Cyber-charter expenses – and reform to the funding model – have been areas of focus for the Warren County School District.

But a piece of that puzzle is already under the district’s roof – the Virtual Academy.

And according to information presented to the school board on Monday, that program is limiting losses to outside cyber-charter schools and, in some instances, making money.

Superintendent Gary Weber told the board during committee meetings that there are 254 Warren County students enrolled in the district’s Virtual Academy full-time through a total of 746 students took classes in the program last year totalling just under 2,000 credits earned.

“When we started this process,” he explained, “we were paying a significant amount for 130 credits a year. (It’s) grown quite significantly. What’s difficult is the cost avoidance aspect of this.”

Those 254 full-time students “are not coming back to our (brick and mortar) schools,” he said.

State law requires the district to then pay – on a per-student basis – amounts to those outside cyber-charter schools.

If all 254 went to outside cyber-charter schools, the district would see an expense of nearly $5 million, Weber said.

“The Virtual Academy is able to offset a lot of our costs,” he said. “We know we need to put a marketing campaign out” to attempt to bring in cyber-charter students into the Virtual Academy.”

He also told the board that the district works with 19 different different school districts to provide cyber services through the Virtual Academy. With the costs of the Virtual Academy factored in, Weber said total outside revenue totaled $452,000.

“It’s quite substantial,” he said. “The conversation always becomes, do we try to build that back up again,” noting that the number of schools was higher before the pandemic.

Misty Weber, who oversees the Virtual Academy, said the number of outside districts is “holding steady. We haven’t had time to go out and market.”

Board member John Wortman asked if the academy could grow now without a negative impact on the ability to secure staffing.

“This is always the tough part of it,” Gary Weber said, noting there are people that want to teach in that environment but it “takes away really good teachers in the classroom.”

Misty Weber said they could “take on a little bit more” but did cut staff this budget cycle.

Wortman then asked if there’s anticipated shift to a virtual model in K-12 similar to what is being seen in higher education.

“I’m not seeing those types of changes coming,” Weber said. “We’ve tried very hard to keep kids in classrooms. Virtual is not for everybody. We have adapted considerably the way we offer the instruction.”

He said that often includes students who want to take a certain elective but can’t fit it in the schedule.

“This started 10 years ago when we had to furlough multiple teachers,” Misty Weber said. “We wanted to take control of that education ourselves. We just thought we’d do our full time kids. The only reason we sell it is because other districts came to us” and wanted to do the same thing.

She added that Pennsylvania, Florida and Ohio are the largest cyber-charter school states in the country.

“Trying to build something to compete against that is very important,” she said.