Give ECOT ‘A’ for chutzpah

School’s ads may have abused taxpayer funds

Give the folks at Ohio’s largest online school, the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, extra credit for chutzpah: While fighting to hold on to the $60 million in tax dollars they collected for students who didn’t actually log in, they saw no problem with running up a big tab in TV ads aimed at their own self-preservation.

Until Thursday, television ads were urging lawmakers — many of whom have collected fat campaign contributions from ECOT founder Bill Lager — to call off the Department of Education, which has ordered ECOT to repay the unearned tax dollars.

“The Ohio Department of Education wants to end school choice and stop parents from deciding what’s best for their children,” one ad asserted.

No. The department is doing its job. It is holding ECOT accountable. The school claimed it had 15,322 full-time students for the 2015-16 school year and was duly paid about $7,000 per student, or about $108 million. In a review of student log-ins and paperwork, the state could verify only 6,313. Hence the clawback.

Such scrutiny has been applied to other Ohio schools — also ordered to repay money for students not educated — and is welcome, if somewhat tardy, with ECOT.

State Auditor Dave Yost ordered ECOT to knock off the ads, calling any use of tax dollars for lobbying “a very dangerous precedent — where money can be taken by force from taxpayers to tell the legislature what to do.”

Friday, ECOT Superintendent Rick Teeters denied that the school paid for the ads. Earlier, though, ECOT spokesman Neil Clark said the school did pay, and that it has a right to use these funds to influence the education department and lawmakers.

Another brassy claim from ECOT is hardly surprising. This is the crew that maintained it should be paid merely for offering an education, regardless of whether it actually provided one. When the Department of Education last year sought to verify the number of hours ECOT students spent online, the school went to court to argue that it shouldn’t have to provide its log-in records, saying it should be paid based on how many kids the school had signed up.

Franklin County Common Pleas Judge Jenifer French rejected this nonsense and ordered the school to prove that it each student received the minimum 920 hours of instruction, as required by state law. ECOT couldn’t. The State School Board properly upheld the department’s demand that taxpayers be reimbursed. So far, appeals courts have agreed.

ECOT claims that paying the fine will be its “death knell” and on Wednesday asked the Ohio Supreme Court to block the state’s order for payment. Having to repay these ill-gotten dollars, the school argues, will force it to lay off at least 350 people, or about a quarter of its employees. Wouldn’t money that paid for all those costly TV ads have spared at least a few employees?

The state education department isn’t against school choice; it’s against taxpayers getting bilked. Bill Lager’s two for-profit companies have been paid nearly $200 million in taxpayer money in the past 17 years to run the non-profit school. They’ve been paid for more than twice the students they’ve actually said they educated, and even then with poor results; graduation rates at this nationally recognized “dropout factory” are well below 50 percent.

Ohio students who want an online education deserve to get one.