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IdeaStream.org
The Battle Over
Attendance Between ECOT and ODE Continues
by Andy Chow
Friday, July 15, 2016 at 6:49 PM
Ohio’s largest online charter school is firing back against state
officials who say they don’t have enough information to perform an
attendance audit. The Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, or ECOT, says
it won’t hand over student log-in times unless a judge tells them to.
Statehouse correspondent Andy Chow reports.
The Ohio Department of Education says it still needs detailed
information on when ECOT’s students logged-in and -out of school every
day in order to get a clear idea of how much instruction time they
received.
A judge already shot down ECOT’s request for an order to block ODE from
conducting an attendance audit, which is done every five years and only
looks at a single school year.
But ECOT spokesperson and long-time lobbyist Neil Clark says the online
charter school system is following a contract signed in 2002 that
spelled out the standards of an audit. According to Clark, the state is
trying to break away from those standards.
“Our attorneys are in the room and they’ve made it very clear that any
information that the department of education asks outside of our
contract that they will need to file other paperwork with the court and
make a request to the court that we submit the other data,” says Clark
who reports the lawsuit against ODE over that contract continues.
The battle over ECOT’s attendance records started earlier this year.
The Ohio Department of Education has tried several times to perform an
audit to find out just how much instruction time each of its nearly
15,000 students is receiving on a daily, weekly and annual basis.
A student must receive 920 hours of educational instruction a year -
which translates to a minimum of five hours a day.
But according to ODE’s court filing, a preliminary audit found that
most of ECOT’s students were only getting about one hour of instruction
a day.
Clark says that’s “outrageously false, “And I have no idea where the
special counsel for the AG obtained that information that in our
particular position is ludicrous but that will ultimately come out in
further detailed audits so I have no idea how they acquired that
information or where they got it from.”
Our reporter Andy Chow asked, “Wouldn’t, wouldn’t more information,
wouldn’t handing over more information to ODE clear up those kinds of
things?”
“Now I appreciate what you’re saying but we have a contract. The
contract specifically states what we’re supposed to do. Until the court
tells us what to do we are going to follow the contract. So all the
comments that can be made about how we should or what can we do to
clear up the thing -- this is now in litigation so it requires a judge
to tell us what to do -- not ODE – period,” says Clark.
ECOT received $108 million from the state last school year. If the
preliminary attendance audit holds up, ECOT could lose tens of millions
of dollars in repayment.
In a letter to parents, ECOT’s superintendent implies that the
department of education is trying to eliminate the online charter
school. The letter added that ODE is changing the rules which could
lead to ECOT closing its doors.
The department has declined a request to comment because of the pending
litigation.
Democrats in the General Assembly have introduced a bill that would
strengthen attendance standards and require e-schools like ECOT to
report their attendance numbers every month to the education department
The legal fight over the attendance records is expected to go back to
court within the next couple of weeks.
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