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Charter schools held accountable

Online schools can be wonderful things. Among other things, they can provide more individualized attention to students and appeal to those who may not function well in the set hours and environments of traditional classrooms.

But one thing they do not do as well is ensure students are showing up for class, so to speak. According to Ohio officials, a big online school operation has been taking advantage of taxpayers in a massive way because of that.

How massive? Try raking in $60 million in unearned revenue from taxpayers during a single school year.

Nontraditional education, through both physical and online charter schools, is a valuable alternative to public schools. But as we have pointed out for years, Ohio’s approach to it for some time amounted to allowing private entities to collect state money on what amounted to a trust-me basis.

Accountability was lacking. Little was done to ensure charter schools were spending state money appropriately, or that they were providing quality educations. That is changing as accountability more in line with that for public schools is being demanded.

It is tougher to accomplish that for online operations. One, the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, had been getting away with billing the state for student exposure time that could not be documented, according to state officials.

Though the ECOT lists itself as a nonprofit organization, it serves to funnel big bucks to two for-profit companies for management and software services. Using a nonprofit as a front for what amounts to a profit-making operation by that method is not uncommon.

An investigation of the ECOT, much of it by state Auditor Dave Yost, found millions of dollars had been paid out improperly.

The funding formula for online schools relies heavily on contact hours — that is, time students spend logged into to the schools’ websites. But Yost found that the ECOT was collecting $7,000 annual payments from the state for fulltime students, despite the fact those children were logged in for only a few hours during the year.

Last week, state Board of Education members agreed to require the ECOT to repay $60 million of the $108 million in state funds it received for the 2015-16 school year. Clearly, to judge by the board’s 16-1 vote, its members feel they and taxpayers have been cheated.

Good for the board for going after the money. Once collected, it should be handed out to either honest charter schools or public schools that need help.

The board’s move is another indication that the old wild-West days of charter schools in Ohio are over. Good. It’s about time.

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