COLUMBUS — When members of Ohio Auditor Dave Yost’s staff showed up unannounced at 30 charter schools on Oct. 1, they found seven where dramatically fewer students were in their seats compared to the estimates provided to the state that July.

In one case, a Youngstown school was empty even though the lights were on and staff was present.

“I’m really kind of speechless at everything that I found,” Mr. Yost said. “It’s quite a morass.”

The sampling of 30 schools represented less than 10 percent of the state’s 381 charter schools and could not be relied upon to extrapolate statewide, the auditor said.

Four of the 30 schools visited were in Lucas County — the Academy for Educational Excellence, the L. Hollingworth School for the Talented and Gifted, the Toledo Preparatory and Fitness Academy, and the Wildwood Environmental Academy.

The auditor did not find major discrepancies in the Toledo area schools’ numbers. In three of the four cases more students were in attendance than had been predicted last July.

The July estimates determined how much the state provided to the schools in early aid.

Charter, or community, schools are public schools that receive funding both from the state and local districts but are given more freedom from the regulations than traditional K-12 schools. The theory is that the charter schools would be permitted to innovate in hopes of producing better results.

But the number of failing schools and allegations that some are more about profit than results has resulted in a call for reform.

The seven schools found to have dramatically overestimated their expected attendance were in the Youngstown, Columbus, Dayton, and Cincinnati areas. All served students who had already dropped out at some point.

In addition to the Academy for Urban Scholars in Youngstown, where the count was off by 100 percent, other school counts were off as much as 83 percent.

The Youngstown school, sponsored by the Buckeye Community Hope Foundation, had zero students in attendance when Mr. Yost’s auditors walked through its doors on Oct. 1. The school had predicted 95 students in July.

The academy’s director told the auditor’s office that the students had been engaged in practice for standardized tests and were dismissed early. But a follow-up visit to the school found just 36 students.

Mr. Yost said his audit did not indicate whether taxpayers had lost money. The state has the ability to recover past overpayments from a school’s future aid.

“Are 100 percent of the kids showing up 50 percent of the time, or are 50 percent of the kids not showing up hardly at all?” Mr. Yost asked.

He said current Ohio Department of Education data can’t answer that question.

“The charter school law was never designed for accountability, transparency, and success,” said Rep. Teresa Fedor (D., Toledo), ranking Democrat on the House Education Committee and a former public school teacher.

“It was designed to make it easier to steal from schoolchildren and produce poor results,” she said. “The law was enacted by Republicans in 1997, and it started as a pilot project with a promised five-year review. That survey was supposed to be produced in 2002. It is now 2015.”

Mr. Yost, who stressed many charter schools are performing well, did not make recommendations for legislative changes.

"We look forward to working together to improve accountability of charter schools even as we support them to improve student performance,” said Greg Harris, director of the pro-charter StudentsFirst Ohio. “We need to ensure that all students have quality school choices. Unfortunately, the victims of educational malpractice are largely Ohio's most vulnerable citizens — impoverished schoolchildren.”

Among the Toledo area schools, Mr. Yost found that:

● The Academy for Educational Excellence’s headcount of 79 students on Oct. 1 was 7 percent higher than the July estimate.

● The L. Hollingworth School’s count of 302 was 34 percent above its estimates.

● Toledo Preparatory’s 183 students were 5 percent above estimates.

● Wildwood’s count of 317 was 7 percent below estimate.

Contact Jim Provance at: jprovance@theblade.com or 614-221-0496.

First Published January 23, 2015, 5:00 a.m.