By Debra Weiner
The Pennsylvania Department of Education, or PDE, recently denied the revised application of the Virtual Preparatory Academy of Pennsylvania, or VPAP, a cyber charter school. This school would have been run by Accel Schools, a for-profit company in Ohio that runs a cyber school in Ohio that received an F grade for every measure of student achievement included in the Ohio Department of Education s school report card for 2018-2019.
PDE evaluated VPAP s application against five criteria in the charter school law and identified flagrant deficiencies related to all five, including an incomplete or totally absent curriculum, proposals for inadequate and inappropriate practices for vulnerable student populations and incomplete and contradictory financial information.