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State requirements blamed for test score

October 19, 2011 By Leave a Comment

If the high school and junior high were separate schools, the district would not have any subgroups large enough to be counted and the district would have met all AYP goals, Albert said.

Also Tuesday, the board:

• Voted to expel two students, transferring one to the district’s alternative education program and the other to the Tulpehocken Virtual Academy, the district’s cyberschool. The expulsions followed a closed-door session.

• Learned that residents seeking to make girls volleyball a sport will appear at the Nov. 8 meeting. Girls soccer and field hockey are already fall sports.

“There might not be enough girls to go around. They might deteriorate the other two sports,” board member Oscar J. Manbeck said.

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More of region’s students enroll in cyber schools

October 18, 2011 By Leave a Comment

In a pale pink room adorned with posters of Justin Bieber, Julia Leister sits down to learn. The 10-year-old fourth-grader puts on her headphones, opens her laptop and begins typing to her classmates and teachers.

It’s 9:30 a.m. on a Friday in South Abington Township, and Julia is learning math in her bedroom.

Julia is enrolled in a cyber charter school – as are more than 2,300 other students in Northeastern Pennsylvania. That number has grown by 50 percent in just the past three years.

Cyber charters are public schools that are free for families and provide laptops, textbooks and other materials necessary to learn.

As enrollment in the schools grows faster than many education officials ever expected, districts are feeling the financial pinch of paying the tuition for students within their districts to attend cyber schools. Many districts are now offering their own virtual programs and are trying to recruit students back.

For Julia, the two years she has been a student at Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School have offered a way to relieve her anxieties and develop self confidence. She can work at her own pace and is doing well on her lessons.

“It’s not for everyone, but it’s working for her,” her mother, Cathy Leister, said.

High enrollment

Charter schools are self-managed public schools that are approved by local school districts or the state. Across Pennsylvania, more than 90,000 students are enrolled in nearly 150 charter schools. Of those students, about 30,000 are enrolled in 13 cyber charter schools.

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Enrollment in cyberschools soars in NEPA

October 17, 2011 By Leave a Comment

In a pale pink room adorned with posters of Justin Bieber, Julia Leister sits down to learn. The 10-year-old fourth-grader puts on her headphones, opens her laptop and begins typing to her classmates and teachers.

It’s 9:30 a.m. on a Friday in South Abington Twp., and Julia is learning math in her bedroom.

Julia is enrolled in a cyber charter school – as are more than 2,300 other students in Northeast Pennsylvania. That number has grown by 50 percent in just the past three years.

Visit Our Charter School Enrollment Database HERE

Cyber charters are public schools that are free for families and provide laptops, textbooks and other materials necessary to learn.

As enrollment in the schools grows faster than many education officials ever expected, districts are feeling the financial pinch of paying the tuition for students within their districts to attend cyberschools. Many districts are now offering their own virtual programs and are trying to recruit students back.

For Julia, the two years she has been a student at Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School have offered a way to relieve her anxieties and develop self-confidence. She can work at her own pace and is doing well on her lessons.

“It’s not for everyone, but it’s working for her,” her mother, Cathy Leister, said.

High enrollment

Charter schools are self-managed public schools that are approved by local school districts or the state. Across Pennsylvania, more than 90,000 students are enrolled in nearly 150 charter schools. Of those students, about 30,000 are enrolled in 13 cyber charter schools.

For the rest of the article, go to Enrollment in cyberschools soars in NEPA

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Penn Manor adds virtual school

September 21, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Penn Manor School District is promoting an online learning opportunity as an option to spending $758,779 to educate students at cyber charter schools.

The expense of cyber charter schools is “an astounding amount,” Superintendent Michael Leichliter told the school board Monday when he and technology director Charlie Reisinger announced a campaign to entice “virtual” students to enroll or re-enroll at the district’s brick and mortar schools.

Virtual Solutions, launched by Lancaster-Lebanon Intermediate Unit 13, offers “a new and exciting virtual high school choice for students and families,” Reisinger said.

The pilot program offered by Penn Manor is focused exclusively on secondary students, he said.

It is being implemented at seven other districts in Lancaster County, according to published reports, and enrollment varies from zero to 15 students in the participating districts.

Leichliter and Reisinger held an information session regarding the Penn Manor Virtual School on Aug. 4 for district families currently enrolled in a cyber charter school. Since then, Penn Manor has enrolled five virtual students, marking the “break-even point,” Leichliter said. The district pays a fee to be included in Virtual Solutions.

“With one more student, we will start seeing a return on our investment,” Leichliter said.

The district reported it is aiming to enroll 10 students.

The program’s appeal to families is flexibility. Under a blended model program, some students may never have to set foot in a school building, while others may be able to attend traditional classes on a part-time basis.

“Right now, it’s all or nothing,” Leichliter said.

Theresa Kreider, director of special education for the district, said there are many reasons given by students who opt for a cyber charter education, including psychological and medical. In most cases, however, Kreider said students in cyber charter schools report “traditional high school just isn’t for them.”

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Oak Glen High School Achieves Program Success

September 20, 2011 By Leave a Comment

His two year effort was part of the Alliance’s Student Educational and Economic Development Success (SEEDS) Program.

Woofter paired at risk freshmen with high school junior or senior peer mentors.

The SEEDS students were also introduced to Advanced Placement courses and their families were given information about the state’s virtual school‘s advanced courses.

The news relase said as a result of their SEEDS experience, a significant number of students demonstrated improved grades, attendance and an overall attitude toward school.

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More Pa. Students attending virtual classrooms

September 19, 2011 By Leave a Comment

DOWNINGTOWN, Pa. (AP) — This fall, 27,000 Pennsylvania students are attending virtual classrooms through state cyber schools.

“There is a growing movement in school districts across Pennsylvania to come up with alternatives to cyber charter schools,” said Alan Slobojan, director of Career, Technical and Customized Education for the Chester County Intermediate Unit. “School district virtual academies fill the gap between brick and mortar public schools and cyber charter schools by providing online classes to attract students back to their local school districts.”

Pennsylvania’s 11 cyber charter schools and public school districts that offer their own virtual academies, and in the southeastern area of the state, at least 13 public school districts will begin offering a full-time cyber option to residents of their districts this September.

Alan Slobojan oversees the intermediate unit’s Brandywine Virtual Academy, which was started in 2006 as an alternative to full-time cyber charter schooling, giving individual students the opportunity to take one or two courses online for credit recovery or summer school flexibility.

According to Slobojan, over the past five years, the academy has evolved into an alternative to cyber schools, combining virtual education with school district services, such as an official school district diploma, individualized access to district teachers and guidance counselors, and participation in co-curricular and extracurricular activities. This has come to be known as blended learning, with students able to take classes at the middle or high school along with online classes.

“There is ample evidence that blended learning is growing nationally, not only for economic reasons but also because of the benefits for students as they move forward in life to college or a career,” said Slobojan. “We recognize that online learning is the key to lifelong learning.”

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Alternate facility for online charter school in Norristown Area or North Penn school districts weighed

September 19, 2011 By Leave a Comment

NORRISTOWN – Seven months after the Norristown Area School Board unanimously rejected a science and math-oriented charter school application, a Herndon, Vir., online curriculum and school management company is contemplating a bid to use their online curriculum in a small “bricks-and-mortar” high school for 200 students.

Tim Sager, the director of school development for K12 Inc. of Herndon, Vir., said the company was seeking interested families in either the Norristown Area or North Penn school districts to provide the nucleus for a formal application that must be filed by Nov. 15 to satisfy Pennsylvania deadlines for charter school applications.

“Our proposition is we can put in a school of 200 to 300 kids and offer a comprehensive, online curriculum,” Sager said.

The company, which has about 300 employees, supplies online curriculum to school clients in 25 states, manages the Agora Cyber Charter School in Wayne and provides online curriculum to the Pennsylvania Virtual Charter School in Norristown.

The company would renovate an office or retail space of just 7,000 to 8,000 square feet to provide a central study area for students with smaller office and conference rooms for one-on-one tutoring and small-class sessions. An old school building with large classroom spaces would not be used, he said.

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GASD looks to expand its cyber program

September 12, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Gettysburg School District administrators hope more students who want to learn in a cyber environment choose a Warrior education.

The district’s Board of Directors learned Tuesday night during its semimonthly business meeting that its virtual learning program, in its second year of operation, has 11 students ranging from grades 8-12 enrolled.

The Gettysburg Area Virtual Academy, according to coordinator John J. Lewis, offers district students grades 6-12 the opportunity to take their learning out of the classroom and into the digital age with a district-approved curriculum.

Lewis, assistant principal at Gettysburg High School, shared with the board that text books and lessons in core cyber classes match those of corresponding classes at the middle school and high school.

“The pacing is such that if a student decides to return to school, the transition back to the classroom won’t be so great,” said Lewis. “It’s an asset for these students.”

He further pointed out that students from other areas or programs generally don’t experience such an easy transition.

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Legislation to reshape charter schools in state

August 10, 2011 By Leave a Comment

In its latest ranking in 2010, Pennsylvania was 12th out of 41 states.

Minnesota, home to the first charter schools, ranked first. Florida, Massachusetts, Colorado and New York rounded out the top five. Nine states don’t have any charter school laws.

“In general, Pennsylvania law provides an environment that’s open to new start-ups, public school conversions, and virtual schools and supportive of autonomy,” according to the report. But the report said the legislation could improve in several ways: by prohibiting caps on growth, increasing the accountability for the authorizer, allowing more entities besides school boards to approve charter schools and allowing the same organizations to start multiple charter schools.

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Mutually Assured Learning

August 9, 2011 By Leave a Comment

But if we start with the premise that online education is not only inevitable but desirable, the involvement of for-profit and charter entities in the e-learning marketplace could be a symbiotic relationship that benefits all involved.

First, there’s no question in my mind that for-profit entities have made important investments in the development of their virtual offerings and in doing so have upped the ante of the quality of online teaching and curricula. There is a higher bar to aim for now.

In addition, as Connections Academy co-founder Mickey Revenaugh points out in our story, districts that contract with for-profit companies like hers can offer a wider range of online options than if they had to build it all themselves. It’s not just the rural school in Arkansas that can now offer Mandarin. It’s that amazing online math curriculum that you want your students to benefit from, or the turnkey solution that will allow districts to serve families that opt out of public schooling for religious or political reasons.

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