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The Penn Hills school board voted Monday to appeal a state hearing officer's decision on whether the district should be reimbursed for the online schooling bills for the children of U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum.

The board decided, 7-2, to appeal a Pennsylvania Department of Education ruling that the district had waited too long to appeal Santorum's residency. Hearing officer Barry Kramer last week denied the district's request for a refund from a Beaver County cyber charter school because the district didn't lodge a complaint within seven days of being notified of the children's enrollment.

Pennsylvania Secretary of Education Francis V. Barnes will rule on the matter. That will take at least 30 days, a department spokeswoman said.

This is the first case the state Education Department has heard challenging a cyber charter student's residency. The outcome could set a precedent for similar disputes for all 501 districts statewide, school district solicitor Al Maiello said.

Santorum pulled his children out of the Midland-based Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School in November, after it was revealed the children had attended the school since 2001. Santorum owns a three-bedroom house in Penn Hills, but spends most of the year with his family in a $757,000 home in Leesburg, Va., a Washington, D.C. suburb. Santorum and his wife, Karen, bought the Virginia home in 2001.

Santorum, who is up for re-election in November 2006, has called the appeal "baseless and politically motivated." John Brabender, Santorum's Pittsburgh-based media consultant, labeled the refund request "a Democratic smear."

School board member Erin Vecchio, the Penn Hills Democratic committee chairwoman who has spearheaded the district's refund, said the board should pursue the tuition reimbursement the way it handles residency disputes involving other out-of-district students.

"We owe this to the public. I don't care how much it costs. (Santorum) cost us money," Vecchio said. "If this was a kid from the city of Pittsburgh, we'd be going after them, even if it was past the seven-day window."

The cyber charter school sent enrollment notifications to the district on July 9, 2003, for the 2003-04 school year and June 23, 2004, for the 2004-05 school year. The school district filed its objections in December for both school years. For 2003-04, the deadline was July 16, 2003, and for the next school year, it was June 30, 2004.

Maiello said the state's cyber charter law allows districts to lodge residency complaints after the seven-day window has passed.

State law requires that public schools pay 80 percent of their per-pupil costs as tuition for students registered in their districts and enrolled in online charter schools. The district says it paid $70,000 to in cyber tuition for Santorum's children. Santorum says that once state subsidies are deducted, the district's costs were closer to $34,000.

School board member Margie Krogh, who along with Linda Schlegel voted against appealing the decision, said the district should ask the Legislature to amend the cyber charter law.

"We could fight this until we're blue in the face. I think we shouldn't waste any more money on something that's not our job to decide."

Ira Weiss, a solicitor for several local school districts and general counsel for Pittsburgh Public Schools, said Kramer's ruling reflected a state bias in favor of charter schools.

"This sort of restrictive reading is consistent with the department's attitude of casting its balance in favor of the charter schools," Weiss said. "The message here is you have to closely review these (enrollment) lists and make your objections known very quickly."

Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School Superintendent Nick Trombetta said the state is just as hard on charter schools as on public schools.

"The hoops we've had to jump through lead me to believe they have been as fair as they should be," Trombetta said.

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