A proposal to create taxpayer-funded school vouchers in Pennsylvania may have suffered a fatal blow for this legislative year.

But Republican lawmakers hope they can revive another one of Gov. Tom Corbett’s proposed education initiatives in the coming months.

“The issue is not dead. We have to still do a reform package on charter and cyber charters,” said state Rep. Paul Clymer, R-Bucks, chairman of the House Education Committee. “The whole idea is to have a fair and balanced package sometime this year that we can present to the committee and then to the General Assembly.”

But some Republicans disagree on what that final charter school package should look like.

State Rep. Mike Fleck, R-Huntingdon, voted against the charter school legislation Wednesday. He’s pushing legislation that would likely decrease funding for cyber charter schools, limit how much they can spend on advertising, and require the state to enforce minimum online and offline hours for students.

“They’re public schools. They’re here to stay,” said Fleck, a former Southern Huntingdon County school board member and current member of the House Education Committee. “But they need to be held to the same requirements as our regular public school system.”

State Rep. Dan Truitt, RChester, has two children enrolled at Pennsylvania Leadership Charter School in a program that blends online classes with brick-and- mortar classes. Also a member of the House Education Committee, Truitt is opposed to the idea of changing the funding formula for cyber charter schools.

“I’m very concerned about the Fleck legislation — that he’s going to accidentally break a good thing,” said Truitt.

The charter and voucher-school legislation failed with a 105-90 vote. Truitt plans to seek out the 20 Republicans who broke ranks with their party to help shoot down the plan.

“What I figure I’m going to have to do is hunt down each one of these people one at a time and find what held them back, what were their reservations,” said Truitt. “I’m looking at this list, trying to understand what the pattern is, and I don’t see anything that I can firmly grasp and say, ‘Aha, that’s where things went wrong.’ ”

The issue is especially relevant in Centre County.

State College Area School District spends more on charter schools than 95 percent of other Pennsylvania school districts. The county has four brick-and-mortar charter schools. The nearby Sugar Valley Rural Charter School typically draws 20 to 30 students from

the Penns Valley Area. And Centre County students also attend cyber charter schools, including Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School, which opened a satellite office in Bellefonte this summer.

“(T)he coalition’s position is we lost a battle, not the war,” said Fred Miller, a spokesman for the Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School. “We will regroup.”

In the spring, Corbett supported several education reforms. But the proposals never came to a vote before the full House or Senate.

In October, Corbett took a more active role. He pushed charter school reform, an expansion of the Educational Improvement Tax Credit program, teacher evaluations based on standardized tests and a scaled-back voucher program.

Under the voucher proposal, students in the “lowest-performing 5 percent of schools across the state” would be eligible for vouchers.

The state Senate approved voucher legislation in October, but the proposal stalled in the House.

Wednesday evening, House members voted on a reduced version of Corbett’s proposal. It didn’t include vouchers, but it still amended the charter school law, called for a commission to study the funding of all charter schools, and expanded the Educational Improvement Tax Credit program, which allows companies to make tax-deductible donations to schools for student scholarships. The bill failed.

“I was actually kind of surprised,” said Bob Lumley-Sapanski, a Bellefonte Area school board member and president-elect of the Pennsylvania School Boards Association.

Lumley-Spanski and others who have protested voucher proposals saw Wednesday’s vote as a sign that voucher legislation likely will not pass until at least after the 2012 election.

“I think it’s lost a lot of steam now,” he said. “There’s so much money behind the vouchers, I think it will come back. But I just think it will be a much more difficult plan to sell. It’s been shot down twice already.”

Voucher proponents offered a similar view.

“The PSEA has essentially demonized vouchers to a degree that it may be impossible to turn public opinion on that,” said Truitt, referring to the state’s largest teachers union, the Pennsylvania State Education Association.

Many of the 20 Republican lawmakers who voted against the charter school overhaul come from rural areas without brick-and- mortar charter schools.

“If you don’t have a charter school, and you don’t know the value of it, and everyone is telling you don’t vote for this — then where’s the incentive to vote for it?” said Jim Hanak.

Hanak, chief executive officer of the Pennsylvania Leadership Charter School, said proposed education reform legislation that was defeated this week could improve the climate for charter schools. It would allow those interested in founding a charter school to apply to a university or the state for approval, instead of their local school district.

“There’s lots of interest once one opens,” he said. “But until one opens … it’s kind of like, ‘What is it?’ ”

Hanak and other proponents of charter schools said there’s more support for their cause than the 105-90 vote suggests. They said some lawmakers were upset that the scaled-back bill didn’t first come from the education committee. Others lawmakers wanted vouchers included in the bill.

Fleck said he wouldn’t support a charter school reform package that didn’t specifically address cyber charter schools.

“Basically school choice came down to what big Wall Street guy we were going to make wealthy,” said Fleck. “For me it wasn’t educational reform.”

He wants to overhaul the funding for cyber charter schools, arguing that they have fewer expenses than brick-and-mortar schools and that many nonprofit cyber charter schools hire for-profit organizations to manage the schools.

Clymer, the chairman of the House Education Committee, told Fleck he’d like to hold a hearing on his proposed bill early in the new year. But Fleck’s proposal doesn’t have Clymer’s full support.

“There are some provisions that are controversial. And some that make sense,” said Clymer, who later criticized Fleck’s proposal to limit what charter schools spend on advertising, lobbying and bonuses. “I’m not sure how restrictions really benefit anyone. It’s the formula that is used to provide the payment to the cyber charters and to the charter schools that we have to try to address.”

Ed Mahon can be reached at 231-4619.