Ohio taxpayers have spent more than $100 million to educate thousands of high-school students who rarely or never show up for class, part of a growing trend of absenteeism at privately operated schools.These tax-supported schools are supposed to rescue students who were failing in traditional high schools, but a Scripps Howard News Service investigation found that many of the students are not attending class and few are graduating. These institutions have become ghost schools with thousands of students who are enrolled but never attend.Ohio paid $29.9 million for absent students who were enrolled at 47 of these special schools during the 2006-2007 school year, the most recent year that complete data are available.On an average day, 33 percent of the students enrolled in these "dropout recovery" schools were absent, compared to less than 6 percent at traditional schools. The state's worst truancy rate was 53 percent at a campus in Cincinnati, and even spiked to 64 percent two years earlier.In Ohio and other states, these privately operated schools are paid based on the number of students enrolled -- not those who actually attend -- so the schools get paid even if the desks are empty."I'm not against privatization of schools. But sometimes I get terribly ill thinking about all of the resources here that could have been better spent in traditional schools," said Gary Miron, a researcher at Western Michigan University who tracks the growth of education-management organizations known as "EMOs.""After all, these EMOs are doing what for-profit companies are supposed to do. They are making money. They are creating business models that are highly profitable. The real question is why our state legislatures are allowing this."The dropout-recovery movement began in 1998 in Ohio and has been averaging about $30 million a year in state payments for absent students. Taxpayers have paid more than $100 million in the last five years through this system.Robert H. Crosby, a Salem, Mass., businessman who owns a for-profit company that manages nine charter schools for at-risk students in Texas and Florida, said, "Ohio is the profit-making EMO capital of America."And the money can be significant."It's a cash cow! We all used to sit around and joke about that," said Mark Elliott, former principal of the Life Skills Center of Cincinnati. "I spent less than $1 million on a $3 million operation. What the hell are they (executives at his former company) doing with the other $2 million?"Elliott's former school has Ohio's highest absenteeism rate and is the nation's worst-attended, according to U.S. Department of Education records. Average daily truancy at the Cincinnati campus runs more than 50 percent of enrollment in recent years and peaked at 64 percent for the 2004-2005 school year. Only about 158 students of the 438 enrolled were showing up that year. "Why does this go on? Because we let it go on," said Andy Jewel, a researcher for the Ohio Education Association. "This isn't about education reform. It's about politics. Charter schools have become a highly politicized process. That's why it hasn't been reined in, yet."Nationwide, absenteeism in all public schools runs about 8 percent, according to a study of the 2003-2004 school year by the U.S. Department of Education.The Ohio Department of Education requires that schools must take action if absenteeism exceeds 7 percent, but the state's dropout-recovery schools were exempted from the rule. Ohio public schools' most recently reported data show statewide absenteeism averages about 5.9 percent.Ohio's charter schools account for only 3 percent of the state's public high-school enrollment, but 45 percent of the state's high-school dropouts, according to a Scripps Howard analysis of U.S. Department of Education computer files.The worst attendance rates are found at the chain of 17 Life Skills Centers run by the for-profit company White Hat Management, founded by Akron, Ohio, businessman David Brennan. The company operates 20 more Life Skills Centers in Arizona, Colorado, Florida and Michigan, schools that also have high levels of absenteeism.Fewer than half of all Life Skills Center students graduate, according to Ohio Department of Education records.The Life Skills schools had a total enrollment of 5,789 students during the 2006-2007 school year, according to Ohio Department of Education records. But the state said absenteeism for those schools collectively was 45.62 percent that year, which means White Hat Management was paid $17.3 million for 2,641 absent students.White Hat Management issued a written statement to Scripps Howard when asked to explain the absenteeism. The company said its schools serve students who've dropped out of traditional public schools and that more than 10,000 have received diplomas since 1998."It is a constant challenge to keep our students in school -- many of them have lost the discipline of daily attendance and almost all of them have other responsibilities such as jobs and families that make it harder for them to balance their schedules," the company said. "There is absenteeism at Life Skills Centers as there is at public schools. It is surprising that it isn't higher."Under Ohio law, truant students must be dropped from enrollment lists after missing 105 hours of instruction. But former Life Skills employees and students said habitually truant students were kept on the active-enrollment lists.Former employees said they were routinely sent to students' homes to obtain written excused absences using a standard form the company developed. Then the absence became "excused" until another 105 hours were missed."It was really a bad experience. I'd spent my time biting my own tongue and swallowing blood," said Andrea Gale, a former English teacher at the Life Skills Center of Lake Erie, Ohio.She said teachers were used primarily as record keepers for attendance -- "nothing more than clerks" -- and told to obtain excuse notes from parents and guardians."We really wanted to be able to mark a kid as 'E' for 'excused' on our records. We would even go to the families' houses and say, 'Where is your kid?' We had time allotted for home visits. Usually the excuses were for medical reasons. But we'd take whatever excuse we could get, things like 'My child was ill' or 'He was at the doctor' or 'He was out of town.' Then I'd match that to my attendance book," Gale said.Other former employees echoed Gale's remarks. Each said administrators ordered teachers and clerical workers to obtain excused-absence notes to keep the students enrolled."I think they had it down to a science. It was a business. It was run like a business," said Nanyah Bat-Asher, who taught at the Life Skills Center of Cincinnati. "They knew exactly how long to keep the students on the books, how long they could get paid for them."Former Life Skills Center of Canton teacher Michael Appollonio, who now works for the Ohio State Mental Health Agency, said: "A lot of the excuses that kids brought in, they were a joke. Some of them might have said the student missed the bus. OK, but three days in a row of a student missing a bus? I've seen documents that I know were written by students and the administrators just took them."Yet these forms, collected by the hundreds each year, allowed White Hat to earn millions in tax dollars for kids who rarely showed up.Appollonio's Canton school had 211 students and collected more than $1.5 million in the 2006-2007 school year. If its pay were based on student attendance, it would have received about half that amount, according to the state's funding formula.As the former enrollment specialist for the Life Skills Center in Trumbull County, Cathalene Weyant said she helped the attendance coordinator change the unexcused-absence records after receiving excuse notes. She said the school had a running list of whom it needed to get notes from and was collecting notes from about 50 percent of its students.Administrators never questioned the notes' validity, she said."I'm sure they were bogus," said Weyant. "It was pretty much a given that they weren't going to go" to class.Former students said they lied on the forms.Desiree Troy attended the Life Skills Center of Canton from 2002 until she graduated in 2006. Although she rarely cut school, the now-22-year-old admitted to handing in fake absence notes."They wanted us to write our names and dates and why we weren't in school," Troy said. "I wasn't always honest. If I wasn't going to school to avoid conflict or to get a break from it, I would still say I had a headache."Officials with the Ohio Department of Education defended their oversight of White Hat schools. State reviewers have gone to each Life Skills Center to examine hundreds of excused-absence forms on file in recent years."The student files are checked for proper documentation. If a student is listed absent, they will note that there is an excuse in the file. As to the validity of that, how do we determine if the parent is lying or not?" asked Jason Wall, the management analyst supervisor for the Ohio Department of Education's School Finance Office.Wall said auditing how many full-time-equivalent students (FTEs) are actually attending a school does not challenge the accuracy of excused-absence forms, other than to confirm that they exist."There is nothing in our FTE review process where an area coordinator would pick up the phone and call a parent regarding a specific excuse," Wall said. "We trust that the parent has what is best for the child in mind and that it is a valid excuse."White Hat Management also defended its use of excused absences:"Our policies require written documentation for excused absences and we comply with all applicable sections of the Ohio Revised Code. We will not dignify allegations made in interviews with 'former employees,' 'former teachers' and 'former students' since we have not been offered transcripts of such interviews," the firm said in a written statement."We find offensive any implication that White Hat Management -- the management company for Life Skills Centers -- has not complied with reporting and legal requirements," the company said.Elsewhere in America, officials are aggressively challenging the accuracy of attendance claims at privately run schools.The Texas Education Agency investigated seven schools in recent years and demanded the return of more than $16 million because they allegedly filed inaccurate and inflated attendance reports. The state already wrote off another $9 million of debts lost when 20 schools went out of business following the agency's investigations."In the mid-1980s, Texas decided that attendance is important to achieving good performance in school," said Lisa Dawn-Fisher, deputy associate commissioner for school finance at the Texas Education Agency, who supervised sanctions against the attendance claims."We only pay on the basis of warm bodies in the seats so that the kids are receiving instruction. It is not enough just to enroll kids, but to actually teach them," Dawn-Fisher said.She said that's probably why absenteeism in Texas schools averages just 4 percent, the nation's lowest rate. (E-mail Thomas Hargrove at hargrovet(at)shns.com. Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)