Today’s the deadline for the Ohio charter school Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT) to hand over student log-in data to the Ohio Department of Education (ODE) as part of an ongoing attendance audit.
The order came on Monday from a Franklin County judge after ECOT refused to release the records, claiming a broken promise on the department’s end that it wouldn’t use log-in durations to assess whether ECOT’s full-time students (FTEs/Full-time equivalents) are getting their required 920 hours of learning.
“Essentially, the Department is attempting to change the rules on e-schools which would result in us losing significant portions of our funding,” said an ECOT Facebook post. “Without court intervention, these underhanded procedural changes would severely limit our ability to provide a quality school experience. In fact, they would likely force us and other e-schools to close our doors altogether.”
This is the second ruling against the school since it began its lawsuit against ODE last month. In another audit in March, the department found students to be logged in for an average of one hour a day, falling remarkably short of the state-required 920 hours per year. ECOT officials and commenters on its webpage have said that much of the learning at the online charter school happens offline.
“If they were at my house three weeks ago they could have seen the two and a half large trash bags of papers I threw out from the last two quarters alone,” said ECOT mom Angie Carroll. “Only a fraction of learning is done in front of the computer.”
Still, the amount of funding that goes to a public school is largely determined by the amount of full-time students it enrolls, putting ECOT at risk of losing a lot of the $106 million it gets in state funding.
“We have proven our worth to the over 18,000 students who have graduated from ECOT and the thousands of families who are choosing ECOT because it is a better alternative than their public school!” said another ECOT post. “And we do all this while costing the taxpayers millions of dollars less per year than traditional public schools!”
The school has until 5 p.m. today to release its log-in durations.