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What's a virtual high school?(The Beaufort Gazette, S.C. Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) May 3--To put it simply, Christine Shirley, a sophomore, is not a fan of Battery Creek High School. Unimpressed with her teachers and failing a class she believes she deserved to pass, she left the school a month ago in search of something better. She and her friend Charles Terry, another student not enrolled in a school, said they found that in a Holiday Inn presentation hall on Boundary Street on Saturday morning. "I love school, and I normally make good grades," Shirley said. "With this program, I feel that I can really push myself." She and Terry were two of about 20 parents and students who attended a information session for the Insight School of South Carolina, a statewide, online charter high school opening its virtual doors in September. The school, which is one of three online charter schools opening in South Carolina in the fall, held information sessions in about 10 different cities statewide Saturday and is part of a new group of online schools taking advantage of the state's public charter school district. "There are a lot of virtual education programs out there that are supplementary in nature," said Jamie Osborne, a spokesman with the South Carolina school. "But this is (the students') school. They have everything you have in a typical school." The Charter School Act of 2005 created the statewide charter school district as another avenue for parents and educators to create charter schools instead of working through their local school districts. A state list for the 2007-08 school year showed more than 30 charter schools statewide, all of which were connected to local districts. None were online-only. A good portion of Saturday's session was spent answering students' and parents' questions about whether Insight had things their traditional public schools have. Such as: Are there tuition fees? No. Insight is a public charter school, so it receives its money from the state and federal governments. Does Insight have a prom? Actually, yes. It's a regional prom. Does it have clubs? Yes. Can you get suspended? "If it comes to an extreme case, yeah, you can get kicked out," said Kim Frey, a project manager with Insight Schools, the parent company based in Portland, Ore. "There's no cyber-bullying allowed." "So if someone, like, cyber-kicked you ..." Christine said. Osborne interjected: "Then the cyber-principal would reach through the screen and (grab you)." Insight schools has eight other schools nationwide. Representatives played up the most attractive and immediate differences Saturday. For instance, every student is issued their own laptop, textbooks and other materials for free. Students also are reimbursed for Internet costs. Each student has the typical cadre of teachers, administrators and guidance counselors available to them but also an "iMentor," a person constantly checking on their academic progress on a daily basis, including monitoring how frequently students log on to complete their work. School officials also claim all instructors teaching core courses are "highly qualified" as defined by the federal government's No Child Left Behind Act of 2002. The teachers keep structured and unstructured office hours. "It's very media-rich," Osborne said. "The great thing about virtual education is you get this daily snapshot of progress, so the minute you see a student is not (making progress) you have the ability to take action immediately." The school also offers a diverse, 120-course catalog that includes rare classes like Web design, flash animation, video game design and 3-D video game design in addition to requisite core instruction. Insight Schools is also affiliated with the University of Phoenix, the large national, online, accredited university. The school runs a dual-enrollment program allowing Insight students to take up to 12 credits of Phoenix courses for free, Osborne said. Deirdre DuBose, 49, of Beaufort, was there on behalf of her daughter, a struggling junior at Beaufort High School, who has been failing classes since her freshman year, DuBose said. She said she was looking for an alternative that would provide more one-on-one interaction with her daughter and focus on computers, which she said her daughter is good with. "It seems to be good. I kept waiting for the bottom line cost-wise, but there doesn't seem to be one," she said. "This seems to be the way of the future for some kids." Insight has been given a charter allowing it to accept up to 500 students this year, Osborne said, and that number increases to 1,500 the next year and 2,500 a year later. Osborne said he expects a full roster by September. The school is in no way connected, however, to the S.C. Department of Education's Virtual School, which began this year with a $3.2 million budget to serve as a supplementary program for students who want to take high school courses their school doesn't offer, said Dee Appleby, director of the Office of eLearning, part of the state department. The virtual school offers about 48 courses from grades eight through 12 and can serve up to 3,000 students at one time, she said. Students can take up to three credits per year (three classes, roughly), and if they're particularly ambitious they can get a waiver from their high school to take more. In Beaufort County, 121 students are taking at least one course, Appleby said. "We're never going to do away with all brick-and-mortar (schools), but we do have other options because kids learn differently," she said. "Not every student is adaptable to going to a brick-and-mortar building every day." In addition to Insight, two other online schools were given charters to operate statewide in the fall: K12 Inc., a Herndon, Va., company opening the South Carolina Virtual Charter School, and South Carolina Connection Academy, part of fleet of online schools headquartered in Baltimore. Both are high school programs. Both serve students in kindergarten through 12th grade. But Appleby warns parents to be cautious when making the decision to enroll their children in an Internet school. "Those types of schools that are fully online are missing one thing, and that's the human factor," she said. She said she's also listened to parents leave the schools unsatisfied. "Their comments are that they're not what they seem to be. You can say a lot up front, but the delivery, in the end, is not always what they proposed. ... It'll be interesting to see." All students will still be required to take state-mandated testing such as high school end-of-course exams. Osborne said he hopes parents will look at the scores before they judge the school. "Any school should be judged by its performance," he said. "We'll put our results up against anyone else's." To see more of The Beaufort Gazette or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.beaufortgazette.com. Copyright (c) 2008, The Beaufort Gazette, S.C. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. For reprints, email [email protected], call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA. |