It's easy to understand why the public gets confused about the burgeoning education empire in Midland, Beaver County; it's been growing so fast that its creator, Nick Trombetta, sometimes gets confused himself.

"You come to a point sometimes where a thing has gotten bigger than you ever anticipated it would be," said Dr. Trombetta, superintendent of the Midland School District and the Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School.

Dr. Trombetta is looking at an educational model in which a cyber school teacher working in a classroom in the Lincoln Park Performing Arts Center -- of which he is executive director -- simultaneously teaches live students at Lincoln Park Charter School -- which he helped start -- and wired-in cyber students use curricula developed by the National Network of Digital Schools -- of which he is the director.

So who pays the teacher, and which of the other entities pays which other entity how much for what?

The complexity of such questions led NNDS, which is the umbrella organization over all the others, to hire the Virginia law firm McGuire Woods. The firm's charge is to sort out the various organizations and responsibilities, make sure the barriers between them are proper and make sure shared services are handled right.

"We can't operate NNDS anymore -- or PA Cyber anymore -- like a mom-and-pop business," Dr. Trombetta said.

"I want this organization to be above reproach," he said. "People have a right to know that we're going to deliver quality service to the children we're supposed to be serving."

While the finances of the various entities are indeed entangled, Dr. Trombetta said it still comes down to a matter of the cyber school doing an efficient job of providing education and plowing extra revenues into NNDS to continue developing the business.

With students stretched out across the state, parents, as a practical matter, don't have ready access to attend board meetings.

However, board meeting agendas and minutes are posted on the Web site, and Dr. Trombetta said there was discussion of providing podcasts or Web casts of meetings so parents can observe.

While the cyber school initially was chartered by Midland, the state Department of Education, which now oversees cyber schools, renewed its charter last year.

Dr. Trombetta said if he had wanted to reap large personal rewards from his enterprises, he could have done so easily, legally and with few questions, simply by creating a for-profit business to handle management, curriculum development and enterprises in other states.

Instead he created NNDS, a nonprofit.

Why?

"I felt the community that created the idea should benefit from it," he said.

"I had people come here and say, 'You should turn this into a for-profit,'" he said. "I just didn't see that. There's something to be said for putting what you're making back into the community."