'Ghost schools' paid millions for absent students

Taxpayers pay millions of dollars every month to educate tens of thousands of high school students who rarely or never show up for class, part of a growing trend of high absenteeism at privately operated schools.These special charter schools are supposed to rescue students who were failing in traditional public high schools, but a Scripps Howard News Service investigation found that many students are not attending class and few are graduating. Some of these institutions have become ghost schools with thousands of students who are enrolled but never attend.Ohio, hardest hit by the trend, paid $29.9 million for absent students who were enrolled at 47 of these "dropout recovery" schools during the 2006-2007 school year, the most recent year that complete data are available.The nation's single worst truancy rate - according to government records - was at a campus in Cincinnati where 64 percent of enrolled students were not in class on a daily basis during the 2004-2005 school year.The problems are widespread.Charter schools in Florida, for example, collected at least $25 million for a daily average of 5,125 missing students during the 2006-2007 school year. And the Texas Education Agency has tried to recoup more than $25 million from schools that allegedly inflated attendance reports.For-profit companies operate schools in 30 states and the District of Columbia. Most of these schools are paid based on the number of students enrolled -- not those who actually attend -- so the schools get paid even if the desks are empty."I'm not against privatization of schools. But sometimes I get terribly ill thinking about all of the resources here that could have been better spent in traditional schools," said Gary Miron, a researcher at Western Michigan University who tracks the growth of education-management organizations, known as "EMOs.""After all, these EMOs are doing what for-profit companies are supposed to do. They are making money. They are creating business models that are highly profitable. The real question is why our state legislatures are allowing this."The dropout-recovery school movement began in 1998 in Ohio, and in recent years has been averaging about $30 million a year in state payments for absent students. Taxpayers have paid more than $100 million in the last five years through this system.Robert H. Crosby, a Salem, Mass., businessman who owns a for-profit company that manages nine schools for at-risk students in Texas and Florida, said, "Ohio is the profit-making EMO capital of America."The money can be significant."It's a cash cow! We all used to sit around and joke about that," said Mark Elliott, former principal of the Life Skills Center of Cincinnati. "I spent less than $1 million on a $3 million operation. What the hell are they (executives at his former company) doing with the other $2 million?"Elliott's former school has Ohio's highest absenteeism rate. Average daily truancy runs more than 50 percent of enrollment in recent years and spiked to 64 percent for the 2004-2005 school year. Only about 158 students of the 438 enrolled were showing up that year."Why does this go on? Because we let it go on," said Andy Jewel, a researcher for the Ohio Education Association. "This isn't about education reform. It's about politics. Charter schools have become a highly politicized process. That's why it hasn't been reined in, yet."Nationwide, absenteeism in all public schools runs about 8 percent, according to a study of the 2003-2004 school year by the U.S. Department of Education.The Ohio Department of Education requires schools to take action if absenteeism exceeds 7 percent, although dropout-recovery schools have been exempted from the rule. Ohio public schools most recently reported statewide absenteeism averaging about 5.9 percent.Ohio's charter schools account for only 3 percent of the state's public high school enrollment, but they account for 45 percent of the state's high school dropouts, according to a Scripps Howard analysis of U.S. Department of Education computer files.The Ohio schools with the worst attendance are the 17 Life Skills Centers run by the for-profit company White Hat Management, founded by Akron, Ohio, businessman David Brennan. The company operates 20 more Life Skills Centers in Arizona, Colorado, Florida and Michigan, many of which also have high levels of absenteeism.Fewer than half of Ohio Life Skills Center students graduate, according to Ohio Department of Education records.The Ohio Life Skills schools had a total enrollment of 5,789 students during the 2006-2007 school year, according to computer files at the Ohio Department of Education. But the state said absenteeism for those schools collectively was 45.62 percent that year, which means White Hat Management was paid $17.3 million for 2,641 absent students.White Hat Management issued a written statement when asked to explain the absenteeism. The company said its schools serve students who've dropped out of traditional public schools, and that more than 10,000 have received diplomas since 1998."It is a constant challenge to keep our students in school -- many of them have lost the discipline of daily attendance and almost all of them have other responsibilities such as jobs and families that make it harder for them to balance their schedules," the company statement said. "There is absenteeism at Life Skills Centers as there is at public schools. It is surprising that it isn't higher."Under Ohio law, truant students must be dropped from the enrollment lists after missing 105 hours of instruction. But former employees and students at Life Skills Center schools said habitually truant students were kept on the active enrollment lists.Former employees said they were routinely sent to students' homes to obtain written excused absences using a standard form the company developed. Then the absence became "excused" until another 105 hours were missed."It was really a bad experience. I'd spent my time biting my own tongue and swallowing blood," said Andrea Gale, a former English teacher at the Life Skills Center of Lake Erie, Ohio.She said teachers were used primarily as record keepers for attendance -- "nothing more than clerks" -- and told to obtain excuse notes from parents and guardians."We really wanted to be able to mark a kid as 'E' for 'excused' on our records. We would even go to the families' houses and say, 'Where is your kid?' We had time allotted for home visits. Usually the excuses were for medical reasons. But we'd take whatever excuse we could get, things like 'My child was ill' or 'He was at the doctor' or 'He was out of town.' Then I'd match that to my attendance book," Gale said.Other former employees echoed Gale's remarks. Each said administrators ordered teachers and clerical workers to obtain excused-absence notes to keep the students enrolled."I think they had it down to a science. It was a business. It was run like a business," said Nanyah Bat-Asher, who taught at the Life Skills Center of Cincinnati. "They knew exactly how long to keep the students on the books, how long they could get paid for them."Former Life Skills Center of Canton, Ohio, teacher Michael Appollonio, who now works for the Ohio State Mental Health Agency, said: "A lot of the excuses that kids brought in, they were a joke. Some of them might have said the student missed the bus. OK, but three days in a row of a student missing a bus? I've seen documents that I know were written by students and the administrators just took them."These forms, collected by the hundreds each year, allowed White Hat to earn millions in tax dollars for kids who rarely attended.Appollonio's Canton school had 211 students enrolled and collected more than $1.5 million in the 2006-2007 school year. If its pay were based on actual attendance, it would have received about half that amount, according to the state's funding formula.As the former enrollment specialist for the Life Skills Center in Trumbull County, Ohio, Cathalene Weyant said she helped the attendance coordinator change the unexcused-absence records after receiving excuse notes. She said the school had a running list of whom it needed to get notes from and was collecting notes from about 50 percent of its students.Administrators never questioned the notes' validity, she said."I'm sure they were bogus," said Weyant. "It was pretty much a given that they (the students) weren't going to go" to class.Former students said they lied on the forms.Desiree Troy attended the Life Skills Center of Canton from 2002 until she graduated in 2006. Although she rarely cut school, the now-22-year-old admitted to handing in fake absence notes."They wanted us to write our names and dates and why we weren't in school," Troy said. "I wasn't always honest. If I wasn't going to school to avoid conflict or to get a break from it, I would still say I had a headache."Officials with the Ohio Department of Education defended their oversight of White Hat schools. State reviewers have gone to each Life Skills Center to examine hundreds of excused-absence forms on file in recent years."The student files are checked for proper documentation. If a student is listed absent, they will note that there is an excuse in the file. As to the validity of that, how do we determine if the parent is lying or not?" asked Jason Wall, the management analyst supervisor for the Ohio Department of Education's School Finance Office.Wall said the auditing methods used to determine how many full-time-equivalent students (FTEs) are actually attending a school does not allow for any challenge of the accuracy of excused-absence forms, other than to confirm that they exist."There is nothing in our FTE review process where an area coordinator would pick up the phone and call a parent regarding a specific excuse," Wall said. "We trust that the parent has what is best for the child in mind and that it is a valid excuse."White Hat Management, in its written statement, also defended its use of excused absences:"Our policies require written documentation for excused absences and we comply with all applicable sections of the Ohio Revised Code. We will not dignify allegations made in interviews with 'former employees,' 'former teachers' and 'former students' since we have not been offered transcripts of such interviews," the firm said in a written statement."We find offensive any implication that White Hat Management -- the management company for Life Skills Centers -- has not complied with reporting and legal requirements," the company said.Elsewhere in America, some state and local officials are aggressively challenging the accuracy of attendance claims at privately run schools.In Florida, three Richard Milburn Academy schools were shut down in the last two years for a variety of performance complaints that always included absenteeism."It was a struggle from the very beginning with them. What constitutes attendance? Their record keeping was just so poor," said Sandra Ramos, recently retired assistant superintendent of Pasco County schools who oversaw last year's closure of the Milburn school in her district."They were continually trying to get their enrollment up," Ramos said. "During FTE weeks (twice-yearly enrollment counts to determine funding) they would give $50 bonuses so the kids would show up. But those kids didn't show up after that."Robert H. Crosby, the founder and president of NonPublic Educational Services Inc., which operates three remaining Milburn academies in Florida and six campuses in Texas, vigorously defended his programs."We are focusing on the at-risk kids. I like to say we've focused on the bottom of the barrel. I'm not taking the easy road on this. I have a total mission in life to help kids who are at risk. After all, I was an at-risk kid once myself," Crosby said from his Salem, Mass., office. He said many school boards in Florida are hostile to charter programs run by private businesses. Four Florida counties -- Brevard, Collier, Polk and Alachua -- refused to give charters to his group, according to state records."If you are a nonprofit group, you can do no wrong. But if you are for-profit, then you can do nothing right," Crosby said. "There is a bias against for-profits in education."Absenteeism at Crosby's remaining schools averages 26 percent in Florida and 17 percent in Texas. Texas, unlike most states, pays charter schools on the basis of actual attendance, not enrollment.Crosby was asked whether the method of funding influences attendance in schools."That's an interesting hypothesis. But that's for someone else to look at, not me," Crosby said. "In Florida, we are paid by enrollment, but so is every other school. Texas is one of the few states that pay by attendance. Most of the states pay by enrollment, fortunately."Texas officials believe their funding formula does have an impact."In the mid-1980s, Texas decided that attendance is important to achieving good performance in school," said Lisa Dawn-Fisher, deputy associate commissioner for school finance at the Texas Education Agency. She supervised sanctions against the attendance claims by charter schools."We only pay on the basis of warm bodies in the seats so that the kids are receiving instruction. It is not enough just to enroll kids, but to actually teach them," Dawn-Fisher said.She said that's probably why absenteeism at all Texas public schools averages just 4 percent, the nation's lowest rate.(E-mail Thomas Hargrove at hargrovet(at)shns.com. For more of this package, go to www.scrippsnews.com))