When the school year starts and families have to make decisions about what to do, there are options.

Brick-and-mortar in-person schools and online cyber schools are the two basic arrangements.

Inside the cyber school option are many more choices.

Naturally, Warren County School District would like students in its attendance area to attend the district’s schools — whether they be brick-and-mortar buildings or the Virtual Academy.

Warren County School District has passed a plan calling for a full reopening to staff and students. District officials know that not all families will want to send their children to schools in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The district has also beefed up the Virtual Academy — its in-house cyber school — to be ready to meet much higher demand. Virtual Academy classes are backed by Warren County School District teachers.

“Our Virtual Academy has evolved over the years,” Superintendent Amy Stewart said. “We’re going to be adding more live lessons. We’re using our teachers. I have great confidence that we can do every bit and more because we have connections with the families and the kids to keep them on track.”

There are other choices.

Students could attend a different cyber school — a cyber charter school. There are many available.

Warren County School District clearly does not want to see its students take that route.

The district loses funding for each district student that attends a charter or cyber charter school other than the Virtual Academy.

“We try to make sure everybody understands, when folks leave, those dollars leave their schools,” Stewart said. “That means cutting staff.”

Cost-per-student numbers are determined for the special education and regular education students in a district based on calculations on a previous year’s budget.

When one student leaves, the assigned dollars go with them. If a district of 4,000 students loses 200 to cyber schools, it may not see a significant cost savings — a few students out of a class may not lessen the number of classes that are needed. But, the district may have to cut staff anyway to keep the budget balanced.

That is the district’s challenge.

The challenge for parents is knowing if a cyber school is right for their student.

The Pennsylvania School Board Association are sharing information that indicates cyber charter schools do not perform as well as public schools, despite receiving funding based on the amoun a brick-and-mortar district would spend.

“A June 2 paper from the highly respected Brookings Institution stated, ‘We find the impact of attending a virtual charter on student achievement is uniformly and profoundly negative,’ and then went on to say that ‘there is no evidence that virtual charter students improve in subsequent years,'” according to a release from PSBA.

“In 2016, the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, and the national charter lobbying group 50CAN released a report on cyber charters that found that overall, cyber students make no significant gains in math and less than half the gains in reading compared with their peers in traditional public schools,” according to PSBA. “A Stanford University CREDO Study in 2015 found that cyber students on average lost 72 days a year in reading and 180 days a year in math compared with students in traditional public schools.”

“From 2005 through 2012 under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, most Pennsylvania cybers never made ‘adequate yearly progress,'” according to PSBA. “Following NCLB, for all five years (2013-2017) that Pennsylvania’s School Performance Profile system was in place, not one cyber charter ever achieved a passing score of 70.”

“Under Pennsylvania’s current accountability system, the Future Ready PA Index, all 15 cyber charters that operated 2018-2019 have been identified for some level of support and improvement,” PSBA reported.

“One of the most common things that we find when students leave for outside cybers is that they are not monitored closely and carefully, end up failing classes, and return to the district short credits,” Stewart said. “That’s a big deal.”