtual charter schools.
The financial problems caused by virtual charter schools are compounded by the fact that many of the students who enroll in the virtual charter schools were previously home-schooled. Thus, more students are being funded by tax money, although many continue to be essentially home schooled within the virtual charter structure. Taxpayers pay for such home schooling in the same amount they pay for schooling in a brick-and-mortar school, yet the actual cost many be thousands of dollars less. Virtual schools do not provide many of the services and amenities of a brick-and-mortar school and have student-to-teacher ratios as high as 60-to-1. In addition, virtual schools do not provide communication or attendance accountability to the resident school districts that pay the open enrollment amounts.
WEAC, although not opposed to virtual education, opposes the use of open enrollment to establish and fund virtual charter schools. It also opposes the substitution of parents for the certified teacher in the public school curriculum and instruction. WEAC initiated litigation challenging one such a virtual charter school; that litigation is presently before the Wisconsin Supreme Court. WEAC continues to support virtual education when used to enhance – but not replace – the curriculum and educational experience in Wisconsin’s public schools. It opposes funding virtual charter schools through a mechanism that does not reflect the actual cost of the schooling provided.
Resource Page on Charter Schools
Posted October 15, 2007