CCA’s dramatic increase in enrollment over the past five years may not have happened at all if CCA’s board and leadership team didn’t make a dramatic decision in 2015 to cut ties with the for-profit management company that launched the school, according to a number of CCA’s leaders now and at the time.
But it didn’t happen without a fight.
“There were two people on the board [of trustees] that were friends and they were shouting at me,” said Marcie Mulligan, a longtime board member at CCA.
The board was divided between loyalists of Connections Academy, the company that founded the school, and board members who wanted the school to become independent. Connections was based in Baltimore when it helped launch CCA in 2003, and then in 2011 Connections was sold to the education behemoth Pearson.
Mulligan was one of the board members who wanted to become independent. Connections leaders acted annoyed when Mulligan asked detailed questions about how it was spending CCA’s funding, she said.
She didn’t think local tax money should be sent out-of-state. “The management company charged overhead costs that could instead be staying in Pennsylvania with Pennsylvania taxpayers,” she said.
By 2015, for-profit management companies like Connections ran a large share of the cyber schools across the country. But concerns were emerging that these private companies were growing rich on the backs of taxpayers.
“Charter schools now big business nationwide” ran a headline in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 2013. Jack Wagner, Pa’s. auditor general at the time, criticized cyber schools that were paying for-profit companies for services without giving detailed breakdowns of what they were receiving.
The CEO of Pennsylvania Distance Learning Cyber Charter, another cyber school, said its management company at the time, White Hat, had been taking 97 percent of the school’s revenue, and that it was difficult to find out how they were spending the money. The school ended its relationship with White Hat. Then, the board of trustees for Agora, one of the other large cyber charter schools in Pa., began to consider making a dramatic change to its relationship with its for-profit management company, K-12.
Jerry Birmelin, a CCA board member and Republican legislator at the time, thought separating from Connections would be more efficient. “As we grew, we were obviously bringing in more and more revenue and Connections was taking a very large share of it,” Birmelin told PennLive recently. “They were not giving us the best bang for the buck. We just felt that we could do it independently, better and cheaper and be more economical.”
Kevin Shivers, another board member at the time, thought students were doing well under Connections’ curriculum and didn’t think there was a need for change. He said Connections had impressive connections with schools like John Hopkins University and The Julliard School.
“I thought Connections was a wonderful partner who provided a lot of support and provided a real quality educational backstop to the school,” Shivers said.
Lora Bueno, a teacher at Connections while the change was being debated, said one of the advantages of being run by a national company was that students could move to other states without skipping a beat. “They could still be using the exact same curriculum and be at the same place,” she said.
The fiercest opponent of change, according to several board members at the time, was board president, David Taylor. Taylor felt that the board, the management company and the school’s leadership provided checks and balances that kept the school on track. Plus, Taylor had been impressed with the educational vision of the original founder of Connections, Barbara Dreyer.
“Dave felt a loyalty to Connections because they had gotten us started. And on one occasion when the state hadn’t passed a budget on time and we weren’t getting our reimbursements from the state, Connections covered us, essentially gave us the money we needed to make payroll,” Birmelin said.
Maurice Flurie, the CEO at the time, and another board member, Ralph Dyer, were the two biggest proponents of leaving Connections, according to Birmelin.
Mulligan remembers meeting with Flurie at an Italian restaurant to discuss the change. Flurie convinced her that the school would be better off with more control over its curriculum and technology.
“Up to that point, everything went through Connections,” Mulligan said. “If we wanted a laptop, we had to call Connections. If we wanted a printer, we had to call Connections Education.”
Joyce Good joined CCA in 2015 to help it create its own curriculum. She said the Connections software “platform was probably seven or eight years old by then and was not designed” to cater to individual students in the way that CCA wanted it to be.
Flurie and Dyer ultimately convinced enough board members to separate from Connections’ management services. Two years later, the school launched its own software platform and dropped the Connections curriculum as well.
Mulligan thinks the decision to become autonomous paved the way for CCA’s future success. “I 100 percent think that was the best thing,” she said.
The school saw some immediate improvements, Flurie said: The school increased salaries to attract better talent; they were able to replace laptops in two days rather than two weeks; and teacher-to-student ratios fell by 20 percent.
But the changes took effort. “We had to start looking for vendors for all sorts of things,” Birmelin said. “So being on the board during those years was a major commitment.”
CCA rebranded, and began developing its own curriculum and software, a process that wasn’t entirely smooth. “We had an awful lot of parents who were upset at the level of the curriculum,” said Good.
Some of the staff and students who liked Connections, left CCA for a new Connections school that Taylor helped open up called Reach Cyber Charter School.
CCA’s enrollment had been on a steady upward trajectory until its break from Connections but afterward it went through a five year period of enrollment stagnation. When CCA applied for its charter renewal in 2015, Flurie wrote on the application that, “We have proposed little enrollment growth for the coming charter term, wanting to focus on the quality of our teachers and student academic performance without the strains that often accompany rapid enrollment growth.”
While there were some bumps in the road, Flurie said, after five years CCA had more money, independence and control over its curriculum — and was in a better position to adapt to the rapid growth of students during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In 2015 “if we’d have seen some type of exponential growth, it would have been a real challenge,” Flurie said. “Once we got those systems ramped up, then there’d be no reason for us to be concerned about enrollment increasing.”
CCA’s transition away from for-profit management has become standard-practice in the Pa.’s cyber school industry. Reach, like CCA, has since dropped its affiliation with Connections. Insight PA, like Agora, announced it was dropping its management contract with K-12 (now known as Stride) at the end of the last school year.
Good serves on the board of Pennwood, the newest cyber charter school in Pa., and the third cyber school in Pa. that has started off as an affiliate of Connections Academy. Good believes Pennwood’s leaders have a unique vision for addressing one of the thorniest challenges in cyber education: how to help students who fall behind because of procrastination.
But it’s difficult to launch a new cyber school without the support of a larger organization like Connections — at least, at first, Good said.
“I could not lead a team and just simply open a cyber school,” Good said. “There’s just too much to it.”
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