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HARRISBURG — Pennsylvania’s largest cybercharter school says it is “unreasonable” to expect its staff to see and hear from all students weekly, despite the Shapiro administration’s contention that it must do so to comply with state law.
Now, state lawmakers are pushing to update the law’s language to ensure these wellness checks happen.
The statute, passed as part of last year’s budget, says cybercharter schools must weekly “ensure that each enrolled student is able to be visibly seen and communicated with in real time.”
The language had been inspired in part by a prominent case in which a 12-year-old cybercharter student, Malinda Hoagland, died in May 2024 following alleged torture and starvation by her guardians, according to state Rep. Joe Ciresi, D-Montgomery, the lawmaker who sponsored the original bill. The girl was attending Commonwealth Charter Academy, which now faces a wrongful death suit.
It’s also the school that is now resisting performing weekly wellness checks.
When the Pennsylvania Department of Education requested documentation of the newly required checks from Commonwealth Charter, an attorney for the school said it had a different interpretation of the law and would not be performing them, according to October 2024 letters viewed by Spotlight PA.
“In a school with over 30,000 students and over 2,300 faculty, administrators, and support staff, and several opportunities for a student to be visibly seen each day, [the Education Department’s] mandate that all 30,000 students actually be seen and heard each week is unreasonable and impossible of execution,” the Commonwealth Charter lawyer wrote. “The General Assembly did not in fact mandate that.”
A spokesperson for Commonwealth Charter said the school received another letter the following month and requested a meeting to discuss the issue, but never heard back from the state — something they said “has been an unfortunate but constant theme from them for several years.”
An Education Department spokesperson told Spotlight PA it sent letters to all 14 of Pennsylvania’s cybercharter schools in October about the new law, and that it is confident that most “have made changes to policies and procedures in order to meet the wellness check requirement and ensure the well-being of each student on a weekly basis.”
Only one school, Commonwealth Charter Academy, “has challenged PDE’s interpretation of Act 55,” the spokesperson said, adding that the agency plans to publish public data on cybercharter wellness checks in August.
State Rep. Pete Schweyer, D-Lehigh, heads his chamber’s Education Committee and has lately been focused on passing legislation that would update the decades-old law governing cybercharter schools. He told Spotlight PA he only recently became aware of Commonwealth Charter’s stance on student wellness checks.
The school’s October letter “was shocking to me,” he said.
“I’ll speak for myself. I didn’t have a full grasp on how brazen and how willing at least some cyberschools were to just disregard the health and well-being of their kids,” he told Spotlight PA. “In what world would anybody look at that as an exploitable loophole? Like, it’s obnoxious.”
State Sen. Lindsey Williams, D-Allegheny, who has also been focused on cybercharter regulation, said she felt the original law “was clear: Cybercharter schools need to put eyes on kids at least once a week.”
“It’s absurd that we have to go through this exercise of changing the school code,” she said. “If CCA is unwilling to do the bare minimum to protect their students, then we should.”
Schweyer is now working on a bill that would create stricter reporting rules for cybercharters, as is a Republican member of the state Senate.
Malinda’s half sisters are suing Commonwealth Charter Academy, along with a public school district and a number of other Pennsylvania institutions, for wrongful death. During Malinda’s time at the cybercharter school, their suit claims, she was actively being abused — including at least one incident in which her father forced her to abruptly end a Zoom session and proceeded to hit her.
Commonwealth Charter staff, the suit says, “observed obvious signs of abuse” including blackened and swollen eyes, a range of other bruises and abrasions, and mood changes.
Commonwealth Charter spokesperson Timothy Eller, whose title is chief branding and government relations officer, said Malinda’s death “was tragic and heartbreaking for the CCA school community.” He added that while the school can’t give specifics about pending litigation, the Chester County district attorney said in that there was “no indication that either [of the schools that Hoagland attended] failed to meet legal requirements to report abuse.”
Eller said Hoagland had been regularly visible on camera and actively participated as a Commonwealth Charter student, and that her previous school and county officials had not alerted Commonwealth Charter about their concerns.
Another shot at a legislative update
Commonwealth Charter’s argument about the 2024 student wellness check law centers on the statute’s phrasing.
The attorney for Commonwealth Charter, Philip Murren of Cumberland County firm Ball, Murren & Connell, wrote in his October letter that the phrase “able to be seen” seemed to mean only that employees must have “an opportunity” to do a real-time visual and verbal wellness check on a child, not that they “actually” see and hear their students.
Murren added that the state’s Child Protective Services Law already requires school employees to report suspected child abuse, and that it is Commonwealth Charter’s experience that Children and Youth departments would not accept reports of students simply not being seen or heard weekly in their “fully asynchronous online school programs” as possible evidence of abuse.
“Nevertheless,” he said, “CCA continues to file these reports when warranted.”
This year, the state House is trying two approaches to tighten the law, at least one of which could be included in this year’s state budget.
In June, the chamber passed to the cybercharter law, among them an update to the wellness check language.
It would also add a section on penalties, saying that failure to comply will be grounds for nonrenewal or revocation of a school’s charter. The chamber’s goal is to have the measure be part of ongoing state budget talks.
Late last month, Schweyer also circulated proposing a standardized process for cybercharter schools to conduct wellness checks and establish a “crisis escalation process” for checks that reveal serious concerns.
Schweyer hasn’t introduced official language yet, and conceded it might not be ready in time to be included in the budget. But he said his goal is to lay out crisis triggers that mandate escalation, set schedules for communication with families and authorities, train staff and create additional penalties for cybe charters that don’t follow these rules.
“We’re trying to make this as comprehensive as possible,” he said. “It’s going to take a little while to get this done.”
The broad cybercharter bill that passed the state House in the GOP-controlled state Senate, but the upper chamber is also on board with updating the wellness check law.
State Sen. Tracy Pennycuick, R-Montgomery, that explicitly references the conflict between the state and Commonwealth Charter, writing that her goal is to update last year’s law to “ensure that cyber charter school wellness checks are conducted as originally intended.”
“This is a simple fix to help ensure that students learning remotely are accounted for, supported, and safe,” she wrote.
In a statement, state Senate Majority Leader Joe Pittman, R-Indiana, said the original wellness check language was a priority of many in his chamber, and that “Senator Pennycuick’s language seeking to offer greater clarity to the issue has my support and would take another meaningful step forward.”
Eller, of Commonwealth Charter, said the school was “not consulted or invited to provide input during the legislative process that led to the 2024 changes.”
Asked about the newly proposed updates to cybercharter law, Eller said the school also had not been invited to weigh in, but would be “more than willing to collaborate.”
Asynchronous education
Commonwealth Charter maintains that it does everything it can to make sure students are safe.
Eller told Spotlight PA in an email that the school’s internal wellness check policy requires that if a teacher or administrator is concerned about a student’s safety, they reach out to the family directly. If that doesn’t resolve the issue, they then “may request the involvement of the local authorities.”
Eller said the school also employs staff members whose primary job includes conducting home visits if there are concerns about a student’s attendance or engagement with school.
He said these staffers, known internally as attendance, communication and engagement specialists, conducted more than 1,500 home visits in the 2024-25 school year and made more than 1,670 referrals to Children and Youth agencies across the state.
Commonwealth Charter gets particular attention from lawmakers and other elected officials because of its size and the number of students it educates. It has grown rapidly since the pandemic prompted many families to try cybereducation.
Like most cybercharter schools in Pennsylvania, Commonwealth Charter has the ability to take on an unlimited number of students. However, the state Department of Education cybercharters to agree to enrollment caps as a condition of their charter renewals if they are classified as comprehensive support and improvement schools — a federal designation for a state’s lowest-performing tier.
All but one of the state’s established cybercharters, including Commonwealth Charter, are CSI schools. (One of the cybercharters was only approved for operation last year and isn’t yet ranked). , and it doesn’t have an enrollment cap in place.
Commonwealth Charter says it had more than 35,000 students enrolled by the end of the most recent school year. That makes it by far the largest cybercharter in the state, and also .
Asked what makes it so difficult for Commonwealth Charter teachers and administrators to make sure they see and hear all students weekly, Eller told Spotlight PA that the school aims to make sure kids and families have “flexibility in how they engage in their education.” In practice, this means not all students participate in live Zoom “classrooms.”
While real-time instruction is available, he said, there is also an “asynchronous” option that offers “self-paced, student-led instruction, where students and families set their own schedule and complete schoolwork at their own pace.”
Students can also blend the two approaches, he said.
Aside from concerns about students’ well-being, pressure has been growing on cybercharter schools to show that their educational approaches are working and to account for the ways they spend the significant taxpayer dollars that they accrue.
During an April hearing on cybercharters’ educational outcomes, state House lawmakers heard testimony from the Pennsylvania Association of School Administrators that these schools are performing poorly when it comes to test scores, attendance rates and graduation rates.
Cybercharter proponents, meanwhile, said the children who are enrolled in these schools often are struggling in these areas anyway, and argued cybercharters play a crucial role by offering nontraditional education options.
And in , Auditor General Tim DeFoor, a Republican, reported that the schools were accruing big surpluses from taxpayer dollars and also spending that money in questionable ways, including on gift cards, staff bonuses and vehicle payments.
Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are increasingly open to updating the commonwealth’s cybercharter law, though it’s unclear if the divided Legislature will come to a consensus as part of this year’s budget deal.
Cybercharters and their advocates, which spend hundreds of thousands of dollars lobbying state officials, argue the schools should be just as well-funded as traditional public schools, and say efforts to cut the state funding that flows to them will put schools out of business.
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