Questions about funding and a lack of clarity in laws were among the issues that emerged Monday during a State Board of Education task-force hearing on online schools.
The task force, led by state Sen. Nancy Spence and former state board member Jared Polis, was assembled in response to a state audit of online schools that found there is little state oversight over how such schools are run.
The committee hopes to make recommendations for legislation to improve the quality of online education.
Joe Shea, president of Smart Schools Inc., a company that helps districts provide online courses to students, said not all students are right for online schooling. Students who don’t read well, are not self-disciplined or don’t have supervision at home should not enroll in an online school, he said.
David Grosche, superintendent of the Edison 54JT school district in southeastern Colorado, said he would not let students in his traditional school transfer to a district- run online school because the loss of funding would “destroy” his district.
He said the district gets $10,200 in state funding for each of the 105 students in the traditional “brick and mortar” school and roughly $5,600 for those in the online school.
“If I put them in online, I lose about $4,000,” said Grosche.
But state officials said they’re not sure Grosche can legally deny students access to the online school based on funding alone.
In Cherry Creek schools, Linda Maccagnan, who oversees the district’s online program, said her technology staff wanted to provide extra online courses to two students but had to stop when they were told they were running a cyberschool.
She said her staff just wanted to supplement the students’ education temporarily, not create an online school.
“I’d just like to see clarity between cyberschools” and supplemental programs, she said.
The operator of the Hope Co-Op Online Learning Academy, which was criticized in the state audit for having low test scores and poor oversight over its learning centers, told the committee that Hope had improved many of its practices since the critical audit.
Staff writer Karen Rouse can be reached at 303-954-1684 or krouse@denverpost.com.
