The Vilas School District may have to pay back as much as $4.5 million to the state, largely because many of the students enrolled in an online charter school may not have been eligible for state funding, Superintendent Joseph Shields said Wednesday.
Shields said that of the $4.5 million he believes the district will owe, slightly more than $4 million is owed because students enrolled at the Hope Co-Op Online Learning Academy during the 2005-06 school year got funding they did not qualify for under Colorado law. Vilas chartered Hope in 2005.
Hope founder Heather O’Mara acknowledged problems with the student- count figures but disagreed with the amount to be returned. “There’s a big question” about what is owed, she said.
At issue in most of the cases is whether students should have received full- or part-time funding, O’Mara said.
A final audit of enrollment in the southeastern Colorado district is expected to be released today by the state Department of Education. Neither the department nor Shields would release draft figures Wednesday.
All of the state’s 178 school districts get funding based on enrollment. The Vilas district received $7.75 million during the 2005-06 school year to fund Hope students, said Candy Briles, bookkeeper for Vilas schools. Of that, $5.5 million was disbursed directly to Hope, which had 1,667 students that year, she said. Vilas kept the remainder.
Vody Herrmann, director of the school finance unit at the Education Department, said the district and Hope have had time to review a draft of the audit and provide documentation to verify which students were eligible for funding. Once Vilas receives the audit report, “they have 30 days to pay or appeal,” she said.
To appeal, Herrmann said, the district would need to provide documentation that proves students were eligible for funding. “The document we have doesn’t justify funding the kids we’ve identified,” she said.
A variety of factors determine whether students are funded and how much money goes to a school district. The state, for example, will not pay to educate an online school student who attended a private or home school the year before.
And to get full-time online funding, online students must have at least 360 hours of instructional time per semester, Herrmann said. Students with 359 or fewer hours would get only part-time funding, she said. For the 2005-06 school year, the state funded full-time online pupils at a rate of $5,689 a year.
Shields said he told O’Mara on Monday that unless Hope began to show greater accountability, “we were going to cut ties … revoke the charter,” Shields said.
O’Mara said Hope, which was highlighted in an audit of online schools for having poor accounting practices, will continue to work with Vilas, “but we are keeping our options open based on what may happen with our relationship with Vilas.”
