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Michigan districts make millions teaching home-schoolers karate and crafts

Oxford schools in northern Oakland County has created a “virtual academy” that caters to home-school students who take classes online and sometimes meet in a strip mall. The program had nearly 900 students in the 2018-19 school year, though fewer than 20 lived in the district. (Bridge photo by Mike WIlkinson)

by Mike Wilkinson (Bridge)

Michigan is paying tens of millions of dollars each year for home-schoolers to take classes in dance, karate, ice skating and other electives that critics say not only lack academic rigor but often amount to taxpayer-subsidized private lessons.

State law allows public schools to offer elective classes to home-school students, which has led to an explosion of online academies operated by public school districts from Traverse City to southeast Michigan since 2010.

But vague and conflicting state regulations have led to accusations that districts are overbilling taxpayers for classes led by uncertified teachers on subjects like animal husbandry, sewing and woodwinds — lessons that for parents of children in most public schools would be a private expense.

Last year, the programs cost Michigan taxpayers $27.2 million for roughly 7,300 home-schoolers, up from $5 million and 1,500 students in 2011-12.

State auditors are beginning to crack down and demand repayments from some districts. One of the most common complaints: Classes aren’t available to a district traditional brick-and-mortar students, as required by state law.

“This is about giving someone an unfair advantage,” said Paul Bodiya, chief financial officer of the Macomb Intermediate School District, which audited the Center Line schools’ home-school program and recommended a return of more than $3 million in state aid.

“They’re gaming the system in a way that not even allowed.”

A 1984 state Supreme Court decision mandated that Michigan districts provide educational offerings to home-schoolers, but only in nonessential courses, not math or other subjects where state test scores are falling behind.

In the past decade, many districts struggling with stagnant state financing have created online academies that cater to home-schoolers, often to make a profit.

Bridge Magazine obtained hundreds of pages and audits and records about the programs through the Michigan Freedom of Information Act.

The home-school classes, which operate from the Indiana border to the Upper Peninsula, typically work like this:

Students watch instruction videos for five hours a week at home, then meet an instructor in person for hands-on learning for one hour.

Districts pay course instructors about $350 per child per course, then bill the state $1,200 for the class, keeping the profit.  For students who take four or five classes a semester, the total could reach as high as $6,000 for a full year for electives.

In contrast, all electives of a student in a traditional district — such as music, art and gym — would amount to about $1,300, or one-sixth of the roughly $8,000 per pupil a district gets. The rest would cover instruction in core classes like English, reading and math.

In the Niles Community Schools district in southwest Michigan, for instance, a home-school student took 10 such classes in the 2016-17 school year, including ice skating, voice, skiing and beginner horse care, according to a state audit of the program reviewed by Bridge.

Public school officials and advocates acknowledge the home-school programs were created to make a profit, and say it not only legal but helps districts in tough times.

“How can it be? Well, if the law allows, it can be,” said Marsha Bahra, the former CEO and president of EdTech Specialists, a Traverse City-based consulting company that worked with districts to create online elective programs.

Bahra said the programs grew to help students who don’t succeed in traditional classrooms.

“They needed a different experience,” she said.

Bahra, who recently retired, said recent audits from the state of Michigan that scrutinize the programs have hurt districts and students.

“There a lot of emotion in all of this and it shouldn’t be about the emotion,  it should be about the students and it should be about the staff,” she told Bridge. “If we did something wrong, we didn’t do it intentionally, we weren’t trying to money-grab.”

‘Movie madness’ and ‘free running’

The Traverse City Area Public Schools created the Northern Michigan Partnership for home-school students in 2017, which was based in a school in Interlochen, about a dozen miles from downtown Traverse City.

None of the district 11,000 traditional students took any of the classes; in fact auditors found there wasn’t a plan to transport those students to the program at the Interlochen facility.

Jan Geht, a former member of the school board there, said he voted to approve the program despite serious misgivings.

“That was the purpose of the program, to generate profit,” Geht said, adding, “I couldn’t believe we would get paid to teach non-real topics.”

In Niles, home-school students took more than 400 piano classes, more than 350 dance, ballet or gymnastics classes and hundreds of lessons in basketball, soccer, ice skating and skiing in the 2016-17 school year.

As in Traverse City, the partnership classes were not available to traditional school students, auditors concluded, nor did the district have transportation plans to take students to them; some classes were well over 100 miles away.

Among the courses, according to documents reviewed by Bridge:

•  A class on the “basic fundamentals of basketball” that met once a week for an hour. The actual course lasted eight weeks; in the remaining 10 weeks of the semester-long class, the instructor told students to “practice your skills on your own.”
• A “movie madness” fine arts course that showed films each week, including “Mary Poppins” and “Gulliver Travels,” as students made crafts.
• A course on martial arts, held in Elkhart, Indiana, that had a simple description: Every week students would “learn to kick and punch to defend themselves. Students will learn to evaluate the situation and then to do the appropriate action to stop the attack.”

The Macomb County district of Center Line offered similar courses, including one on “free running” in which students run, jump and climb through an obstacle course set up in a former warehouse.

‘Concerns have been raised’

The home-schooling programs are increasing as Michigan struggles with finances in a system that only allows them to add revenue by attracting more students.

That “incentivizes all types of educational entities to try to recruit children who would be  less expensive to teach,” said Dave Campbell, superintendent of the Kalamazoo Regional Education Service Agency. A national education group estimates virtual schools cost nearly 25 percent less to operate than traditional brick-and-mortar schools.

As a result, some districts have found students and boosted enrollments in untraditional places: supplying private schools  with teachers and extending kindergarten to two years.

Nearly 270 districts offer two years of kindergarten and 100 districts have teachers in non-public schools. Most of the home-school students are in programs run by 20 districts.

by Sara Swanson

Sara Swanson is an editor, writer and a founder of the Manchester Mirror.