Clarify regulations to finally banish ECOT demons

The ghost of the defunct Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow online charter school is haunting Ohio’s 2018 political races, and that’s no surprise. The school’s 18-year history in Ohio, featuring dismal academic performance and gross overpayments by taxpayers, represents a colossal failure of Ohio’s charter-school system that stretches over Republican and Democratic administrations.

It provides fodder for Democratic candidates to put Republicans, who have controlled state government for eight years, on the spot.

Regardless of whose claims prove to be most valid, Ohio’s next class of leaders should focus on a key problem with e-schools: We don’t have a reliable way to ensure that e-school students are “attending” throughout the school year. And thus we don’t have a valid basis on which to pay the schools.

The old method — simply paying full freight for every child who enrolls regardless of his or her participation — is absurd and should have been seen as such from the start. Now ECOT is using employee-tracking software called ActivTrak to document students’ activity, but state regulations don’t make clear what should and shouldn’t count toward the required 920 hours of instruction time per year per student.

What if someone is logged on for six hours straight but registers no keystrokes for the last three hours? Questions like that likely will be hashed out as state claims against ECOT are litigated. Going forward, they need to be addressed up front by state lawmakers.

As state Auditor Dave Yost runs for attorney general, his role in the ECOT story is in the spotlight courtesy of Democratic opponent Steve Dettelbach. It’s a noteworthy role; Yost’s office drove investigations that found ECOT had overcharged taxpayers millions of dollars by accepting payment for students without being able to document that they were receiving an education.

But Yost also has accepted campaign contributions in the past from ECOT founder William Lager and once spoke at an ECOT graduation.

Audits by Yost’s office have found that ECOT owes the state at least $80 million in overpayments. The Department of Education last year began docking ECOT’s state funding to make up the overpayments, causing the school to close in January for lack of funds.

Democrats Dettelbach and Joe Schiavoni, a state senator from Boardman and a candidate for governor, are calling for a criminal investigation of ECOT, based on a claim by a former employee that school officials deliberately deceived the state by manipulating the ActivTrak software.

Dettelbach, a former federal prosecutor, has said that Yost and other state officials have hurt the potential case against ECOT by not referring the matter quickly for criminal prosecution.

Yost’s office replies that its investigators interviewed the whistleblower multiple times and have considered the claims as part of an audit that is to be released soon. Only after that will any criminal referral, if warranted, take place.

Yost Spokesman Ben Marrison wouldn’t say whether the audit found criminal wrongdoing, but said of the auditor’s investigators, “They don’t need to run somewhere else and have somebody do the work. They do the work.”

If criminal charges are warranted, they should be pursued vigorously.

But when the smoke clears, the priority should be writing better e-school regulations so this debacle won’t be repeated.