Local school district leaders, including those in Jim Thorpe Area School District, continue to lobby state legislators to change the way cyber charter schools are funded in Pennsylvania.

During a school board workshop Thursday night, Jim Thorpe Superintendent Robert Presley said the district would save almost $1.8 million per year in taxpayer money if the tuition rate for each regular education student was the flat $8,000 proposed in House Bill 1422 and Gov. Josh Shapiro’s latest budget address, and the rate for special education students was tiered based on their needs.

“That bill is currently sitting in the Senate Education Committee, which is led by Sen. Dave Argall, and we need action on it,” Presley said during the meeting. “The bill would fix the funding for cyber schools to bring them in line with their actual costs, place restrictions on how they can spend tax dollars, require them to be audited, and hold them accountable to many of the same state regulations traditional public schools are.”

The state House of Representatives passed the bill 122-81 last July.

Currently, tuition for all Jim Thorpe cyber schools students are paid from local taxpayer dollars at a rate equal to the district’s per pupil student cost. For regular education, that is almost $13,000 per student and for special education, it jumps to nearly $38,000 per student.

“Jim Thorpe taxpayers right now pay approximately $3.8 million per year in cyber tuition costs,” Presley said.

Elsewhere, Lehighton has 103 cyber charter regular education students at a cost of just over $12,000 each and 48 special education students at a cost of just over $31,000 each. Palmerton has 61 regular education students at a cost of $15,849 each and 29 special education students at $38,160 each.

Opponents of House Bill 1422 generally argue that the reduction of tuition rates will cause cyber schools to close and take away school choice from parents.

In his recent budget address, Shapiro also pitched the $8,000 flat tuition fee for regular education cyber students.

“Let’s come up with a uniform rate that actually reflects what it costs to send a kid to a cyber charter school,” Shapiro said. “If we do that, we will level the playing field, and as a result, we’ll be able to return $262 million dollars back to our public schools.

“If you combine those savings with the new money I’m proposing for our 500 school districts, that would mean nearly 2 billion dollars more for our public schools next year. This is ambitious. None of this is easy and all of it will require us to work together.”

Presley said if Shapiro’s budget passes as proposed, Jim Thorpe would see an increase of over $757,000 through the basic education funding formula, the state’s “adequacy investment,” and special education funding alone.

“We can’t really budget for that because we know the state budget usually is not done by the time we have to pass our budget, but we’re hopeful for increases in those areas,” Presley said.

In the meantime, Presley said he will join other Carbon County superintendents in continuing to put on a full-court press for cyber funding reform.

“I have already met with Sen. Argall three or four times and we’ll be meeting with him again Tuesday,” he said. “I just want to see action on the house bill. If it doesn’t pass then it doesn’t pass, but right now it’s just sitting there and it could have a huge impact on our school district as well as every other public school district.”