Pa.’s largest cyber charter wants to block records showing how it spends money

Pennsylvania’s largest cyber charter school, Commonwealth Charter Academy, has drawn scrutiny from public school advocates for spending millions of dollars on advertising and real estate. Now the charter is going to court to avoid turning over records that would give more clues as to how it’s spending taxpayer money.

The charter, which has amassed hundreds of millions in assets over the last four years as its enrollment has soared, has fended off questions about its spending, saying it is providing a high-quality education to its nearly 30,000 students. Proponents of public schools — which pay CCA and other cyber charters for every student within their attendance boundaries that enrolls — say the charter is draining school district coffers and providing little accountability for the mounting costs.

“You start asking yourself, what are you getting for this?” said Eric Epstein, an anti-corruption activist in Harrisburg and a member of the Central Dauphin School Board, where he said CCA is “consistently the top biller” among charters paid by the school district.

Epstein is one of the advocates being taken to court by CCA, after a state open-records officer in August ordered the charter to give Epstein copies of contracts and invoices for services spanning several years. CCA appealed two orders in favor of Epstein; a hearing is scheduled in Dauphin County Court in December.

In another case, pending in Commonwealth Court, CCA is arguing it shouldn’t have to turn over copies of forms submitted by families seeking reimbursement from the charter for classes their children have taken outside of school.

Through a spokesperson, CCA said it complies with the Right-to-Know law — which entitles citizens to request public records from public agencies — while protecting family and student privacy. It said its legal arguments in the cases “speak for themselves.”

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Epstein — the founder of Rock the Capital, a group that monitors Pennsylvania’s authorities, boards, and commissions — submitted a series of Right-to-Know requests to Commonwealth Charter Academy earlier this year.

The information the charter makes available to the public is “threadbare,” Epstein said. As a public school, CCA is overseen by a board of trustees that holds public meetings. But meeting agendas posted online don’t include information on what contracts the board is voting on, or how much money it’s voting to spend.

Nor do meeting minutes. Minutes from September’s meeting, for instance, say board members voted to approve “proposals, agreements, and purchases,” without any mention of what those proposals, agreements, and purchases were for. (Timothy Eller, who is CCA’s chief branding and government relations officer, did not respond to a question about why the charter does not post board meeting materials online.)

Epstein filed requests for a variety of records. Among them: copies of requests for proposals issued and invoices paid by the charter between 2021 and 2024 for different services, including advertising, architecture, marketing, and government relations. He also asked for the charter’s contracts with law firms and solicitors over a similar time period.

When the charter did not provide those records, Epstein appealed to Pennsylvania’s Office of Open Records. A hearing officer ruled in his favor on some, but not all, of his requests — ordering the charter to conduct “a good faith search” and turn over records. But CCA appealed those decisions to court, maintaining that Epstein’s requests were “insufficiently specific.”

“This is a stalling tactic,” Epstein said. He said that CCA should be able to produce invoices, “just like any other public school.”

In 2022, the Office of Open Records ordered Commonwealth Charter Academy to turn over records to Susan Spicka, the executive director of pro-public-education advocacy group Education Voters PA, who requested forms submitted to the charter by families seeking reimbursement for “community classes.” CCA offers families reimbursement for classes their children take outside of school.

The charter had refused to provide those forms to Spicka, arguing that doing so would violate students’ privacy rights.

While the Office of Open Records ruled that CCA could turn over those records and still protect students’ privacy if it redacted their names, CCA appealed, arguing that the forms were education records and thus should not be public.

It said redacting the forms would not be enough because they could contain parents’ handwriting, which would reveal their identities.

A Common Pleas Court judge rejected those arguments, again ordering CCA to produce the records. CCA then appealed to Commonwealth Court, where the case is pending.

During the fight over the records, CCA produced a spreadsheet of reimbursements requested by families in 2019-20 for classes ranging from art, violin, and piano lessons to horseback riding, speed skating, and hockey. The reimbursements were requested up to $200, according to CCA’s spreadsheet. (Eller did not respond to a question about how much money families are eligible for, and if the money is awarded to families on top of activities that students may participate in through their local school district, saying the charter “provides a modest reimbursement for a family when a student participates in educational and educationally related activities in their local community.”)

In a filing submitted by lawyers with the Public Interest Law Center, Spicka said the Right-to-Know law “guarantees access to public records, not to an agency’s selective summaries of its records.”

“Holding otherwise would undermine the [law’s] purpose of promoting governmental transparency and accountability and allowing for public scrutiny of governmental activity,” she said in the filing.

Separately, Spicka and other advocates have raised questions about CCA’s practices of making cash payments to families. On numerous months’ worth of check registers they requested from the charter earlier this year, the names of hundreds of entities paid by CCA were redacted — including $180,000 worth of payments to redacted vendors in June 2024 alone, according to Spicka.

When Spicka challenged those redactions, CCA said they represented the “names of caretakers that received payments under CCA’s Community Class Reimbursement program; names of family mentors who perform services for CCA, including assisting newly enrolled families with successfully transitioning to CCA and online learning; and the names of staff” reimbursed for tuition payments.

(In one check register from June 2023, CCA categorized more than 500 payments to redacted entities as payments for students or caretakers, with amounts ranging from $22 to $7,425. The charter also made more than 100 payments that month to redacted entities that it categorized as family mentors; most of the payments were for $550.)

To Spicka’s request for any contracts, agreements, or documentation that “details the work or services provided by the vendors/entities that are redacted,” CCA said it had no records.

Eller did not respond to questions about whether CCA has agreements with its family mentors, the services they perform, and how much they are paid.