(TNS) -- PennLive Editor's note: This is the first story in a series of upcoming stories by PennLive titled "Virtual Dominance: How a cyber charter school has upended K-12 education in Pa." The series is an investigation into the causes and consequences of the unprecedented growth of Commonwealth Charter Academy -- Pa.'s fastest growing school.
The oldest and largest cyber charter school in Pennsylvania, PA Cyber, enrolled 10,000 students six years ago. But its status as the biggest school abruptly came to an end soon after commonwealth officials persuaded it to agree to an enrollment cap.
When PA Cyber agreed to a cap of 11,677 students, it didn't seem like much of a burden to the school's leaders because the school's enrollment had been steady for years.
But what PA Cyber's leadership didn't know was that a few months later, a worldwide pandemic would upend the normal functioning of public schools.
Thousands of parents were unhappy with the virtual classes offered by their local school districts, and cyber charter school enrollment surged. Many parents decided that schools with decades of online experience were offering a better education than what their districts could scrape together in months.
Reach Cyber Charter school's enrollment had increased 140 percent from the year before. Commonwealth Charter Academy's [CCA] enrollment increased 78 percent. PA Leadership Charter's enrollment increased 66 percent.
But in part because PA Cyber had just agreed to an enrollment cap, PA Cyber's enrollment increased only by 11 percent.
"While our mission is to serve all students who choose PA Cyber, the PDE held us to this cap, and in 2020-2022 we typically had waitlists and some of those families decided to look at alternative schools," said CEO Brian Hayden.
One of the main schools parents turn to was CCA. Before the pandemic, CCA enrolled fewer students than PA Cyber. But just months later, CCA had enrolled about 50 percent more students than PA Cyber. It had become the largest cyber charter school in the commonwealth.
PA Cyber was the first school to agree to an enrollment cap, but in the past three years enrollment caps have become one of the state's most common and aggressive efforts to regulate cyber charter schools.
The Pennsylvania Department of Education (PDE) has convinced five more of CCA's largest competitors to voluntarily agree to an enrollment cap as part of their charter renewal process.
But CCA has resisted, calling PDE's enrollment cap proposals illegal and ineffective.
"The legislature adopted the prohibition on caps to prevent this type of intimidation and coercion by state agencies," said Tim Eller, a spokesperson for CCA.
PDE has little leverage to impose enrollment caps on holdouts like CCA. According to the state's charter school law, enrollment caps have to be mutually agreed upon. And schools that don't agree can continue to operate with an expired charter.
Eller said, "The continued delay by PDE has had no impact on our ability to function as a school. We continue to serve students and families without interruption."
With a peak enrollment of more than 35,000 students, CCA is the second largest educational entity in the commonwealth -- and the fastest growing school Pennsylvania has ever seen.
A few years ago, PDE began to implement a new policy of renewing only the charters of cyber schools that agreed to cap their number of students when their test scores and graduation rates are low.
So far, about half of the state's cyber charter schools have agreed, including PA Cyber, which earlier this year agreed to cap its enrollment again, this time at 12,000 students.
A spokesperson for the Department of Education said this is part of an effort to get cyber schools to focus on improving the quality of the education they are providing.
"PDE has collaborated with many cyber charter schools in recent years to reach charter renewal agreements that include enrollment caps," according to a PDE statement. "Enrollment caps are one tool that can help ensure that a cyber charter school will focus on academic growth rather than enrollment growth when academic outcomes fail to meet expectations under federal law."
PDE's strategy also has the potential to address one of the biggest complaints from local school districts: Without enrollment caps, district leaders say they sometimes unexpectedly have to pay huge additional tuition expenses when their students transfer to cyber schools mid-year. And that can force them to cut programs, raise taxes or both.
But some cyber school leaders say enrollment caps can deprive students of an opportunity to attend a quality cyber school. They say PDE needs to find more precise ways of measuring their performance before implementing caps.
And some cyber leaders say PDE's approach is having the unintended consequence of giving the cyber schools that are least willing to compromise the most freedom to grow.
House legislators are trying to make enrollment caps mandatory for schools like CCA. Mandatory enrollment caps have already passed the Democratic-led House as part of a larger cyber reform bill passed in June. But it's unclear if enrollment caps are part of budget negotiations with the Republican-led Senate.
Until a few years ago, the Department of Education had been renewing most cyber schools' charters every five years, as their previous charters were about to expire. But according to cyber school leaders, the department is now renewing only the charters of cyber schools that agree to limit their enrollment growth when their test scores and graduation rates are low.
Maurice Flurie, the former CEO of Commonwealth Charter Academy, said in 2021 that the department was happy with CCA's overall charter renewal application but made clear that it would not renew its charter again until it agreed to limit its enrollment.
"They said, 'OK, everything's in place when you agree to a cap.' And then [CCA's] board said, 'No, it's not in the legislation. We're not going to agree to a cap.' They just refused to issue the charter."
The last time CCA had its charter renewed was 2016.
But five of Pa.'s 13 cyber charter schools have had their charters renewed since 2023, after the state examined each school's application, which includes information about their performance and plans to address any shortcomings. In each of PDE's renewal letters, it states that the charter renewal includes "the mutually agreed-upon enrollment parameters outlined herein."
The schools have typically agreed to increase the number of students enrolled by no more than 10 percent, when their test scores and graduation rates are low enough to require a "comprehensive support and improvement school" designation.
A sixth school, 21st Century Cyber Charter School, has in principle agreed to an enrollment cap, according to a statement from its CEO to PennLive. But the school hasn't yet received confirmation of its charter renewal from PDE.
The leaders of some of the six schools say they only agreed to cap their enrollment due to pressure from education leaders in Gov. Josh Shapiro's administration.
"The law says that we have to accept every student who applies. That's the law," said David Taylor, the president of the board of trustees for Reach Cyber Charter School. "Now the administration is saying, 'Well, you can't grow beyond a certain size.'"
Taylor disagrees with the way PDE has pushed schools to agree to enrollment caps, but he also believes, in principle, that there should be a limit to how fast schools grow.
"There's a balance there about doing the job well and not growing too big, too fast and making sure that you can deliver for the students and the families who are in your care," he said.
Eileen Cannistraci, the CEO of Pennsylvania Insight Cyber Charter, said she was hesitant to agree to a cap because it would limit choices for parents, but ultimately agreed with her board that it made sense to focus on improving the school.
"We did have a lot of work to do to get our systems functioning properly, to train our teachers better, to really identify the root cause of what was happening with the students that are coming to us," Cannistraci said. "And so we didn't want to grow a lot until we could get all of that in place."
Cannistraci thinks enrollment caps would make more sense if cyber schools were evaluated in a way that better reflected the challenges they face. For example, she said, her school is blamed when a struggling 18-year-old transfers into the school and doesn't graduate on time. Cyber schools tend to attract a lot of students who are behind or face adversity, she said.
But Cannistraci is not against PDE holding schools like hers accountable if reliable metrics show many students are falling behind, she said.
"I think that would be a good indicator to say 'What's going on here?' And maybe we slow enrollment down until we can figure out if this school is really serving these students well," she said.
Seven of Pa.'s cyber charter schools have not agreed to limit their enrollment, despite test scores and graduation rates that are just as low as the schools that have. The leaders of these schools say they don't want to deny a needy student an opportunity to enroll, and they point out the law doesn't require them to do so.
Most of these seven holdout cyber schools are relatively small, and their leaders don't have ambitions to grow much larger. Esperanza Cyber Charter School, for example, enrolls around 1,000 students every year, 97 percent of whom live in the Philadelphia neighborhoods where the school is based.
"Our name is 'Esperanza,' which means 'hope' in Spanish. You are removing hope from these kids because they wouldn't be able to come to this school," said Esperanza CEO Jon Marsh. "I'm also not trying to be the mega school."
Malynda Maurer, CEO of Central Pennsylvania Digital Learning Foundation, isn't opposed to an enrollment cap but believes the level that PDE has proposed is too low. Maurer had to furlough 16 staff members in June because the school enrolled just under 200 students last year, fewer than it had budgeted for. The school budgeted more conservatively this year, Maurer said, but in the long run the school needs to enroll about 400 students to be sustainable, Right now, she said, PDE has proposed capping enrollment at fewer than 300 students.
Spokespeople for Aspira Cyber Charter School and Pennsylvania Leadership Cyber Charter Schools declined to provide comment for this story. Neither has had their charters renewed in recent years, and they didn't respond to questions about whether they were resisting efforts to get them to agree to an enrollment cap.
Leaders for PA Virtual Cyber Charter School did not respond to a request for comment. But their charter renewal documents indicate the school agreed to impose an enrollment cap if their test scores and graduation rates slip.
PA Virtual is the only cyber charter school out of the 13 across the state that has avoided a designation of "Comprehensive Support and Improvement" (CSI), given to the lowest-performing schools. Instead, PA Virtual is listed as a "Targeted Support and Improvement" school, a designation just above CSI, meaning that one or more groups in the school still are falling below state standards.
Rich Jensen, the CEO of Agora Cyber Charter School, said his school remains against enrollment caps. "If we accept the cap, then we're potentially limiting students and families who may want to choose our model versus another option that they have available," he said.
But Jensen said his school's rigorous educational approach limits the number of students at the school without an imposed cap. Nearly all of the students at Agora are expected to attend live classes on Zoom, and only around 5 percent of students earn the right to skip the live classes to complete work at their own pace.
"We do think there are some things that make us a little bit more distinctive, which may be some of the reasons why we maybe are not the best fit for every family and that's OK," Jensen said.
During the peak of the pandemic, Agora saw a large surge in enrollment, particularly at its elementary school, Jensen said. But the school's board voted in November 2020 to stop accepting new students because it couldn't procure enough laptops and struggled to hire teachers fast enough.
Jensen said his school's enrollment has been steady for the past several years and his board isn't trying to grow the school beyond its means.
"I'm not focused on getting to a certain number," he said. "I'm not looking to be 10,000 or 20,000 or 50,000 or whatever."
The patchwork implementation of PDE's enrollment caps has made it easier for Commonwealth Charter Academy to dominate the enrollment of new cyber charter students in recent years, becoming the state's defacto "mega" cyber charter school.
Most of Pa.'s 13 cyber charter schools enrolled thousands of new students during the pandemic. But since that initial rush, enrollments at 12 of the 13 schools dipped and stabilized.
But CCA has continued to add around 5,000 students per year since the pandemic. CCA's enrollment peaked above 35,000 students last year, with no signs of slowing down this year, according to enrollment figures presented to its board in September.
CCA is the state's second-largest educational entity behind only Philadelphia Public Schools, about twice as large as Pittsburgh Public Schools. CCA's leaders say that the school is growing because of its relentless focus on serving families who are dissatisfied with public schools.
Another reason is that CCA's biggest competitors, like PA Cyber, have agreed to slow their growth. Three of the four biggest cyber charter schools besides CCA have agreed to cap their enrollments. The only one that hasn't, Agora, voluntarily capped its enrollment during the pandemic.
Cyber school leaders say the large and medium-sized cyber schools tend to compete with one another for students more than they do with the smaller cyber schools because larger schools have more money to advertise and can offer a wider variety of classes and programs like field trips.
CCA is now, effectively, the only cyber charter that has the size, resources and permission in its charter to add students without limit.
Maurice Flurie, who retired as the CEO of CCA in 2020, said cyber school leaders who agree to enrollment caps are not fulfilling their missions to educate any student who comes to them. He thinks they are avoiding the extra work that comes with growth.
"You don't have to worry about hiring extra teachers, you don't have to worry about hiring extra resources. It just makes things easier and simpler," Flurie said. "If I'm a cyber charter school and I have the capacity to ramp up my ratios to continue to monitor and manage that growth, I would never agree to a cap. I think it's just a matter of laziness."
The continued enrollment growth at CCA has made it difficult for school leaders in traditional local school districts to budget, they say. Local districts pay CCA around $15,000 per student enrolled -- and twice as much for special education students -- although the exact amount varies by district.
"The lack of predictability in these costs presents a significant barrier to planning for essential services and staffing increases," said Michael Dady, the assistant superintendent for the Greater Johnstown School District, during a House Education hearing in May.
Some Pa. legislators are hoping to address this problem by forcing CCA and other cyber schools to limit their growth until they can improve their academic results.
For now, Flurie said CCA has the capacity to grow larger without affecting its ability to serve families because the school continues to hire new teachers that keep its class sizes down. The school has more than 2,800 staff members, about 75 percent of whom are teachers, according to the school. CCA started the 2025-26 school year with more than 34,000 students enrolled. If it continues to add students at its current rate, CCA will end the school year with more than 40,000 students.
"Technically," Flurie said, "they could have 100,000 kids."
PennLive Editor's note: Next week, PennLive will publish Part 2 of the series, which will analyze the reasons why so many students are flocking to CCA according to the school's students, parents, teachers and administrators.
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