Dayton Daily News

Online charter loses sponsor, may have to close doors

Insight School had been seen as option after ECOT closure.

- By Bill Bush

Less than three weeks after ECOT closed suddenly, stranding about 12,000 students, another large Ohio e-charter that was touted as an alternativ­e for those students is about to be shuttered.

Columbus-based Insight School of Ohio received notice from its sponsor, Buckeye Community Hope Foundation, on Dec. 18 that its charter will be allowed to expire June 30.

The school, launched in July 2013, currently has just under 1,300 full-time-equivalent students statewide, and is receiving about $9.4 million a year in state funding to operate under an agreement with for-profit management firm K12 Inc., which gets 22 percent of all state revenue as an upfront fee.

Its students, who work from home over the internet, failed to meet necessary measures in academics, and the school failed some financial and compliance goals, the notice said. Its “performanc­e index,” a general measure of overall student performanc­e, has trended down for the entire five years the school has been in existence, and it has received F grades in the “value added” measuremen­t the past two years. Value added measures whether students make a year’s worth of progress each year.

“It was strictly academic performanc­e,” said Jennifer Schorr, associate director of the education division at Buckeye Community Hope Foundation, the school’s sponsor. “Obviously, academics are very important.”

Under Ohio law, charters that are not renewed by sponsors for academic reasons are not permitted to shop for another sponsor, Schorr said.

The Insight School board is looking at its options to stay open and “it may not be something as quick as next year,” said Amanda Conley, the head of school, akin to its superinten­dent.

Despite that the school’s 2016-17 state report card was all Fs, Insight School was touted as a potential option for upended ECOT students on an Ohio Department of Education “Find a School” web tool. Like ECOT, the school unsuccessf­ully attempted to shift to a “dropout-recovery” charter format, which would have meant lower state report card standards that were easier to meet.

Conley said the school was effectivel­y functionin­g as a dropout prevention charter already, with a majority of its students older than 16, including teenage moms and dads, homeless students and those with mental-health issues and drug addictions.

“The unfortunat­e reality is we’re the last option,” Conley said, adding that Buckeye wouldn’t agree to support the switch to a dropout school.

But that was because the school waited too long to notify Buckeye, missing a key state deadline to apply, Schorr said. At any rate, the new dropout designatio­n would have affected future report cards, and Buckeye based its decision to close Insight on its existing report cards, Schorr said.

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