Erika Taylor’s son failed three classes in his first year of high school, to her and her husband’s shock. They’d always known him to be a bright kid, adored by his teachers and deeply engaged with reading.
“He had all these great coping mechanisms, so we didn’t realize how advanced his learning differences were until he got to high school,” Taylor recalled.
To make up for lost credits, he enrolled in the summer classes offered by his district, Denver Public Schools. They were conducted at a public library with each student completing their individual work online.
“He finished chemistry, English and whatever math he was in in about two weeks – a year’s worth of material,” Taylor said.
Her son’s principal introduced them to Ian Jones, the principal for Denver Online High School. Hopeful, she and her husband sought the unlikely solution, enrolling their kid in the full-time virtual high school. The result was a success.
“He got so much individual attention,” she said. “It was really being able to work at his own pace.”
Taylor, who is now the president of the Colorado Coalition of Cyberschool Families, is grateful to the district for providing an online option, which aligned with her son’s learning style, propelling him to graduation.
Now, Montezuma-Cortez School District is preparing to launch a similar option.
Following several rounds of parent surveys, the district elected to partner with Colorado Digital Learning Solutions, a state subsidized provider of online classes, to offer online and hybrid options to middle school and high school students in the district. The school board approved the plan last week.
M-CSD Executive Director of Academic Services Justin Schmitt said there were around 240 kids within M-CSD boundaries who attended online schools outside the district last year. In the last three years, he said, the district has seen a cumulative loss of 700 enrollments to online programs.
“A lot of our kids are involved in programs that are based in Colorado Springs or Denver,” Schmitt said. “We wanted to be able to say, ‘Hey, we can still provide a high-quality online learning experience for you and keep you connected to your local district.’”
In the hopes of recuperating some of those losses – along with state funding, which is based on enrollment numbers – the district will allow students to choose between traditional in-person, hybrid and fully online models. With enrollment coming up July 9, district officials are still uncertain of how many families will opt into online school, but Schmitt said, based on phone calls the district has received, he estimated around 10 families are interested in the fully online option.
CDLS offers more than 250 different courses, all taught by Colorado licensed teachers. The organization has worked with 160 districts throughout Colorado over its 10 years of operation and boasts a high rate of passing among its enrollees.
“Over 90% of the kids who take courses with us generally earn a passing grade,” CDLS Executive Director Dan Morris said, citing the nonprofit’s seven-year profile.
The student handbook, available on CDLS’s website, offers a snapshot of the day in the life of a virtual student, who completes assignments asynchronously according to a weekly schedule. Students, the handbook says, should expect to spend an equivalent amount of time in their online coursework as they would in person: roughly four to five hours per week per course.
The handbook also clarifies that CDLS courses are not easier or less time-intensive than those offered at a traditional school.
“These are online courses, and they are rigorous. It’s not something a student can just click through and accomplish,” Morris said. “There’s assignments, there are due dates, there are quizzes, there are assessments throughout the course, and we expect kids to complete their work within a semester time frame, just as if they were in the building.”
District officials believe the online option won’t make a significant dent in in-person enrollment, meaning Montezuma-Cortez High School and Middle School will function normally for the students sticking with traditional schooling.
“We want kids to be in person,” Schmitt said. “In our view, that’s the best learning option. That provides us with the best opportunity to provide the support that they need.”
He predicted that most of the kids opting into the fully online model will likely be those who’ve already exited the district to pursue online schooling elsewhere.
Additionally, Schmitt said, some teachers expressed concerns they would be edged out of their jobs due to enrollment in the online option but he reassured them that was not the case.
“It’s overall not a decrease in staffing at all. We’re maintaining or even growing our level of staffing on those campuses,” Schmitt said.
The district created three more full-time positions and one part-time in the high school to help accommodate the periods in which hybrid students are taking online classes, according to Superintendent Eddie Ramirez.
Middle school and high school students interested in CDLS’s offerings can elect into a hybrid option or a fully online option. The fully online option has students completing the minimum 360 hours of instruction a semester with asynchronous courses through CDLS. They can elect to take additional courses in-person.
Hybrid students would be the opposite, taking one or two online courses in the midst of their mostly in-person days. For the hybrid model, students will work on their online courses in “flex classrooms” on campus during the allotted period.
“We have a supervising teacher in the room who provides support, but they’re not the teacher of the course itself so it’s almost like they have a course teacher and then a supporting teacher on site,” Schmitt said.
The hybrid model will be operating as a pilot program in the middle school, offering a maximum of 25 students per grade level.
Both CDLS course instructors and M-CDS officials will be monitoring student progress. Morris said teachers, district officials and even parents can view the amount of time students spend on an assignment, when they last logged in and how far along they are in the course.
Social activities and quintessential school events – like prom – are also available to students enrolled with CDLS courses via M-CSD – in both the fully online and hybrid options.
“That’s why we encourage them to participate in our online program instead of others. They can attend our dances. They can be a part of our drama program. They can be a part of our band program. They can participate in athletics,” Schmitt said.
There are a variety of reasons, educators and administrators say, online schooling may benefit certain students.
“If a student comes with special needs and needs some accommodations in the online environment, we have the ability to slow the course down. Some kids will have the ability to accelerate,” Morris said.
Ian Jones, the principal of Denver Online School, where Taylor’s son attended, encounters a diverse array of reasons students selected online school.
“We have probably about 25 ballet dancers who dance all day and they don’t do their schoolwork until nighttime,” Jones said. “I have soccer players, hockey players – people like that – who use it just to create that time during the day.”
There’s also kids who work, kids with medical conditions and those with difficulty learning in the traditional classroom who gravitate toward online school.
However, online school can become a last resort for some students disengaged with school, which reflects in Denver Online High School’s low graduation rate of 70%. Jones and other educators say learning online can be misperceived as “easy,” and families should evaluate their choices carefully to ensure it aligns with their student’s needs.
“At a certain point, you start to engage in that conversation with the family about is this actually the right option for your student. If the kid’s not engaging in school, we don’t want to be a spot where they land and drop out,” Jones said.
M-CSD officials said they will keep tabs on the success of the online and hybrid programs by monitoring grades, assessment scores and other metrics, but that any conclusive data on the success of the programs would need to be collected over multiple years.
Now, the district will begin advertising its online option, particularly to the students and families it lost to other online schools, trying to keep those within M-CSD’s boundaries involved with its schools.
“We’re trying to recognize that there’s different needs and trying to make sure that all the kids that live in our district are kids that we want to serve,” Schmitt said.