A new report outlines student and teacher enrollment, as well as state tuition funding, for Indiana’s virtual charter schools during the 2022-23 academic year. Photo from Getty Images.

By Casey Smith
Indiana Capital Chronicle

INDIANA — More than $60 million in state tuition funding went to Indiana’s virtual schools during the 2022-23 academic year, according to a new report.

In all, those dollars covered roughly 8,500 students — a majority of those attending a handful of virtual charter schools operating in the state.

Each year, virtual charter schools are required by law to submit data to the Indiana Department of Education with the number of student-teacher meetings conducted in-person or via video conference, classroom size, the ratio of teachers per class, as well as state funding totals.

The newest numbers were submitted to the Indiana State Budget Committee last week.

Inside Online Classrooms

Average class sizes across the seven virtual schools ranged from 14 to 82 students, according to the latest data.

Indiana Connections Academy — the state’s largest virtual charter, with 5,784 students enrolled — reported 774 total classes with an average class size of 82 students. The report shows 127 teachers at the school, and a teacher-per-classroom ratio of 16:100.

Hoosier College and Career and Career Academy had 740 enrolled students in 2022-23, according to IDOE. The school reported 62 students on average across its 144 classes. With 25 teachers, the teacher-per-classroom ratio is the highest of the virtual schools at 17:100.

The second-largest Indiana virtual charter with 933 enrolled students, Options Charter Schools, reported the most total classes — 963. It also had the smallest average class size of 14 students. In 2022-23, the school had 48 teachers, according to the report, and a teacher-per-classroom ratio of 5:100.

The average teacher-student ratio across Indiana’s public elementary and secondary schools was 16:1 as of 2022, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. That’s on par with the national average of 15.4 teachers per student.

Indiana Connections Academy additionally reported the most student-teacher meetings — 802 in-person and nearly 405,000 online. Per student, that breaks down to about 70 meetings per year with teachers, on average.

But the highest average student-teacher meeting ratio was at Paramount Online Academy, which enrolled 166 students in 2022-23. All of the schools’ 30,702 meetings were online, and each student averaged 185 meetings with teachers over the course of the academic year, according to IDOE data.

Virtual School Funding

There were seven virtual charters operating in Indiana during the 2022-23 school year, according to the report. Two of those — Phalen Virtual Leadership Academy and Paramount Online Academy — are part of the Indianapolis Public Schools’ Innovation Network Charter School. Because funding for the two virtual charters is determined through agreement with the public school district, exact tuition support was not provided in the IDOE report.

The five virtual charters that provided funding data for the new report received $60.8 million in tuition support in 2022-23.

That includes Indiana Connections Academy, which netted $39.3 million, for an average of $6,802.90 per enrolled student.

Among the others, Options Charter Schools received $8.2 million, averaging $8,882.76 per student; Hoosier College and Career Academy received $6.04 million, averaging $8,163.97 per student; Indiana Agriculture and Technology received $2.1 million, averaging $6,880.66 per student; and Indiana Connections Career Academy received $4.9 million, averaging $6,688.42 per student.

Indiana virtual charter school attendance has nearly halved since 2019, when about 13,000 students were enrolled, according to IDOE data.

The dip is largely due to a 2019 move by Indiana lawmakers to slash funding for virtual schools due to low performance. Since the change, virtual school funding starts at 85% of what it normally provides districts for each student — a decrease from the previous 90%.

An exception was made during the 2020-21 school year, however, when the state provided full funding for all students amid widespread remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Non-virtual charters, on the other hand, saw funding increases in the latest state budget.

State law stipulates that students are counted as “virtual” if they receive at least 50% of their instruction virtually.

Compared to the last two-year state budget, traditional public schools saw average increases in total funding of 5.9% in Fiscal Year 2024 and will get another 2.1% in Fiscal Year 2025.

Virtual charter schools, specifically, received an average total funding increase of 5% in the first year of the current budget and 3.4% in the second year.

The current school funding formula calculation uses a count of virtual students at school corporations and charter schools to determine foundation funding.

In Fiscal Year 2024, the foundation amount for a virtual student is $5,601.50, which is 85% of the foundation amount of $6,590. In Fiscal Year 2025, the foundation amount for a virtual student will be $5,678.85, which is 85% of the foundation amount of $6,681.