Glad we found something we agree on! :)

I am at a total loss in understanding how anything works for our kids when it doesn't have to meet any standards. If you send your children to a public school, you know that school has to meet criteria which is published each year. East Penn, SLehigh, etc. all do. Seven gens does NOT. How is that working for your kids???? Very confused. If they are using OUR tax dollars, they should have to meet standards as well.

I agree their should be some bench mark standards that need to be met. But they also need the freedom to try new things to meet the childrens individual needs. What is the point if it is just another cookie cutter public school that does not work for your kid?

Thank you Lenny for bringing up the issue of families who send their children to parochial and private schools(and don't forget homeschooling families) and the tax money our public schools do not have to spend educating them. I believe public school boards and superintendents in our area know this but they would never acknowledge this as fact. For them this is all about money and who has the power over that money.

And I can promise you that if you succeed in using one dollar of my tax money to educate in a religious institution, i will join the class action suit against all of you. Our constitution demands separation of church and state. I will not be forced to pay for Catholics, Muslims, Mormons, Satanists, or any other spiritual group.

Our Constitution does not demand the separation of Church and state. Only that there can not be any state sponsored religion.
You must be the product of a Public School education! :)

Vouchers and school choice will eventually succeed. Our kids and citizens deserve choice and competition in education. Education is not one size fits all.

Rosemary, you can be assured that my education is very extensive in regard to American govt. Before you comment further on your personal interpretation of the first amendment, you might want to peruse Jefferson's Wall of Separation Letter in which he explains exactly what is meant by religion and state. A deeply religious man, Jefferson was careful to make sure that faith remained between a man and his God and did not invoke govt .

It is in a letter from Jefferson, but not in the Constitution. Last I checked, letters are not laws. We are held to the Constitution. And I was making a joke about your public school education. Indicated by the smile face.

people sending their kids to private and charter schools have saved taxpayers and public schools TONS of money over the years. Why should our children not be entitled to having at least some of that money follow them to the schools of their choice that better suit their kids needs? The 3 million hole is due to your school systems mismanagement not our charter and private school kids. If all the private and charter school kids returned to public schools you would be wishing for the good old days of ONLY a 3 million $ hole!

Hoping SB1 changes this! I have personally saved the public schools of Pa. over $100,000 with my 3 kids almost done with Catholic School and they have gotten fabulous educations and have felt safe happy and loved and come out with a love of God and all people. And though I saved Public Schools $100,000 it cost me less cause Catholic schools do it cheaper, at least for parishioners.

Catholic schools are cheaper because you don't take any special Ed kids. You kick them out, and send them back to the home school. You made a choice and you paid, so don't whine about it. My kid got a fabulous education in public school. I was smart enough to get my kids education for free.

Not whining about it. Just think all of the schools could benefit from choice and competition. And as far as special Ed kids, Catholic schools do take them. It is not always the right choice for them. Though there is a special ed Catholic school. I think it is in Allentown.

Looks like the Constitution needs to be changed.

you are correct, they are very disingenuous to lump ALL of the different alternatives into one category - they hope that if you dislike one particular type, then you will hate all!

just want to remind that 80,000 includes benefits.

@optimist - depending on the experience level of the teacher. An experienced teacher makes more than $80,000 in just salary alone. At the EPSD, the total cost for a ROOKIE teacher is about $80,000 per year, including benefits, which is a number often cited by superintendent and school board president. Same number, but two different applications - for some it is salary only, others total cost to district.

Agreed. If you hire a teacher who is near retirmement, with masters degree and additional credits, 80,000 for only salary may be ballpark. What people love to do who hate public education and teachers is throw that figure around with no explanation which is exactly the way it was being used in that previous article.

For the record:

According to app.com data universe, there are over a hundred EPSD teachers who earned >$80,000 in 2009-2010, and some of those have as little as 16 years experience, which hopefully is nowhere close to retirement.

There are another hundred plus that made >$70,000, and many do not have degrees beyond BA or some have only 12 years experience.

BTW sometimes my later postings end up out of order, so this comes after three earlier replies on this subject.

$80,000 does not include benefits. Many area teachers with 15+ years experience make $85000 more with department lead or some other title. Then when they retire, they get $75,000 year for the rest of thier lives, with COLA increases. Teachers are NOT underpaid.

I am knowledge...I hate to pick on you but again you haven't done your homework. The average US teach with 15+ years of experience makes about $45,000 which does not include their benefits

One of the things that top ranking countries such as Finland does is pay their teachers well. Their profession is also held in high regard being compared to a doctor or a lawyer. You also need to be a good teacher to keep your job but and they are given creative flexibility in their classrooms. They tailor the style to fit the children.

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/09/teacher-pay-around-the-world/

Anybody representing an organization has a confiict. Just like you.

Most expulsions are 1 year. Most troubled students stay right there in public schools. It's too expensive to send many of them out to other programs for long periods of time. The cyber school movement in largely by choice.

@LENNY and OPTIMIST You're both right. Many students who leave public schools for charters are the disaffected, including those who were expelled, but a larger group are those who had fallen between the cracks and whose needs weren't being taken care of. This adverse selection hurts charter's statistics, and the charter has to overcome the damage to the goods they recieve. On the other hand, charters also receive some high performing students, who have very involved parents, who are searching for even more than what the public schools have given them. It's hard to say overall whether this self selction process helps or hurts charters statistics overall, but the more important point is that it might be helping both the upper performing and lower performing students that choose to attend.

As a footnote about suspended students, optimist is correct in pointing out that must suspensions are temporary. And many students stay in other alternative public school programmes. But the fact is that some do go to charters, and many of those will stay if their parents deem that better for them, if only for the reason of not needing to change again or to avoid going back to a place where they would have to take their baggage back to.

They will certainly tell YOU that their scores are subject to the same disruptive students who are in attendance. PA cyber charter scores, by the way, are one of the most embarrassing of the 9 of the 11 who failed.

Ship millions of illegals to all those top performing countries and see what happens to their scores. Agreegate scores in the U.S. are pulled down by the illegals students and inner city kids. Those kids are lost. Compare the rest and we do just fine in comparison to those countries.

So is my son. I would recommend PACyber to anyone, and I'll admit that I was skeptical about it at first. There are also plenty of outside activities that he is enrolled in so that he can get the social interaction that he wouldn't be getting in a brick and mortar setting, and you have more control over who you child interacts with.

Chuck, the difficulty that I have with your opening arguement is that you compare charter school's PSSA scores with East Penn's, while you state later on that East Penn is a high performing school district. That's cherry picking data. Of course a higher performing public school system would have higher scores. The cost of entry to live there makes it almost a private school! It would be better to compare charter schools against all publuc schools, including those that don't perform as well as East Penn, and as you know, there are many!

ok careless please explain the massive influx of people that have moved into the district in all of the municipalities over the last 10 years. From Emmaus, to Vera Cruz to Lower Mac. people have been and continue to poor in. They tell me "Man the cost of living out here is so much better than Jersey" Are they lying? Are they closet millionaires? Just asking. I see people from all walks of life moving in. Please explain.

@truth - There is no doubt that people have been moving from NJ over the last 10 years, as you state, because of the higher prices and taxes that existed there. My point is that there are some very decent places in NJ (Ocean County, Sussex County, to name two) that are far more affordable than others (Morris, Passaic, and Bergen counties, to name a few) and that prices in the LV have caught up with those less expensive, but still very attractive areas.

And yes, there are "closet" millionaires amongst us, and some who are not so closetted. (sp?)

Chuck I am glad you are making the distinction about cyber charter and brick and mortar charter schools. Choice is not all about PSSA. Its about an experience we want or need for our children to meet their individual potential. East Penn is a great district and I would tell anyone looking into buying in the valley to consider East Penn not only for the amazing performance of their traditional schools and community but also for that added plus of a cutting edge Eco Charter School. If Seven Gens charter does not get renewed I know I am personally going to look into cyber schools and I am far from the only one. I am going to look into them not because East Penn isn't great but I want my kids to have a different experience than the average child.

I think you could also make an argument that charter schools in general not just cyber tend to attract families of children who are not cutting it either academically, socially or emotionally in a traditional public education setting . Could those factors lead to lower standardized testing scores?

I agree with you about funding faith based school. Simply put church and state need to be separate.

We moved into East Penn from Whitehall for Seven Generations and we have chosen to do that with now paying almost exactly twice the amount for property and school taxes. I am not complaining about the taxes just stating the facts. We love the community here in the borough and feel it was a great move for our family.

app.com data universe - getting only information about New Jersey???

I want my tax dollars to go to giving ALL our kids good educations that suit their individual needs. That is not always the traditional Public School is the zip code that you live in. Sometimes it is not any public school at all. (And Chuck, what school is teaching white supremacy?)

“99.44% of parents do not pay enough in property taxes to put 1 kid per year through school.”.....Is this really true?? I have been paying federal and state taxes since my first job in high school. I have been paying real estate taxes to EPSD since I became a homeowner in my mid-twenties. My family members have been dutifully been paying their federal, state and local real estate taxes(to EPSD) for generations. I believe we have paid more than our fair share towards our family member's education. By the time I die, I will have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars towards my only child's k-12 education in the public education system and the bulk of that came before I had a child and will continue for decades after that child graduates. I and every other taxpaying citizen may not be paying the annual per pupil cost in one year of taxes for each of the 13 years our children are attending public school but we sure make up the difference and then some for the lifetime that we pay these taxes!! Yes, we ALL should have a say in how our tax money is spent. Citizens who have children or not should be able to participate where that school tax money goes including public, private, parochial, charter and cyber charter schools.

The support private schools get from taxpayers is marginal, at best! A drop in the proverbial bucket.

At least 20% of each charter school student's funding stays with the school district (East Penn) and is not given to their charter school. This money pays for transportation and other administrative items.

ckennedy is right the district isn't loosing the 20% to pay for transportation and other administrative costs.

Perfect, I would also then like to chose what defense spending I would like to spend. I oppoosed the Iraq war so please refund my money. Also, I do not support giving tax money to oil companies. Please refund.

I think it works better to choose what school your CHILD goes to and have the tax ollars follow them there. After all, it is about the kids. And Home Schoolers should get some sort of tax break. At least something to pay for their supplies and curriculum.

Those are not YOUR tax dollars. They are mine, and my neighbors, and everybody else. They shouldn't follow you ANYWHERE. You want a education for you kid? Free public school. You don't like that option, you're on your own. I don't have the money to support public AND multiple private schools. You choose... you pay.

If we went to public school the taxpayers would pay. Why not pay for a choice that better suits my children's needs? It is my Taxpayer dollars as well.

The transportation issue to me is a non issue. Most of those kids would be bussed to a local school anyway so I don't see the big deal. Like I said, just because you choose a different school does not mean the kid disappears! They would still have to be educated and bussed if they had chosen to go to the public school so this is money that would have been spent on them anyway. Where you save is you don't have to add 10% more teachers and classrooms to teach the 10% who choose other schools. That savings I am sure is considerable.

Chuck, with regard to your last paragraph, I have no doubt that you believe what you say, and I'd agree if and only if the enrollments at East Penn were declining as the charter and cycber students left their home schools. But that simply is not the case. The enrollment in the EPSD has remained essentially steady for the last five or six years, whilst the conditions remain overcrowded by your standards.

Just last month the super claimed that over $1 million would be needed to overcome the alleged overcrowding. If this is true,and if there were no charter schools, the overcrowding would be worse, and even more teachers would need to be hired and space would need to be found to house them and their students.

If you didn;t do that, you'd essentially be accepting a reduction in service, instead of the cost increase.

Thus, the charter schools are EPSD's low cost relief valve!

Chuck, the people who do not benefit are the people for whom public schools do not work. We are also taxpayers and our kids deserve an education that works for them as well. Therefore we deserve a choice.

A second reason that Chuck's mantra about stranded costs doesn't really apply is because any excess of teachers resulting from home school enrollment decreases would have certainly been avoided through attrition (and/or layoffs in other districts) in the recent tight budgets. Have we ever really heard about undercrowded schools anywhere?

There is a danger of mindlessly repeating or believing seemingly well thought out positions when, on the surface, they seem reasonable, but when they actually turn out to be quite misleading. I truely believe that Chuck believes what he says here, because all of his facts are certainly irrefutable, but his connection between those facts is incomplete and flies in the face of reality.

Certainly not true! My friend choose a cyber school because her child is so severely diabetic that she missed tons of school time just going down to the nurse and getting her blood level tested many times a day. A public school does not work for them. Another friend choose a cyber school because her daughter is a talented actress and needs the flexibility home schooling offers. Another goes to private school because her child was bullied and found it cruel to send her child back into the same situation that just was never getting resolved. Another friends daughter has depression issues and cannot handle large public situations. These parents are not fools. They are just trying to choose the best path for their kids and they deserve taxpayer support just like the citizens for whom Public Schools do work.

Rosemary B. Sounds like your friends love the "nanny state." Make these kids grow up. Teach them how to overcome a "bully", teach them there may be a need to be more than being a "talented actress" one day, teach them how to overcome their disadvantages from health conditions. Stop babying these kids. They are going to have to deal with all of these issues in the real world - teach them now how to overcome this.

Caribbean Queen, you must be very blessed that your kids fit into the cookie cutter one size fits all school system. Perhaps if you had kids with serious issues you would be more sympathetic. We should be celebrating the differences and talents between our kids and we should not be forcing square pegs to fit into round holes. By the way, I am not in favor of the nanny state at all. I am a conservative but I have compassion for children and know that kids learn best when they are in situations that meet their individual needs and feel safe and loved.Many kids fall through the cracks in over sized Public Schools.

Rosemary B. Classic. Against the nanny state until it has to do with your kids.

Caribbean queen, that is not it at all. I am in favor of spending education tax dollars in ways that will create citizens who can take care of themselves and this country in the future. If spending tax dollars to meet the individual educational needs of ALL kids does that then that is what I am in favor of. That is what school choice does. It is an uneducated population that needs and cries out for a nanny state not an educated one.

I am knowledge...(eye roll) I am sure there are parents out there of whom you are referring to "fools." But the majority are not. There are loads of different reasons to choose a different kind of school. I know you haven't done your homework in this so let me just give you some real facts. American public education is NOT working. I also wouldn't say that Americans in general are happy with the education our children we receive....we have been begging for reform and just about every candidate Rep or Dem wants to make it better and work for kids.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/dec/07/world-education-rankings-maths-science-reading

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/07/us-falls-in-world-education-rankings_n_793185.html

http://www.upi.com/Top_News/2008/11/19/US_slipping_in_education_rankings/UPI-90221227104776/

Naomi you are simply one of these people blaming all of societies problems on public schools. That is a bunch of garbage! Public schools cannot cure poeverty, bad parenting and may other social ills. The system should be given applause for what it has to and and has been able to do. I am knowledge I appreciate your voice in this discussion. Stand up to these people!

If the system worked so many people would not be calling for school choice.

Also... as to the rankings... notice most of the top performing countries aren't overun with millions of illegals attending their schools and dragging their scores down. If you compare the right side of our bell curve to the right side of their bell curve, we are right there with them.... Send 15 million illegals to Finland and see how their scores do.

There are exceptions of great districts all over the country but I think you are thinking way too locally. We are apart of a global network of people and we are not ranking in the top range globally anywhere.

Life people and the world isn't black and white there are made shades of gray in between.

Finland is also about the size of just 1 of our states...so your analogy doesn't even make sense.

Our country needs immigration and the more we do to educate people to their potential who live in this country the better our country will be.

It is a shame that "I am knowledge" seems to have such a hard heart towards people who are different from him or her self. Seems to have very little compassion or tolerance for people with challenges who don't fit into the cookie cutter, one size fits all public school system. We deserve to be served a good education as well as you. Maybe more people would reach their potential and be more productive citizens if their individual needs were recognized and met by a reformed education system that included school choice.

One size fits all school system? Are you kidding me? There are so many options in the publlic schools, it's amazing! College prep, prep with honors classes, prep with AP classes, VoTech (with 56 different varieties alone), business classes, technology classes. Gezzuz. So many choices. But no choice that makes a left sider on the bell curve appear like a genius. Accept you kids for what they are and try to get them an education that will make them competitive. More kids should go to Tech. We have enough assistant KMart managers.

According to the PA Constitution this state will have a public education system. That means taxpayer funded. Whatever reforms people want to fight for, they may do so at the school board and state levels through petitioning those governments. If you want to step outside that system, go ahead and also pay for it. If you want to have only private education in PA, please take the necesarry steps to change the Constiution. As far as one size fits all, public education has a huge variety within the system: special education, gifted, AP, tons of acivities, vocational etc.

But people still need choice and competition will make all the schools better. And I mean public vs public school choice as well.

The reform I want to fight for is school choice so the competition will improve all the schools and more kids can get their individual needs met.

Kids who choose other school alternatives are also part of the COMMUNITY. And having them get an education that suits their individual needs instead of having them be left behind or bullied or frustrated serves the whole community. The one size fits all, you live in this zip code so this is where you go mentality does not necessarily meet the needs of all children in the community. We are also taxpayers and deserve to have our kids needs met.

Also, the Lehigh Valley has 3 Catholic High schools with an approximate enrollment of 1800 students, most from the Lehigh Valley. You can't tell me there is "little savings" there! Whole school buildings would have to be built and MANY teachers (I approximate 80) hired if tomorrow all those kids decided to re enter the public school system. And I don't even know how many kids are in the cyber charter schools.

PACyber has an enrollment of about 11k students.

My point is that no student has taxes attached to them personally. Everyone in a community funds the district - not just a student. Also, those three Catholic HS are fed from at least 7 districts and at least 9 HS buildings. That comes out to 200 at each school in four grades. Not that savings your group continually predicts. Public dollars should not and can not be legally used to support religious education in PA.

And then their is Atlanta, Georgia 's school district where the TEACHERS were changing the grades on their standardized tests to give them better results! What a disservice to those kids!

May God bless you, Martha, for the work you do in trying to meet these kids individual and unique needs. This is indeed what school choice is all about!

For the parents who show up at the rallies and write their representatives, school choice is about the kids and what is right for them and how to give them a better chance to succeed in life and grow up to be responsible citizens who are contributing members of society and not a future drain on this country. An investment in choice today will lead to dividends for our country in the future.