State again billed for questionable count

ECOT’s brazen plundering of the Ohio treasury continues to set a new bottom for shameless. The state’s largest online school, told to repay $60.4 million overbilled in a previous school year for students who were MIA, appears to be inflating current enrollment — overcharging the state to raise money to repay its debt.

The fear is that Ohio taxpayers will never see a dime of what ECOT owes.

The enterprise is employing the time-honored strategy of “extend and pretend”: Ignore state orders on how to properly count enrollment for reimbursement. Appeal the Ohio Department of Education’s orders, upheld by a succession of Ohio courts, while continuing to claim that the state has no right to document that students actually are logging in and getting educated.

Drag out the legal fight, a no-brainer since the school is paying its legal bills with taxpayer dollars.

And before the Ohio Supreme Court rules, grab as much state cash as possible.

ECOT has reported that its enrollment is shrinking. But its demand for state student subsidies is not.

It recently told the Supreme Court justices that uncertainty over its financial future has caused unprecedented enrollment losses. It doubled down on this at its July school board meeting, where members were told enrollment had dropped to 13,804.

That would be about 400 students less than the 14,200 students that ECOT billed the state for in July. The difference between the two enrollments amounts to $243,000 a month in state reimbursements. Over 12 months, that would give ECOT roughly $2.9 million to help cover state “claw-back” payments, which the Education Department is deducting from the schools’ monthly student subsidies over a twoyear period.

And remember, that finding of a $60 million overpayment is for the 201516 school year; the education department is still auditing ECOT’s 2016-17 enrollment.

But here’s the clincher: ECOT is billing the state using the very same flawed system that resulted in the inflated-count fight — possibly reaping another $60 million overage. The school steadfastly maintains that the state and lower courts are wrongly interpreting a state mandate for schools to provide a student with a minimum 920 hours of “learning opportunities.”

ECOT says it needs only to offer an education, not actually provide lessons. It’s Professor Harold Hill’s “Think System.”

This explains why ECOT claimed 15,322 full-time students in 2015-16, but the education department could verify only 6,800 students meeting the minimum required hours. Some kids logged in for only a handful of hours. Even if the state didn’t require a school to document student participation, any legitimate educator would track this information to ensure kids were learning.

Not ECOT. The school has a four-year graduation rate below 40 percent, and about 70 percent of its claimed students were found to be missing often enough to be declared truant. ECOT has been in business 17 years. How does Ohio stop this mugging of taxpayers?

“Frankly, I’m concerned that they may be submitting inflated student numbers to try to maximize their cash flow, and that month will not be recoverable later,” State Auditor Dave Yost told The Dispatch.

Yost is asking the education department to withhold a portion of ECOT’s monthly payments into an escrow account.

If the state doesn’t have a mechanism set up to place questionable payments in escrow, it should quickly establish one. Ohio taxpayers shouldn’t have to empty their pockets until ECOT exhausts its money-making options.