Noah Lewis, an 8th-grade social studies teacher at Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School, stood in front of the board of trustees recently, holding a poster of a gas gauge running on empty.

For Lewis, it was more than a metaphor. Lewis had to drive six hours from his home to attend a monthly board meeting in Midland where the school is based. Teachers for the cyber school live across the commonwealth.

Lewis said he often wakes up at 4 a.m. to drive for Lyft and Uber to help support his wife and four children. He said he is living paycheck to aycheck, in part because teachers at PA Cyber have been without a contract for more than two years.

PA Cyber teachers earn around $5,000 less than public school teachers in the commonwealth with the same average experience — and they earn about a third less than teachers who work in districts with a similar number of students as PA Cyber.

“This is exhausting and a lot of days I feel like I’m starting my school day already very much very low on gas,” Lewis said.

While Lewis and his fellow teachers spoke most often of the need for a new contract, they also raised a number of problems facing the school that they say administrators aren’t addressing, including a lax attendance policy, insufficient support for special education students, a lack of transparency from its board, and excessive spending on buildings and executive pay.

The teacher comments come at a time when legislators in Harrisburg have been considering a broad swath of potential changes to how cyber charter schools are funded and regulated. This was one of the first major calls for change to come from within the cyber charter schools.

‘Negative impacts’

Cyber charter leaders, including PA Cyber CEO Brian Hayden, have largely avoided participating in public comments about the proposed reforms over the past several months. They have remained united in their opposition — particularly but not exclusively to reductions in their funding.

“Beyond budget issues, this also would have negative impacts on the way the schools manage, would put additional pressures on what occurs in the classroom and other places,” Hayden said at the meeting. “So we have vigorously, as the cyber charter school community, vigorously opposed this.”

The cyber leaders have been hoping to keep the public’s attention focused on the inspiring stories from their graduation ceremonies recently.

But public comments at the board meeting suggest that at least some of the teachers and staff at these schools believe that the proposed changes in Harrisburg could help serve their students better by increasing their attendance and participation in classes.

PA Cyber is one of only two cyber charter schools where the teachers are protected by a union contract — and so it’s one of the only cyber schools where teachers can speak out constructively without facing the possibility of losing their jobs.

The speakers calling for reforms were noteworthy in that they are all avowed proponents of cyber schools, who believe in the education they are offering students at least in principle. Lewis is not only a teacher at the school — he, along with several siblings, graduated from PA Cyber.

Loretta Fairley, the only parent to speak at the meeting, said she is a fierce advocate for school choice, but believes that the school’s inability to publicly reckon with some of its shortcomings is making it harder to convince the skeptics.

“Is PA Cyber a school built to empower the students? Or is it a corporation built to line the pockets of our administration on the backs of students and taxpayer dollars?” Fairley asked. “School choice and charter schools are under attack and these concerns which I’ve shared only add fuel to that fire.”

Showing up, staffing up?

Kristin Murli, a high school biology teacher who has been with the school for a decade, held up a copy of her attendance sheets during public comments. She said 20% of her students didn’t attend class even when they were required to.

“Our attendance policy allows these no-show students to be marked present by simply logging into” the school’s software, she said.

When Murli calls their homes and is able to get through, she said, the students’ parents are “shocked because they’re not receiving notification from the school. There’s no robocall to alert parents that their children are not attending. There is no email blast. Our school leaves parents in the dark when it comes to their child’s daily class attendance.”

In response, Hayden, PA Cyber’s CEO, said in a statement the school follows all applicable laws and has a “formal attendance policy and has many procedures in place to ensure our students have high attendance rates.”

Lon Valentine, another teacher at the school, said the lack of an adequate attendance policy is particularly concerning in light of several recent criminal cases where children at cyber schools turned out to have been abused and neglected.

“We just simply can’t let students just enroll here and never show up to school,” Valentine said. “We often hear that we’re their last hope. But where is that hope getting them if we just allow them to come here and flounder and just duck attendance policies?”

Graduation ceremony

Commonwealth Charter Academy’s graduation ceremony in Pittsburgh recently looked a lot like an public school graduation.

Cleverly individualized caps and shoes to accessorize a sea of blue and gold gowns. Speeches peppered with cheesy jokes and inspiring cliches.

Parents bouncing babies in the aisle as the ceremony dragged on. Big hugs outside after families reunited on the other side of the rest of their lives.

But there were some notable differences as well.

For one, this was the fifth of seven graduation ceremonies Commonwealth Charter Academy was conducting this year across four cities: Wilkes-Barre, Philadelphia, Hershey and Pittsburgh. That’s two more graduation ceremonies than last year, as CCA continues to enroll thousands of new students every year, an unprecedented period of rapid growth for a school in the commonwealth.

CCA is now substantially larger than every school district besides the School District of Philadelphia.

The leaders of CCA and other cyber schools say the graduation ceremonies themselves provide proof of the value of a cyber education — even if the data doesn’t fully capture their worth.

Eileen Canistracci, the CEO of Insight PA Cyber Charter School, said this year’s graduation speeches by her school’s valedictorian and salutatorian underlined the success her school is having with many of the commonwealth’s most vulnerable students. She thinks the Department of Education needs to come up with better metrics by which to evaluate cyber charter schools according to the specific challenges those students face.

“I hear that being used against us all the time, about our graduation rates, but that’s the four-year cohort graduation rate that doesn’t speak to the 18-year-old that enrolls in my program with three credits,” she said. “And I get that student, by the time he’s 21, a high school diploma. I don’t get credit in any of the data that the state reports on for that group of kids. And cybers tend to get a lot of those kids.”