A parent questioned the Pleasant Valley School Board members at Thursday night’s meeting about the number of students attending charter schools and other issues.

Ron Reynolds, of Chestnuthill Township, often asks the school board how they plan to get the students in the charter schools to come back to brick-and-mortar buildings, but he didn’t stop there. Reynolds also said he thinks the students in the classroom are using electronic devices too much for instruction.

According to Reynolds, the students receive live instruction 64% of the time. So for 36% of the time, instruction is supplemented by an electronic device. He asked what the incentive is to get students to come back to brick-and-mortar schools when they’re sitting in front of computers a third of the time in the classroom.

“If you want to do 35.29% in electronic what’s their incentive,” he asked. “They’re just going to do cyber or go out of the district and do 100% in electronic learning.”

Currently, the school district has 360 students in outside cyber charter and brick-and-mortar charter schools. For every student in an outside charter school, the school district has to pay his or her school the state subsidy it receives for those students. Pleasant Valley paid about $14,024 per non-special education student last school year and about $34,389 per special education student, according to the state Department of Education.

The school district also has its own cyber school called the Bears Academy, which allows students to learn at home but state subsidies stay with the school district. There are 248 students in Bears Academy.

Superintendent James Konrad said the district has contacted and encouraged the families with children in outside charter schools to come back to the school district or move to the district’s cyber program.

“It seems like we are having lots of success at the high school, in particular, regarding Bears Academy,” he said. “Of course we are going to continue to make efforts to draw students back.”

The school district partnered with Seneca Valley School District’s Seneca Valley Outreach Program for Technology last school year for use in the Bears Academy.

Sue Kresge, the president of the school board, said that before the pandemic, there were 193 students in outside charter schools and 203 in the school district’s cyber program.

“I don’t think we’re going to get them all back. Of course that 360, I look at that number every month and say, ‘It would be great to get more of them back.’ But we are still going to have, you know, probably around 200 that are going to be there no matter what we do,” she said.