Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (closed)

The reason it belongs in a funding corpus rather than an oversight one is that it makes the formula’s central quantity visible. Every Ohio funding regime multiplies a per-pupil amount by a student count, and the entire structure rests on that count being right. For a brick and mortar district the count is checked by physical attendance. For a statewide e-school it is whatever the school reports until someone audits it, and until this case Ohio’s rules did not clearly require the school to show that funded students were participating. inference

The numbers are now on the record and they are large. A 165-page department hearing officer’s report found that ECOT had counted roughly 9,000 more full-time-equivalent students than it could document — inflating its FTE enrollment by about 60% — to receive $108 million in state funding. The finding rested on student log-in and log-out data showing that students were online for an average of about one hour a day. verified

Recovery followed in three tranches: $60 million for FY2016, which the State Board of Education voted to claw back; $19 million for the 2016-17 school year; and $44.6 million — the entirety of what it was paid — for the final months before it closed in January 2018. verified ECOT contested the recovery through 2021, when the Supreme Court of Ohio held it could not challenge the order. verified

What this repository computed # ↑ Contents

Not what Ohio publishes. Figures derived here from committed fixtures, each one citing the test that reproduces it.

The distributional question this raises is the one the corpus should be able to answer and cannot yet: under the pre-FSFP deduct mechanism every dollar ECOT was funded came out of a resident district’s foundation payment, spread across most districts in the state. Whether the recovered money returned to those districts, and in what proportion, is unestablished. open

Peak enrollment, which the federal survey held all along # ↑ Contents

ECOT was a community school, so it is never comparable and every district measure in crates/dispersion looks past it. The Census F-33 Ohio panel carries it anyway, for 8 years — FY2009 through FY2017, with FY2014 absent as it is for every Ohio agency. verified crates/dispersion

Enrollment peaked at 14,153 in FY2016, nearly double its FY2009 count of 7,272. State revenue peaked in the same year at $109,371,000 — which is the survey’s independent reading of the “$108 million in state funding” the hearing officer’s report gives, from a source this corpus does not hold, and it is the year the State Board voted to claw $60 million of it back. Two records of the same quantity, 1.3% apart. verified

Across those 8 years ECOT received $666,576,000 of state money. In FY2016 that made it the 8th largest recipient of state education money among all 982 Ohio agencies the survey carries, behind 7 city districts and ahead of the next community school by more than half again. One online school, funded above every district in Ohio but seven. verified

And it was funded above the districts the money came out of # ↑ Contents

ECOT’s state revenue per pupil ran between $7,249 and $7,913 across those years, against a statewide district average between $5,241 and $6,036 — 1.3994 times the average district in FY2016, and never below 1.27 in any year the panel holds. Under the deduct mechanism that money was subtracted from resident districts’ foundation payments, so this is not an incidental comparison: districts gave up state aid to fund a school receiving more per pupil than they received themselves. verified

The aggregate draw is 0.0124 of everything Ohio’s districts received in state money in FY2016, roughly double its FY2009 share. That is the total any per-district apportionment would have to sum to.

The pool it drew from, which the survey had carried all along # ↑ Contents

The other side of the deduct is in the same panel and had never been read as a distribution. V92 is what each district paid community schools, and across the eleven years it can be read in — FY2010 to FY2021 — Ohio’s districts were credited with and paid straight out $9,285,168,000. verified crates/dispersion

Against that pool ECOT drew a share of 0.10592, rising from 8.4% in FY2010 to 11.9% in FY2016. One school, against roughly three hundred. verified crates/dispersion

This bounds the apportionment question rather than answering it, and the difference matters. The share above is a statewide average: it says what fraction of the whole pool ECOT took, not what fraction of any particular district’s deduct went to ECOT, and a district whose residents enrolled with ECOT more often than average paid more of its own deduct to it. Decomposing a district’s payment by receiving school needs the department’s deduct file, because the survey asks each district for one number. That part is still not established here. open

The sector it belonged to, once the agency type is made to name one thing # ↑ Contents

The federal directory files Ohio’s community schools under CCD agency type 7, and in its early editions the same code names twenty-four regional data-processing co-operatives instead. Resolved — the two populations share no identifier, no IRN block, and no appearance in any fixture only a school reaches — the directory holds 934 community schools, of which 667 ever opened. verified crates/dispersion

267 were announced and never opened. They carry the status the directory reserves for an agency scheduled to be operational within two years, and then stop appearing. Nearly three in ten of the community schools Ohio’s row counts include never taught anybody. verified crates/dispersion

The sector’s own peak is eight years later than the row count says: editions list most agencies in 2005-06, and the number actually open peaks at 391 in 2013-14. verified crates/dispersion

Against that population ECOT is an old school rather than a typical one. It ran eighteen open editions where 0.60554 of schools that opened were still open after ten years, and the median closed school lasted five. verified crates/dispersion

ECOT was incorporated on February 11, 2000. The Auditor of State’s audit for the year ended June 30, 2007 gives “Date of Incorporation: February 11, 2000” in its statistical section, and its first note calls ECOT “a nonprofit corporation established pursuant to Ohio Revised Code Chapters 3314 and 1702”, approved under a contract with the Lucas County Educational Service Center “for a period of five academic years commencing after July 1, 2000”. verified district audits established carries the incorporation date, because that is when the entity was organized; the sponsor contract’s term, which begins after July 1, 2000, is when it was licensed to operate, and the first school year was the one that began that autumn. The final audit dates the end: “the sponsor suspended ECOT’s operations effective January 19, 2018”, and the school “moved to closed status on June 30, 2018”. verified That report also prints “ceased operations on January 19, 2019” once, a misprint against its own chronology. inference

Per-agency series are held by IRN across four committed fixtures, not one path: verified
  crates/foundation/fixtures/fy27-department-model.csv    FY2027 formula run, 609 districts
  crates/project/fixtures/district-finances.csv           FY2020-FY2024 actuals and balances
  crates/dispersion/fixtures/f33-ohio-panel.csv           FY2012-FY2022 revenue, federal basis
  crates/dispersion/fixtures/mr81-sponsor-panel.csv       1998-2014 free and reduced lunch