Arizona Virtual School Funding

by David Safier

(TASL) In my continuing quest to learn whether Arizona’s Virtual Charter Schools are overfunded, I’ve talked with a few people at the Arizona Department of Education, who gave me valuable information and told me the names of other people who can give me more. With their help, I’ve located the yearly financial reports each school files with the state. I’m way over my head trying to make sense of the spreadsheets, but even with my minimal knowledge, I can tell the spreadsheets deal in lumped-together numbers that don’t reveal much about how the school’s are spending the state’s money.

Right now, I’m so deep among the financial trees I’m having trouble seeing the virtual forest. But I’m trying.

Meanwhile, I received a very interesting comment to my last post on this subject, saying that Arizona virtual schools are charging way too much. It’s from Mimi Rothschild who lives in Pennsylvania and is the co-founder and CEO of Learning by Grace, Inc., which she describes as “the nation’s largest provider of online Christian education.” She and her husband at one time ran an online charter school in Pennsylvania. Here are some of her comments:

When I was involved in providing services to a large online charter school in Pennsylvania, the company I worked with (owned by my husband) charged less than $2000.00 per student for the identical services that most online schools are charging three 350% more for.

[snip]

This is a blatant misuse of funds that should be used to create different and better educational opportunities for our children. It is time for legislators to take a long, hard look at the amount of taxpayer dollars are spent on for profit online schools and adjust their funding to the legitimate costs of running the schools and not the inflated salaries and profits associated with providers such as K12, Inc. (the founder of K12, Inc. Michael Miliken and his brother Lowell Miliken recently cashed in 267 million dollars EACH when their for profit company that runs many of the nation’s online schools, went public.

K12, Inc., by the way, runs the Arizona Virtual Academy, the largest online charter school in the state.

Did Ms. Rothschild truly provide comparable services at less than half the cost when she was part of a Pennsylvania charter school, or is this an apples and oranges comparison? I honestly don’t know, but I plan to get in touch with her and ask some questions. Maybe I can show her the financial reports I’m plowing through and see if she can make more sense of them than I can.