FORKS — Quillayute Valley School District will have to repay the state $1.25 million, if the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction upholds a state auditor’s report.

The district was one of three districts statewide — which also included Federal Way and Steilacoom Historical — that provided insufficient documentation of enrollment in Internet learning programs in the 2006-2007 school year, State Auditor Brian Sonntag said in the audit.

“The three districts were unable to provide documentation to support the number of students reported in their alternative learning experience Internet programs,” Sonntag, who was unavailable for comment on Thursday, wrote in the report.

The Quillayute Valley School District contracted with the Oregon-based Insight Schools in 2006 to establish an online public high school, Insight School of Washington, a statewide high school expected to bring in some 600 additional students its first year, and reverse a trend of declining enrollment for the district.

The online school doubled its enrollment in 2007, and has added about 500 students per semester since, said Quillayute Valley School District Superintendent Diana Reaume.

Sonntag used samples of students from each district. He reported that the money owed by Quillayute Valley School District for the sample group is $16,726.

When proportionally applied to the entire enrollment of the Insight School of Washington, the total amount to be repaid is $1,251,959.

“For us, that money, we figure, is about half of the entire budget for that year for the Insight School,” Reaume said.

Sonntag determined that Federal Way School District should pay $1,030,945 and Steilacoom Historical School District should pay $3,071,037.

Problem now resolved

Reaume said the issue was primarily a paperwork problem that has been resolved since.

She said that when the district began the program, the legislation related to online high schools was new, and the rules hadn’t been clearly defined.

“Sometimes we would call up with a question, and we weren’t sure what it meant, and [the state superintendent’s office] wasn’t sure what it meant,” she said.

The Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction will decide if the district must pay the money.

“We are just waiting to hear back from OSPI,” Reaume said.

Sonntag’s report was forwarded to the office, which is reviewing it, spokesman Nathan Olson said on Thursday.

“Hopefully, within the next few weeks, we will issue a letter to the districts letting them know our opinion of these findings,” he said.

Once the letters are issued, the districts have 30 days to either accept the findings or to appeal them to the Office of Administrative Hearings.

The Legislature requested the audit of the three districts, which had the largest online programs in the 2006-07 school year, the Tacoma News-Tribune said.

The virtual academies are free to Washington students and funded with state and levy dollars. There were 49 online programs last year with more than 6,500 students.

Now in compliance

Reaume said that the first year of the program involved a learning curve.

“One thing I can say for sure is that I feel confident that what we are doing now is in compliance, and the quality of education being offered for students is top notch.

The primary problem began on the first day of school, Reaume said.

“We weren’t ready to open the Insight School at the same time as the brick and mortar building, so we had a different first day of school that year, so when we did out first enrollment report on the fourth day of school, we didn’t realize we should do a separate one for Insight,” she said.

“Because of that, the student learning plans were not ready on that day, so we really should have done the enrollment reports a few days later, and done it all separately.”

Reaume said that because of that discrepancy, the month of September was not allowed to be counted for any of the 600-or-so students.

“We now realize the counts for Insight School of Washington should have occurred separately, and have made this correction in subsequent years,” Reaume wrote in a formal response to the audit.

“I can’t speak for the other districts, and in that year, I was not the superintendent here, but from the school district and the school board’s point of view we do the best we can with what we have,” she added on Thursday.

“We want to follow the law and we do as well as we can, Sometimes we might not have asked the right questions.”

The audit also critiqued the district’s monthly progress reviews.

Reaume said that, initially, a review was done for every student but, after the first semester, only reports on students who were not meeting requirements were submitted to the registrar.

That was corrected in the 2007-2008 school year, she said.

All of the other issues dealt with reporting instructor hours and student contact, and how long a student spent in learning activities.

Computer failures, as well as a dependence on Outlook Express — an e-mail program — to archive e-mails led to a lack of a paper trail on the interactions.

“But we now have all of our e-mails archived, and we log every single phone call, and are working on possibly a way to automatically record each of the phone calls between students and instructors,” Reaume said.

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Reporter Paige Dickerson can be reached at 360-417-3535 or at paige.dickerson@peninsuladailynews.com.