A tiny school district in southeast Colorado will reimburse the state an additional $470,000 for miscounting students at its own, separate online school, the state Education Department said Monday.

The reimbursements are from the Hope Co-Op Online Learning Academy and the Vilas School District in Baca County, which issued Hope's charter.

Hope has about 3,500 students at 70 learning centers across the state. It also agreed to pay for an Education Department monitor with access to all its financial records.

Reviews of the 2005-06 school year by the state auditor and the Education Department said Hope could not prove how much time students were spending in online courses and had co-mingled taxpayer money with private-school tuition.

Hope Executive Director Heather O'Mara said the school will definitely feel the impact of the reimbursements but "we need to address that issue and move forward."

About half of Hope's learning centers are in Denver, and the school plans to switch its charter from Vilas to the Douglas County School District just south of Denver for the 2008-09 school year to be closer to those centers.

Vilas Superintendent Joe Shields said the district had not followed strict state rules on counting students, but all the pupils were there.

"There's no fraud whatsoever," Shields said. "The students were here, they were in school, but I couldn't count them."

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