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Tuesday, December 20, 2011

Real Concerns About Costly Virtual Schools « City School Stories

Real Concerns About Costly Virtual Schools « City School Stories:


Real Concerns About Costly Virtual Schools

Notes from the Field
Submitted by Frank Murphy on December 20, 2011
The state of Pennsylvania spends a large amount of taxpayers’ money financing the operations of cyber charter schools.  In the 2009- 2010 school year, just four of these virtual schools received more than $231 million from the state’s education budget.  This sum is about eighty percent of the amount of money that the School District of Philadelphia lost in state aid this last budget year.
During the 2009-2010 school year, Agora Cyber School received approximately $55 million of the funding Pennsylvania dispersed to the nine-cyber schools operating within its borders.  Agora is part of the for-profit