Nikisha Martin has been sending her four kids to cyber school for the past decade. Her local school in Pittsburgh had low test scores and she couldn’t afford to send her kids to a private school.
Martin enrolled her children in Pennsylvania Leadership Charter School in 2015. It is one of 14 cyber charter schools in Pa. where any student across the commonwealth can take their classes online. ”I loved it because the kids learned a lot there,” she said.
Even though she was happy with the school, two years ago Martin decided to transfer her kids to a different cyber charter school: Commonwealth Charter Academy (CCA). Martin is one of tens of thousands of parents who have enrolled students in CCA since 2020, the fastest-growing school Pa. has ever seen.
Pa.’s 14 cyber charter schools enrolled more than 20,000 additional students during the pandemic, as parents became dissatisfied with their local public schools. But after that initial rush, the number of students at Pa.’s other cyber schools has since decreased, in part because the schools agreed to limit the number of students who can enroll. Meanwhile, CCA is growing faster than ever.
The continued growth has caught local school district officials off guard, as they try to fill budget holes left by students who take most of their local tax dollars with them when they transfer. While local schools and cyber schools have been battling at the state Capitol over the financial implications of CCA’s growth, there hasn’t been a definitive answer about why it’s been happening.
CCA’s leaders say that there isn’t a single answer but the best answer can be found by listening to parents who choose to send their kids there. Each parent is making a personal decision that they believe is best for their children, according to Tim Eller, a spokesperson for CCA. “We can’t say specifically, ‘Well, this is why people come to CCA,’” Eller said. “No, it’s going to be different for every family.”
Martin was drawn to CCA because it offered a much wider variety of field trips than her family’s previous cyber school. Martin’s family members told her that they were worried about the development of her kids’ social skills because they didn’t interact with other kids during their online school days. So, Martin saw CCA’s more extensive offering of field trips as an opportunity.
“I’m trying to have other things for the kids to do, so they could be with other kids and kind of be involved more,” Martin said.
WHAT PARENTS TELL CCA
Martin’s reason for enrolling in CCA fits a narrative that some critics of cyber charter schools have levied against it: that parents are enrolling in the school for the various perks they offer, such as free laptops and printers, $1,000+ in reimbursements for Internet and club sports, and field trips that have little connection to the school’s academic program.
But parents at CCA like Martin typically only mention these perks to explain why those chose to go to CCA rather than another cyber school. The main reason they chose cyber schools in the first place is usually more fundamental: they are not happy with something about their local public schools.
“We realize we’re the second marriage,” said Robert Schultz, the chief learning officer at CCA.
Martin sent her kids to two local public charter schools before sending them to a cyber charter school. But she said her kids were bullied at school: her eldest still has a scar on her face from being scratched by a classmate more than a decade ago.
One of Martin’s teachers, she said, would ball up her daughter’s homework and throw it in the trash when it wasn’t up to par. Her daughter wasn’t eating lunch because she was being forced to catch up on her work and had to choose between lunch and recess. Then, she tested at a second grade reading level, even though she was in fourth grade.
“At that point I was just like, ‘I’m tired. You’re going to online school.’” she said. “And I just withdrew them. And they’ve been online-schooled ever since.”
These stories are par for the course at CCA, according to CCA staff and according to more than a dozen interviews PennLive conducted with CCA parents. Many parents say their students’ special needs weren’t being met in their traditional school.
CCA enrolls hundreds of pregnant teenagers and young mothers as well as homeless students. They enroll more than 1,000 students whose first language isn’t English and more than 10,000 students who have been diagnosed with learning disabilities or special needs. They enroll students who are trying to work to support their families and students trying to make it professional in athletics who have extensive travel schedules.
Schultz said CCA goes out of its way to interview parents when they are first enrolling to find out why the local school wasn’t working for them. He said they ask them, “Where are you at? Why are you here? What can we do to make this the best experience for your child and their learning experience?”
Even if their children aren’t struggling, some CCA parents prefer the flexibility that cyber school offers. More than two-thirds of the parents at CCA in a recent survey said the reason they enrolled is because it offered a more flexible schedule than their traditional school. Students decide when or if they want to attend live classes and can finish their school work when it is convenient.
“In brick and mortar, you have to fit your life around your education,” Schultz said. “And at CCA you can fit your education around your life because everybody’s got different life situations and circumstances.”
Martin has been happy with the flexibility of CCA. Her kids wake up fully rested around midday and then start their schoolwork. They finish it at their own pace and can spend more time on subjects they are struggling with. “It was more demanding for the kids” at their previous cyber school, she said. “You had to have everything done by a certain time period.”
Schultz said these kinds of stories are normal at CCA. “It’s kind of like exercising: Sometimes I don’t feel like going and working out at that specific time. If someone made me work out a specific time every day, I’d probably not work out,” he said. “which I don’t do that much of anyway.”
'IT WAS LIFE CHANGING'
Debra Isenberg was at a loss over what to do about her grandson.
He was diagnosed with autism and had also begun acting violently toward his teachers, to the point where his school started requiring an adult to follow him around from the moment he got off the bus until the moment he got back on the bus to go home. Isenberg worried that even that wouldn’t be enough as he grew bigger.
“I said, ‘If we don’t do something soon, somebody’s going to get hurt. We have to make some major decisions and changes. And I don’t want to institutionalize him or anything like that or send him to a residential school,’” she said.
Isenberg decided to enroll him in CCA and retired from her job as a teacher, so she could help him. As a teacher, she worried that going to school over a computer wouldn’t allow him to develop socially, but ultimately she did it anyway.
“You choose your battles when you’re dealing with special students,” she said.
In a school building, her grandson was overwhelmed by triggers and responded violently. On the computer, she said, that didn’t happen anymore. “Within the first year, he was off of all of his medications and the anger was gone, the aggressiveness and behaviors were gone,” she said. “It was life changing for all of us.”
WHAT THE TEACHERS SAY
Jeffrey Piccola, the president of CCA’s board of trustees, recently wanted to know why CCA has been able to attract so many teachers.
More than 90 percent of the more than 2,800 staff members at CCA have been with the school for less than five years. The school hires hundreds of new teachers every year in order to keep its class sizes down for the thousands of new students it enrolls.
Piccola asked Schultz, CCA’s chief learning officer, to pull together a focus group of teachers. “To a person they say, ‘I can finally do what I was trained to do: teach,” Piccola announced at a CCA’s September board meeting.
Before she started teaching at CCA two years ago, Molly Stewart said some of her students in the local elementary school had violent tendencies, which scared her when she was pregnant with her daughter. “My pregnancy was a safety concern for me every single day,” she said.
Because misbehavior is rare at CCA, Stewart said, she has had more time to focus on teaching lessons to her second-graders. Stewart could go into the office every day to be around other teachers but usually chooses to use her office near Pittsburgh one week a month, the amount required by CCA. ”It just works better for my family,” she said.
Joe Porr, a middle school science teacher who started at CCA last year, said he was getting burned out in public schools. The roughly 30 students in his classes would be filled with students at so many different academic levels that it felt impossible to teach them all. At CCA, he said, he’s been able to use the school’s software to help adapt his lessons to his students who are behind.
“You’re really able to differentiate for the students,” he said. “You’re really able to help them.”
Stewart and Porr typically only teach two classes per day, in the morning. Their afternoons are often spent reaching out to students. Some CCA teachers said these one-on-one conversations give them an opportunity to build relationships they likely wouldn’t have had in a traditional school where there are so many kids to manage and where it can be frowned upon to meet alone with a student.
“I knew my students here better than I knew them in a brick and mortar setting,” said Andrea Azzalina, CCA’s elementary school provost, who taught for seven years before moving into administration. “because we do so much individualization, so much communication.”
'OUR FAMILY UNIT IS CLOSER'
Jodi Witmer’s two children were forced into learning remotely during the pandemic. It didn’t go well.
The local school district provided little help to her first grader and the technology they used seemed obsolete. Many families choose to move into their district in Wyomissing because the schools are considered good, Witmer said. But her family found they really enjoyed the flexibility that remote learning gave them, including last minute trips to the beach.
“We didn’t have to tell the school, give them advance notice. It’s like, ‘Oh, the weather’s good. Okay, let’s go,” she said.
Witmer liked the flexibility of cyber school but wanted a better academic program. So she enrolled them in CCA, which had a better developed program.
Her kids have their own desks in the house and they can roam around to do their work and even sit outside on the deck. Her kids eat healthier food at home. The school offers extra help if they get behind, but her kids rarely do, she said.
And now they get to spend more time together. Witmer’s husband has a job that doesn’t allow him to take time off during the summer. They’ve been able to travel together in off-months like October and February. The kids bring their work with them, or do it when they get back.
“This past year, we flew out to Albuquerque, New Mexico, rented an RV for a week, and went to Four Corners and then did something in each of those states,” she said. “Traveling’s an education, too. There was just so much they learned.”
One of her kids plays soccer after school and the other plays tennis. That means that, even as a stay-at-home mom, she would barely get to see her children during the week if they went to a traditional school.
“I feel like our family unit is closer,” she said. “We get to spend time with them instead of sending them eight hours a day somewhere else.”
WHAT IS THE VALUE OF A PARENT'S CHOICE?
One of the most commonly repeated refrains of CCA’s leaders for the past decade has been: “CCA is a family service organization with a deep expertise in education.”
Catering to every family regardless of their situation gives CCA a wider pool of potential students than other Pa. cyber charter schools that prioritize more narrowly defined educational philosophies. And, unlike most charter schools with a physical building, CCA is not limited by how many kids live within driving distance. So there isn’t a clear limit to how large it can grow.
CCA’s leaders often treat the number of parents choosing CCA as proof that the school is doing better than other schools, despite low test scores and graduation rates.
Not everyone agrees parents always make good choices about what school to attend. State lawmakers have been trying to address extreme cases where they believe parents are not making good choices, such as when parents try to use the cover of cyber school to hide the abuse of their own children. (CCA is the only school out of 14 cyber charter schools that has been fighting against a new law that requires students to appear on camera at least once a week.)
Lawmakers have also been debating ways to deal with parents who are using the more flexible attendance rules at some cyber schools as a way to avoid accountability for truancy violations.
“It happens. We all talk about it. They just hop from one cyber to the next cyber,” said Malynda Maurer, the CEO of the Central PA Digital Learning Foundation, another cyber charter school. “When they get mad at one, they go to the next one. And we all talk about it. We’re like, ‘Maybe we should just start this without the legislation, start talking to each other and say that this kid’s an attendance problem.'”
One of the challenges for legislators is that, without coordination, it’s difficult to quantify exactly how many parents are deliberately evading accountability. And so the stories of students who are struggling at schools like CCA tend to be more abstract, while the stories of students who are succeeding are more visceral.
Witmer says her family’s life is better because they spend more time together now. Martin feels safer knowing that her kids are at home during the day. Isenberg’s family life became bearable after her grandson switched to learning from home.
Cyber critics sometimes imagine that the problem cases at cyber schools are ubiquitous and discount the value parents say these schools are providing.
WORD OF MOUTH
CCA’s families are sharing their success stories widely. More than 50 percent of CCA students are referred to the school by someone who has a student at the school already, according to a recent survey of new students by the school, and nearly 20 percent have another family member already enrolled at CCA.
Flurie said some other cyber schools are doing a good job with parents “but they are just small enough and they haven’t grown enough, they haven’t reached that point that everybody knows somebody going to CCA.”
CCA has more money to advertise than other cyber schools and more money to buy buildings close to where students live. They have more resources to develop classes that attract new students and to cater to very specific student needs. And they offer more field trips.
When PennLive asked a parent recently if they had heard about cyber school options for their child, the parent answered: “Oh you mean CCA?” CCA has become the Google or Amazon of cyber charter schools in Pa., shorthand for what cyber school is.
And that’s posing additional challenges to “mom and pop” cyber schools. Maurer, who leads Pa.’s smallest cyber charter school, said her school deliberately uses a lower student-to-teacher ratio to provide a more bespoke education for its students. So Maurer’s school has little money left over to advertise and is almost entirely reliant on word-of-mouth and that’s been especially challenging of late.
“Their advertising is everywhere,” Maurer said. “That’s the first thing that people see and hear is CCA.”
PennLive Editor’s note: You can read the first story in the series about how enrollment caps have helped CCA grow by limiting competition. Part 3 of the series, which also published today, looks at how a decision that CCA’s leaders made to separate from its for-profit parent company helped pave the way for future growth.
Next week, PennLive will publish Part 4 of the series, about former staff members at CCA who say the school’s focus on growth has come at a cost.
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