July 28th 2019 Newsletter
How About Those Public School Ghost Students?
OCPA did a great job on Monday pointing out the hypocrisy in the OSBI and the rest of the teacher union supporters by exposing just how many public school “ghost students” there are out there.
It turns out that vast amounts of tax dollars are paid to public schools for “ghost students” that had left a particular school, entered a charter school or private school, or even left the state. Not only was this legal, it was deliberate design and widely known in education circles.
It turns out that schools can receive funding based upon current year enrollment or the highest amount of students enrolled in the last two years. Therefore public schools with declining enrollment can continue to receive the same funding as if they were at their peak, up to three years. Worse, there are families that move every single year so kids can be counted in multiple schools. Worse than that is the practice of assigning values to students based upon what grade they are in. A middle school kid counts as one student, other grades count as more than one student.
The story points out that other states have dealt with this by only allowing only current enrolled students to get state, local, and federal funding. Indiana saved 94 million dollars the year they changed the practice to current enrollees thanks to the reduction of 16,000 double paid students being purged from the previous school's enrollment totals. Arizona was paying 125 million per year for 13,000 ghost public students.
All of this means that when a public school kid leaves for a charter school the original school can and does in many cases receive funding for two, even three years. Meanwhile the charter school gets about 40% of the funding that public schools received per enrollee.
So the charter schools are being forced to play on an un level playing field. The Department of Education recommended paying the charter schools at a rate of 1.333 to make up for the late enrolling students and the students that leave the state in the middle of a school year. Yet due to the many teacher union supporters in the legislature the change in funding formula was defeated each time it was proposed.
Meanwhile the Oklahoman continues to sling accusations and innuendo in their attempt to damage Epic Charter School and drive away enrollees. August first is when the enrollment count is made so the more students they can scare away from Epic the better in their minds. When the attack peters out and these same students that are being bullied in public schools or are failing in public schools do move to Epic the charter school won't be paid for educating them in the remainder of the school year.
The latest Oklahoman attacks on Epic contained plenty of quotes by the state superintendent of schools and the OSBI stating that Epic will continue to receive funding despite the “embezzled millions of tax dollars”. Hofmeister claimed that the OSBI “recommended” that Epic receive the funding to avoid disrupting the students.
Now think about that for a minute. Any other organization would be shut down in a heart beat and prohibited from receiving funds and their bank account frozen if there was a shred of evidence that they had embezzled millions of dollars.
Yet the state Board of Education says that Epic remains an accredited public school on Thursday when they accredited schools. Meaning that the State Department of Education found the school has followed all state requirements, in other words Epic has been following the laws and rules.
Hofmeister was covering her ass with the teachers unions by criticizing Epic's ad spending despite the fact that it is less than one percent of their annual budget and spread across two years, meaning .005% of the annual budget was spent on ads to draw in new students and teachers. And yet school districts are allowed to advertise using their budgets.
Much was also made of Epic's school grade, that a “C” was the highest score. Meanwhile that “C” was the average for the state. The state's academic report card looked like this:
How prepared are students for the next grade, course or level? 52%
How are students growing compared to their performance the previous year? 50%
How well are English learners meeting their language-acquisition targets? 33%
What percentage of students is in good attendance? 87%
How well are schools helping students gain early college and career exposure? 43%
What percentage of students graduated in four or five years? 86%
Epic did score a bit lower than the average school but consider that many of the kids, especially the new kids, are failing public schools or being bullied and missing school. Epic has amazing attendance scores, near 99% in some schools. Looking at the previous time frame showed how close Epic was to being average, 74, 69, 67, meaning those “D” grades were pretty close to “C” grades. Much is made of the graduation rates but guess what, that really doesn't apply as Epic usually has the kids all four years that are counted in the graduation rates.
Other teacher union supporters like KOSU, the public radio station, are spinning the story and spreading wildly inaccurate information. And they telegraph one of the reasons why the liberals are supporting these attacks on Epic, the fact that home schooled and private school students are not tracked by the state. To avoid the public schools all a parent needs to do is inform the local school system that their kid will be educated elsewhere. So there is no list of home schooled or private schooled kids and that upsets the teachers unions and they want it fixed. They claim that without the ability to account for each child there is no way to eliminate ghost students in the charter schools. Which is pure B.S..
Each kid is identified by their Social Security number and each kid in Epic has a full application on file so the state can track where that kid came from and verify they exist. If the kid pops up in another charter school or other public school they will know. Keep in mind that they are calling students that attend both charter and either home school or private school “ghost students”. Yet those students are receiving a fraction of what a public school kid will get and both the home school and private school students get zero tax dollars. Yet those kids enrolled in Epic have to turn in their assignments or they are kicked out of the charter schools, another of the teacher union media attacks even verifies this by claiming that Epic drops more kids for non attendance than the other schools. And at the same time Epic's attendance rates are some of the highest in the state, near 99 % and 98%, a full ten points above the state average.
This is Epic's real crime. By helping the home schooled and private schooled kids access a mere fraction of the tax dollars their parents pay into the system they enrage the public school supporters. No matter that the kids have to do the work and there is no law against these kids enrolling in a charter school.
But that KOSU story either was written by a wildly incompetent journalist or they flat out lied in the story:
“Epic teachers get bonuses for recruiting students and families receive up to one thousand dollars per child. That money is part of what Epic calls its “Learning Fund,” which can be used to purchase extra products and courses.“
Now anyone that has been reading our articles or took five minutes to Google “Epic Learning Fund” knows that there is $1000 set aside, nearly one fifth of what Epic gets from the state. But it goes to pre approved vendors for hardware, software, or curriculum or other approved educational expenses. The teachers do get bonuses for each student that passes the state mandated testing each year, yet Epic still gets all this done with about 40% of the money that the public schools devour for each child. There aren't any recruitment bonuses, if there were Epic would be paying $3000 per student in bonus/learning fund and left with about $1500 to pay for each kid's teachers and associated expenses.
Bottom line, the OSBI “investigation” consists of one student that was dis enrolled from Epic on November 8th and enrolled in a Utah school on November 16th. Everything else in the affidavit has been investigated over and over and over again including a grand jury that found no problems with Epic. Epic has been investigated between 36 and 40 times since they began a few years ago with no problems found and all laws being followed. Moreover were there any actual laws broken both the OSBI and the prosecutor would have been careful to make clear provable charges instead of the mishmash of obviously impossible charges and allegations. Come October this will all go away and not be mentioned again till the next enrollment window.
