Florida taxpayers spend millions on absent students

Florida taxpayers are spending millions of dollars to educate thousands of high-school students who rarely or never show up for class, part of a growing trend of high absenteeism at schools operated by for-profit corporations.

The Sunshine State has more than 120 schools where more than 20 percent of enrolled students miss class on a given day. On some campuses, daily truancy levels are half or more of the official student population, according to a study by Scripps Howard News Service.

Because charter schools in Florida are paid based on enrollment -- not actual student attendance -- the schools collected at least $25 million during the 2006-2007 school year for a daily average of 5,125 missing students.

"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.

Miron said the schools 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?"

For-profit companies run several chains of schools in Florida, including facilities with the state's worst rates of absenteeism. The state has 11 Life Skills Centers operated by White Hat Management of Akron, Ohio.

The worst-attended of these are the Life Skills Center of Polk County, with an average absenteeism rate of 48 percent, and the Life Skills Center of Opa Locka, where absenteeism averaged 45 percent.

White Hat Management issued a written statement to Scripps Howard when asked about the absenteeism. The company said its Life Skills Centers serve students who've dropped out or otherwise rejected their traditional public schools.

"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."

White Hat also operates 17 Life Skills campuses in Ohio that have the nation's lowest attendance rates, according to the Scripps Howard study. The Life Skills Center of Cincinnati reported that absenteeism averaged 64 percent of enrollment in the 2004-05 school year.

Also reporting consistently high absenteeism in Florida are three Richard Milburn Academy schools, where an average of 26 percent of enrolled students missed class during the 2006-07 school year.

"There's not enough oversight," Lee County School Board member Bob Chilmonik said after reviewing the records of the Milburn Academy in his county. "Most people, a lot of people, can start a charter school."

Lee County's Milburn Academy received $7,500 per student for the 2006-07 school year, but spent only a third of that amount on actual instruction, according to county files.

The Lee County School District also has approved creation this year of the Lee Alternative Charter High School. It will also be run by NonPublic Educational Services Inc., the for-profit company based in Salem, Mass., that operates the Milburn academies.

Three Milburn campuses in Florida have been shut down by local school boards for a variety of performance issues, including attendance.

"What I remember clearly is being appalled at the lack of student performance," said Cindy Olson, a member of the Hillsborough County School Board, which closed its Milburn school in 2006.

According to the Florida Department of Education, the Milburn Academy of Hillsborough reported that 60 percent of its students missed at least 21 days of class during the 2004-2005 school year. It was the sixth-worst rate of truancy among all of Florida's public schools.

The worst absenteeism, according to the state, was at the Milburn Academy of Sarasota, where 72 percent of students missed at least three weeks of school.

Deb Metheny, supervisor for charter schools in Sarasota County, said poor attendance was just one of the reasons her school board revoked the Milburn Academy's charter in 2006. The school was also cited for poor student performance, low graduation rates and failure to provide vocational training programs.

"Also, there was a lack of qualified teaching staff and a failure to provide guidance and social-work personnel," she said.

But she said the academy failed to reach the 80 percent attendance goal it promised the school board. "And that's according to their own figures," she said.

The Milburn Academy of Pasco County was closed last year.

"It was a struggle from the very beginning with them. What constitutes attendance? Their record keeping was just so poor," said Sandra Ramos, a recently retired assistant superintendent of Pasco County schools who oversaw the closure. "They were continually trying to get their enrollment up. 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."

Lauren Pelkey, now 22, graduated from the Pasco County Milburn Academy as the school's valedictorian in 2004. She said the school's small class size -- enrollment was about 130 students -- was made even smaller, since only about two-thirds of the students showed up each day.

Pelkey said the only time she skipped school was during spring break when she went to the beach in Clearwater.

"I would say I was really sick, and they (her teachers) would notice I was extremely tan," Pelkey said. "So they would ask for a note, and I would have to forge one. I don't think they believed it, but what could they do?"

The school's closing last year didn't surprise Pelkey, now a student at St. Leo University, in central Florida. Although Pelkey liked the teachers, she said the students ran Milburn Academy. She said the program was "a waste of taxpayers' money."

Pasco County officials said that school officials had awarded credits for Spanish classes taught by an instructor who wasn't qualified. Students were given science credit even though the school didn't own lab equipment -- a violation of district rules, according to Ramos. A former teacher also said students were awarded gym credit despite the school not having a physical-education class.

Robert H. Crosby, founder and president of NonPublic Educational Services Inc., which operates the Milburn academies, 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.

"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."

But he said the schools have had problems finding qualified teachers. He acknowledged that his schools offered $50 gift cards to coax kids to attend class, "but that was for high attendance rates over the course of the year" and not just during designated counting weeks.

There are six Milburn schools in Texas, where the funding rules are quite different. Texas only pays based upon the number of students who actually attend class. Daily absenteeism averages 26 percent in the three remaining Florida schools and 17 percent in the Lone Star State campuses.

Crosby was asked whether the method of funding influences attendance.

"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."

(E-mail Thomas Hargrove at hargrovet(at)shns.com. Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)