One of Gov. Paul LePage’s goals, reiterated during last week’s State of the State address, is to provide different types of education for children unable to make it in the regular public school system.

Sometimes called charter schools, these schools, such as the Maine School of Science and Mathematics in Limestone, tend to have a particular focus.

Maine School of Science and Mathematics opened in 1995 after Loring Air Force Base closed down and the Defense Department helped redevelop the property. It is very remote; the campus is a residential school, with dormitories located in the former elementary school. It can serve 140 students, though current enrollment is only 105.

The school has a fantastic reputation. It has a very small student teacher ratio, 10 to 1. It is always listed among the nation’s best public high schools. It can request and receive assistance from the state university system to help with guest lecturers and curriculum support.

But the costs of running the program are high — it has student dormitories and provide room and board, as well as summer programs — and it serves only few, albeit very bright, students.

Meanwhile, according to the state Department of Education, there are more than 201,000 Maine public school students.

Charter schools like this and the new Good Will Hinckley School in Fairfield may have a role to play in the education mix, but they are not and cannot be a substitute for quality local public education. They don’t serve enough students to make them any more than an interesting option for very bright, talented kids, and they tend to focus only on high school students.

LePage would like to see more charter schools, and a few might be appropriate — preferably more in urban areas where more students can take advantage of them.

Unfortunately, the funding for charter schools and public schools comes from the same pot, the Department of Education budget.

According to a Maine Center for Economic Policy study released this week, Maine’s education budget has been cut dramatically per pupil since the recession began in 2008 when compared to other New England states.

After adjusting for inflation, Maine has cut state aid to public schools by $468 per student, or 8.8 percent, since fiscal year 2008. Over that same time, Vermont cut spending $70 per student while every other state in New England increased education funding by $100 per student or more. LePage’s biennial budget proposal for fiscal years 2014 and 2015 would result in an additional cut per student of $66 when adjusted for inflation.

Where is the money for new, attractive charter schools in this scenario?

LePage has a suggestion … and there may be more to it than meets the eye. He is trying very hard to get online charter schools approved in Maine.

That is, children stay at home and do work over the Internet with an instructor who may or may not be credentialed to work in the state. At least one of the charter academies, K12 Inc., donated heavily to LePage’s election campaign.

The two pushing hardest to break into the Maine market — K12 Inc. and Connections Academy — are both out-of-state, forprofit corporations that have dismal track records in other states, such as Pennsylvania, Texas, and Colorado.

Both make money two ways — from tuition paid by the states for the children they send to the online schools; and from selling the textbooks or online programs that the children must use.

They do not use the state’s choice for textbooks, they use their own. And they publish the textbooks.

The student to teacher ratio is high — 75:1 in a Virginia Virtual School District.

Students who are in the online system do worse on state assessments than students in real schools, and they also have a high dropout rate. For example, in Colorado, only 12 percent of virtual academy students graduated on time, as opposed to 72 percent of brick-and-mortar students.

And yet the real cost of an online education may be higher than for a brick-and-mortar education, especially as former virtual students return to class to be educated again.

Connections Academy and K12 Inc. tried again to get their schools certified in Maine last year; they failed, but LePage desperately wants this option, and will try again to push it through the Legislature this year.

For a very limited number of remote students, or those who cannot attend regular school for disciplinary reasons, or because of illness, disability or temporary injury, the school system can and should develop its own “online academy” to make sure that every student gets an appropriate education. But for-profit online academies are not the way to go, for Maine or its students.

GINA HAMILTON, of Bath, is editor of the New Maine Times. She welcomes emails at [email protected].