Saturday, September 26, 2015
COLUMBUS
About a year ago, Dave Yost sent state auditors to 30-some charter schools around the state to check their daily attendance.
The visits were unannounced and designed to determine whether the numbers the schools reported to the state were in line with the numbers of students in classrooms.
The results were eye opening.
At one Youngstown charter, none of the 95 students who were reported in attendance were actually on site. At another, only 30 of 180 students were in the building.
More than a dozen charters statewide had attendance issues, prompting all kinds of questions from Yost and the tax-paying public.
“This is a problem for Ohio from a budget standpoint,” Yost said when he announced the attendance audit results back in January. “... As an auditor, I’m worried anytime I see money that’s being spent where I can’t tell whether it’s being properly spent. But beyond that, these charter schools are not there just for kids that go there. These charter schools are there because we want an Ohio that has educated kids, that has kids that become adults that are productive members of society. Whether it’s a failing charter school or a failing public school, we all have an incredible interest in this.”
Administrators at the schools offered reasons for the sparse attendance. Some noted the difficulty in keeping dropouts coming to school every day. At another, students completed testing on the day of the visit and had gone home early.
Still, the results were alarming, given that these charters receive state funding based on their enrollment.
The findings added to growing public debate about the need to clamp down on publicly funded community schools.
Legislation
The Ohio Senate moved legislation with some teeth to accomplish that back in June, but Ohio House has not yet acted on it.
There’s also that whole online school data scrubbing incident at the Ohio Department of Education that has prompted calls for outside investigations. (Yost’s office is conducting a regular financial audit of the agency that likely will include some review of the scrubbing incident to determine whether further review is warranted.)
There’s continuing criticism of the failing results of charter schools versus public schools. It’s probably a safe bet that lawmakers will do something about charter schools during the fall session.
In the meantime, there’s Yost, the Republican state auditor who reviews the books of different public agencies to make sure taxpayer dollars are being spent appropriately.
Just as he did a year ago, Yost is preparing to send auditors from his office to charter schools around the state in coming weeks to check their attendance records versus what they report. He plans to send those auditors to some public schools, too.
Though the visits are unannounced, he’s making no secret of the fact that they’re going to happen.
“We’re not going to announce when, but we’re going to follow up and not only do this procedure again, but we’re going to add a few components to it based on what we learned,” Yost told reporters recently. “And we’re also going to add a traditional public school component so that we have a baseline there.”
Marc Kovac is the The Vindicator’s Columbus correspondent. Email him at mkovac@dixcom.com or on Twitter at OhioCapitalBlog.