Enrollment booming for cyber schools, online academies

With families concerned about the safety of students returning to schools amid the covid-19 pandemic, cyber charter schools and the online academies run by school districts are seeing an increase in demand, officials of the schools said.

“Pennsylvania’s public cyber charter schools have been inundated with inquiries about their schools and requests for enrollment,” said Jessica Hickernell, a spokesperson for the Pennsylvania Coalition of Public Charter Schools, a Mechanicsburg-based association representing 12 of the state’s 14 public cyber charter schools.

The biggest factors driving the increase in enrollment are concern over students’ health and safety in a traditional school setting and frustration over the online education that school districts delivered when Gov. Wolf ordered schools to close in mid-March because of covid-19, said Brian Hayden, CEO of the Midland-based PA Cyber Charter School.

PA Cyber Charter already is at capacity for the upcoming school year, the earliest that ever has happened, Hayden said. The school can teach 12,000 students; 11,000 are enrolled, and 1,100 have submitted applications, Hayden said.

PA Cyber is putting new applicants on a waiting list.

Even though cyberschools do not have the limitations of a physical classroom traditional schools do, Hickernell said they have class size restrictions and struggle with the availability of technology that they provide to their students. These factors, along with the number of personnel they have, can influence a cyber charter school’s instruction capacity, Hickernell said.

“You can’t have 60 students in a class and expect the same quality of education,” whether online or in a traditional classroom, Hayden said.

PA Cyber had 9,856 students in the 2019-20 school year, according to a report from the Pennsylvania Department of Education.

Public charter schools were popular enough last school year that 146,550 students were enrolled in October, before the pandemic struck, according to the Pennsylvania education department.

The state has more than 160 brick-and-mortar charter schools and 14 cyber charter schools, said Eric Levis, an education department spokesman.

At Pennsylvania Distance Learning Charter School in Franklin Park, CEO Patricia Rossetti said the school has been seeing an increase in enrollment among students in kindergarten through eighth grade, when there typically is growth in the high school grades. Enrollment typically runs between 850 and 900 students, but the school has 1,100 students, Rossetti said.

The state’s public schools are working to keep students enrolled in their respective districts to save tuition money that would other go to cyberschools by operating their own distance learning programs.

About 92% of the state’s public school districts offer online learning programs and “we will see that number rise, I suspect,” said Annette Stevenson, a spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania School Boards Association.

Norwin’s online academy has seen enrollment jump from 86 students during the first semester of the last school year, to about 170 so far for the upcoming year, said Jonathan Szish, Norwin spokesman.

The school district conducted a Zoom meeting Tuesday with 300 parents and students who are interested in Norwin’s online academy, Szish said. About 25 students were enrolled following the session, he added.

“It may be the uncertainty that parents must be feeling,” Szish said of the increase in online enrollment.