On almost any public school district's list of budget woes, cyber charter school tuition is near the top.

State law requires the home school district to pay tuition if one of its students chooses to attend a cyber charter school. The rate is set by the state and is based upon what it costs each school district to educate a student.Local superintendents, however, contend the playing field isn't fair. Cyber charter schools, they said, don't have buildings and extracurricular fields to maintain or transportation costs to cover."I embrace competition when the playing field is fair," said Jonathan Cleaver, Lehighton Area School District superintendent. "I would never put a team on the field that I felt was not able to compete because of different rules the other team lives by. It seems, at times, like we're fielding a team of seven and they can field a team of 20 or 25 and play them all at the same time."Lehighton has 81 students in cyber charter schools, including 12 students at Agora Cyber Charter, four students at the Arts Academy Charter School, 54 students at Commonwealth Connections Academy, six students at Pennsylvania Cyber Charter and five students at the Pennsylvania Virtual Charter School.Over the past three years, Lehighton has paid out $1,971,294.40 in cyber charter school tuition."They run television and radio advertisements claiming they are a tuition-free school," Cleaver said. "I'm not sure how they view almost $2 million in tuition payments as free. It's one main reason State Auditor General Eugene DePasquale has issued several reports on the state gaining control on this type of educational institution."OversightDePasquale has recommended creating an independent charter school oversight board, requiring charter schools to present their annual reports to the host school board in a public meeting and creating more options for boards to monitor and renew charters.Tuition costs differ for regular and special education students. A regular education cyber charter student costs Lehighton $10,000 per year, while a special education student costs around $28,000.Tamaqua Area School District, by comparison, has 61 students 42 regular education and 19 special education attending cyber charter schools with a total projected cost of $697,000 for the 2014-15 school year.A lack of oversight regarding a student's classification is another area that troubles Cleaver."We really don't have any input in the process," Cleaver said. "There are students who tested well and passed classes while they were in our schools. Then they go to a cyber charter school and all of a sudden their grades are dropping and attendance is an issue. Then they get tested and classified as special education and our bill gets bigger."Home school districts, according to Cleaver, are not notified of attendance issues until the latter half of the year."It's our responsibility to file truancy charges," he said. "We spend money to collect data and be present at a hearing for a student who never even stepped foot on our campus."The concerns led Lehighton to start its own eLearning cyber option for students within the district. Cleaver said the district can run the program, which is entering its second year, for half the per-student cost of an outside cyber charter school."We've been pretty successful in bringing students back and giving them an internal option," Cleaver said. "A few of the students who previously attended an outside cyber charter school made comments that our eLearning curriculum is more rigorous. In fact, a few even went back because of that."Performance vs. costState Rep. Doyle Heffley, R-122, encourages districts that don't have internal cyber charter options to consider it."We need to find savings in the system and this is a way for districts to do it," Heffley said.Robert Schwartz, a member of the Pennsylvania School Board Association's governing board, said districts that have their own cyber systems need to do a better job of promoting them.Tim Potts, a Carlisle Area School District board member and outspoken critic of the cyber charter system in Pennsylvania, said districts can't continue to pay cyber charter schools under the current funding formula."One thing we could do is pay cyber schools what it costs local school districts to provide the same services to students," Potts said.If the cyber charter school tuition rate were $4,850 per student, the same tuition rate as the Capitol Area Intermediate Unit, Cumberland County school districts would save a combined total of $4.6 million per year, according to Potts.For the 11 cyber charters with school performance profile scores in 2013, all scored among the lowest performing schools in the state. No cyber charter attained the state-level average school performance profile score."As public schools, we get graded and judged on these scores," Cleaver said. "It is important cyber charter schools are judged on their scores as well. Many reports show they are underperforming."The Pennsylvania Coalition of Public Charter Schools calls the school performance profile scores a mere "snapshot in time.""The primary shortcoming with the current report, for both traditional and charter schools, is that the data being used is for only one year and does not measure growth of student learning over time," according to a statement released by the organization. "This makes the results incomplete for any public school that has been successful in advancing students several grade levels, which is a particular strength of many charter schools."As such, this first release of data is most accurately viewed as a baseline upon which to measure future growth rather than a comprehensive measurement of performance."