Amanda Palleschi Online Portfolio

CYBERTENSION: Attendance at online schools is booming, but there’s sometimes friction with brick-and-mortar schools, administrators say.

AMANDA PALLESCHI
Of the Patriot-News

A regular school day at the school on Crums Mill Road in Lower Paxton Twp. has first-grade teacher Janae Cardel logging into a computer screen and employing hats, puppets and "special guest characters" to teach her students things such as how to count in tens.

In a nearby cubicle, Keith Howard might be corresponding with members of the robotics club he started at Commonwealth Connections Academy. They are scattered throughout the state.

Lora Bueno might be updating her archived Spanish lessons or making a house call to a student struggling with the prickly subjunctive mood. And their boss, Greg Gettle, will be feeling misunderstood by former colleagues working in brick-and-mortar schools.

"Perception is everything. We've come a long way, but a cyber school being accepted by administrators [at local schools] has a long way to go," Gettle said.

Cyber charter school enrollment in the state is on the rise.

Last year, Commonwealth Connections had just under 3,000 students enrolled in Pennsylvania. This year, it has more than 4,000. PA Cyber Charter -- the state's largest and oldest cyber charter school -- has seen its enrollment rise from 505 Pennsylvania students in kindergarten through 12th grade in 2000 to more than 8,000 this school year.

While the state Department of Education does not closely track trends in cyber charter education, cyber charter administrations and some estimates show higher numbers in more rural areas. In the midstate, however, the growth is seen throughout urban, rural and suburban districts.

Gettle, the school's high school principal and a founding employee of Commonwealth, a cyber charter school that opened in Pennsylvania in 2005, is not the only one not feeling respect from traditional school administrators. Cyber-academy teachers, administrators and parents say they've a long way to go toward building a credible reputation in the local education community.

One source of tension, they say, seems to be whether cyber charter students can participate in extracurricular activities.

The lines are usually clear, Gettle said. Cyber charter students, by state regulation, have to be given the same extracurricular opportunities as students who attend the brick-and-mortar school.

The question becomes -- how do you define extracurricular activities? The problems, Gettle said, are usually with activities such as driver education, musical groups that do not practice solely outside school hours -- and school dances.

Last month, Connections Academy student and Mechanicsburg Area High School cheerleader Adrianah McGee, 15, was told she could not enter the Mechanicsburg homecoming dance because she did not follow procedures for cyber charter students.

"There are things some districts will do [for a cyber charter student] but they may not do it with open arms," Gettle said. "More and more schools are cooperating and understanding and accepting, but there's quite a lot of them that don't."

Hope Frick, 17, an Elizabethtown native and senior at Commonwealth Connections, admits she's missing out on having a football team, a yearbook and occasionally passing notes to girlfriends in the hallway. But she said she hasn't encountered problems or been given much of a hard time from her home district or administrators at the colleges she's applying to.

"Cyberschooling is totally different from home schooling, but [college] administrators look at it as the new wave of home schooling. They've all been accepting," Frick said.

Another source of friction is finances. About 70 percent to 75 percent of what a cyber student's home district gets from the state to educate that student goes to the cyberschool.

Fred Miller, a spokesman for PA Cyber Charter, said he believes it is this scenario that poses natural tension between brick-and-mortar administrations and cyber charter administrators.

"They've fought us, they've complained, they think we're taking their money," he said. "There's a lot of animosity."

According to Mechanicsburg Area School Board President Dawn Merris, that animosity isn't unwarranted.

It exists, she said, due to those who "appreciate the district for what they can do for them, but yet we're getting charged these fees that some would call exorbitant to schoolchildren outside of our means at a cyber charter school."

"It's a concern in these tight economic times, when we're getting berated for even thinking about raising taxes," Merris said.

This spring, the Capital Area Intermediate Unit launched its own efforts for high-schoolers to take online courses in the summer or fall that fit into their school curricula.

Many midstate districts, including Mechanicsburg, signed on through their program to offer online courses to their full-time brick-and-mortar students.

When the Mechanicsburg district approved $24,000 to buy into the CAIU's contract for online courses, Superintendent Joe Hood said he believed the future will exist partly in brick-and-mortar schools and partly online -- something he, Gettle and Miller all agree on.

"It's competition," Gettle said of district-directed efforts at cyber-education. "It can only make us all better."

Emily Opilo contributed to this report.