Hundreds of students in Pennsylvania do not currently have a school to attend. They do not attend the public school in their community. They don’t have a cyber charter. The moment Commonwealth Charter Academy filed a lawsuit in Commonwealth Court challenging a new state law that prevents students with chronic absenteeism from transferring to online programs, a legal and bureaucratic gap opened, trapping them in the middle. The legal process is underway. The pupils are holding out.
The law at the heart of this controversy is not nuanced. Acts 44 and 47 of 2025 drew a clear line: unless a judge determines that the transfer is in the child’s best interest, any Pennsylvania student who has six or more unexcused absences is considered “habitually truant” and cannot transfer to a cyber charter school in the middle of the academic year. The state legislature enacted these laws in response to a particular issue: a trend that had been developing for years in which families trying to avoid or students facing truancy proceedings would move their kids to online programs, thereby restarting the accountability clock. While the underlying issues with attendance remained unresolved, districts watched as tuition money followed those students out the door.
Commonwealth Charter Academy, the state’s largest cyber charter school with about 30,000 students enrolled, called a special board meeting to vote on the lawsuit before filing it in March. CCA and the families who have joined its petition contend that the limitations are unconstitutional, that public school districts ought to be obligated to cover tuition for these enrollments regardless of a student’s attendance record, and that the law unlawfully prevents students from pursuing an educational option they are legally entitled to. The stakes in terms of money are significant. Students with special needs pay close to $20,000 in tuition each year, while regular education students pay about $10,000. The dollar figures become a significant budget line for districts throughout the state when you multiply that by the hundreds of students who are currently in limbo.
Pennsylvania has been debating this larger issue for years. Cyber charter schools have a unique place in the ecosystem of education funding because they operate under a different and frequently laxer accountability structure while receiving per-pupil tuition from local districts, taking funds away from physical classrooms and programs. The laws of 2025 made a significant effort to tighten that structure. In addition to limiting truancy, the new regulations mandate that cyber schools perform weekly visual wellness assessments with each enrolled student and that students must be clearly visible on camera during live sessions in order to be counted as attending. In a different legal dispute, CCA previously opposed the wellness check requirement, claiming it was unreasonable to expect staff to verify the wellbeing of 30,000 individual students every week. As these disagreements mount, it seems as though the conflict between the growth of cyber schools and institutional responsibility has been building toward precisely this kind of legal conflict.
How the Commonwealth Court will rule and how long it will take to reach a decision are still unknown. There is no doubt that the students in limbo are not abstract policy points; rather, they are kids who, due to a variety of circumstances, have accrued six or more unexcused absences and are now prevented from pursuing an educational path that their families have selected for them. It’s possible that some of them have good reasons for wanting to move to an online setting. It’s possible that some were sent to cyber school specifically to avoid being held accountable for their chronic absences. Without the involvement of a judge, the law does not differentiate between those situations, and that process requires time that school years do not.
In the era of remote learning, the case will probably determine how Pennsylvania—and perhaps other states keeping a close eye on it—draws the boundary between school choice and attendance accountability. In ways that the original cyber charter legislation never fully addressed, that boundary has always been hazy. The question that lawmakers were unable to adequately address in committee rooms is being forced into court by this lawsuit.
