After a protracted legal and political fight with state officials over student attendance and funding, one of the largest full-time online charter schools in the country has shuttered its doors midyear, sending as many as 12,000 students scrambling to find new schools.
In a statement posted on Facebook, officials of Ohio’s Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow said the state education department should have come to an agreement that would have allowed the school to remain open through the end of the school year.
The closure last month comes because ECOT was running out of money, the result of efforts by the state department to recover roughly $80 million.
After a review of student login records, state officials determined that ECOT had overstated its enrollment and recouped those funds by withholding several million dollars from monthly payments.
