Frontier cyber-school students: All we want is to learn

CAREY STONE is living Ferris Bueller's life - just the complete opposite of it, actually.

Every morning, the high-school senior calls her school's administrators, trying to find out where they are, wondering when they'll have classes for her to attend or let her hand in a report on "The Great Gatsby."

And every day, her calls go unanswered. "I feel like they're just brushing me off," she said. Carey, 18, and her sisters, Rachel, 15, and Harmony, 14, are enrolled at the Philadelphia-based Frontier Virtual Charter High School.

The school laid off its teachers and principal on March 8 and hasn't held any classes since.

"My big concern," Carey said, "is that I want to graduate and go to college. But I have a lot of concerns right now."

Carey's quest for answers might soon come to an end. The state Department of Education is finishing an investigation into Frontier over numerous questions about financial and academic problems that were detailed last week by the Daily News.

"The department is assembling a team that early next week will put together a path of what happens moving forward," Tim Eller, a spokesman for the department, said Wednesday.

Eller said students will likely be given the option of finishing the year at another school.

When asked if the state would pull Frontier's charter, Eller said, "that's a possibility, but I don't want to say that's going to happen. But that is an option."

Besides looking at the financial and academic problems, the state also aims to determine if Craig and the school's board of trustees have violated the Sunshine Act by holding private meetings.

The board is expected to have a cyber public meeting - its first since November - on Saturday.

John Craig, founder and CEO of Frontier, did not respond to a request for comment on Thursday.

Craig and other members of Frontier's executive staff have shed little light on what's been happening with the school.

Angie Stone, of Hanover, York County, said she enrolled her daughters and son, Joshua, at the start of the school year after being lured by promises that they would learn about art, music, foreign languages and valuable career skills.

Stone said that it took a month for her children to receive laptops from the cyber-school and that she never received reimbursements for Internet costs that the school is required to provide.

Craig acknowledged to the People's Paper this month that only a quarter of the school's families were reimbursed. Stone's son, 21, who has learning disabilities, graduated in February, but without receiving career training he had been promised, she said. Harmony and Rachel, who also have learning disabilities, began failing once the teaching staff's hours were cut last fall, she noted.

"It was supposed to be this global school that was going to do wonderful things for my kids," Stone said. "But little by little, the courses disappeared. Now, my kids have no classes and no teacher, and they're sitting here doing nothing."

Stone said she spoke with Craig, an associate pastor at the Philadelphia Revival Temple Church, by phone on Monday.

"He acted like I was making a big deal out of nothing," she said.

Last week, Craig released a statement that said that Frontier is "facing the challenges of any new and growing organization."

The teaching staff had worked at half-pay for most of the year before being laid off. Craig has said that the school's 85 students were doing "fine" academically and that Frontier didn't have much of a truancy problem.

However, the Daily News has reported that most of the students were failing, and many were habitually truant. Although cyber-schools are approved and overseen by the state, their funding comes from local school districts.

Frontier is supposed to receive $435,520 this school year from the city school district for 54 city students. Eller said the state paid Frontier $38,073 that was owed the school from other districts.