‘Virtual Learning’ academy brings classroom online

By Christa Desrets

Published: October 13, 2008

The basement of Julie Sites’ Forest home serves as a makeshift classroom for several types of learning.

At a desk adorned with a computer, books and paint supplies, Julie’s 9-year-old daughter Mikaela-Mercy sits, with notebook in lap, ready to log on to her next virtual lesson.

“Do you want to do art or history?” Julie asks.

“History,” Mikaela answers. Her favorite subject.

Her mother clicks through a few screens to pull up the exercise; this one’s on Isaac Newton.

Julie moves to a nearby table, where her 7-year-old daughter Eliana-Elizabeth sits atop a bike on training wheels and searches for the answer to a question on reading comprehension.

“I’m not going to tell you the answer — you have to find it,” Julie prompts.

The girls are two of the first 55 students enrolled in Bedford County’s newest school — the Bedford Academy for Virtual Learning.

“I was prepared to be hyper-critical of a virtual school,” said Joyce Voelker, who serves as teacher for the online school and previously was an elementary school principal in Prince William County. “It didn’t take long for me to be a convert.”

The public school, for kindergarten through seventh grade, opened this year as one of the first of its kind in Virginia.

Using accredited, Standards of Learning-based online curriculum developed by the McLean-based K12 Inc., the academy is administered from Big Island Elementary School under Principal Deborah Shelton.

Students from outside Bedford County pay $600 per year to enroll. Since the school is public, in-county students do not pay anything for the courses or materials. But like other public school students, they are required to submit immunization records and take Standards of Learning exams.

The district receives about $2,300 in state funds for each in-county student, said Randy Hagler, director of finance. The program pays for itself, he said, and could even earn the district money, based on final enrollment numbers.

Julie Sites heard of K12 through her sister-in-law in Georgia, who has used the program for several years, she said.

Previously, Mikaela was home-schooled.

“She’s getting to that age where she’s kind of testing Mom a little more, so I thought the outside ability of another teacher would be very helpful for her,” Julie said.

“Ellie went to first grade last year and just missed us, and wanted to come home this year.”

For both, Julie said the system is working well so far.

“With Ellie, it was the structure of it,” she said. “We can go through and have her do the same thing every day in the same order, so she knows what’s coming next, and that’s very helpful for her.”

Mikaela does most of her work online, but students like Ellie who are in grades kindergarten through third do about 80 percent of their work in workbooks and interactive lessons off the computer, Voelker said.

Julie’s oldest daughter, Liberty, stuck with the “go-with-the-flow” home-school curriculum she had previously used.

“There’s more paperwork and actual physical worksheets (for the virtual school),” Julie said. “That’s one reason that Liberty is not doing it, because she’s not a worksheet type of kid.”

Each night, Julie logs in to her K12 account online, which tracks both girls’ progress. She prints out their schedules for each subject — literature, language arts, spelling, history, math, science and art — and their lists of materials for the next day.

“Then, when we’re ready to start in the morning, we just head down to the basement and they each go through what they want to do first,” she said.

“Mikaela’s typically finished by noon. Ellie needs frequent breaks,” and finishes around 2 or 3 p.m.

“When we finish a unit or subject, then we go on the computer and mark it done. If we don’t finish something because we were busy or sick or whatever, then the computer automatically moves that lesson to the next day.”

If they get stuck on a question or need help with a subject, they send an e-mail to Voelker, who works from her home in Goode.

She can log in to a student’s lesson from her computer and access whatever they have a question about.

“It’s hard because you don’t have face time (with the students),” said Voelker, who keeps snapshots of each student on a corkboard in her home office. “But it’s easy because you don’t have discipline issues.”

Extra lessons are available if they have any trouble with the concepts, Voelker said, or the students can move at a faster pace.

Of the 55 students currently enrolled, 18 are from Bedford County, and 37 are from elsewhere in Virginia. Most have home-schooled in the past.

A couple of students have had to withdraw because they did not have consistent Internet access, Shelton said, but overall parents have told her they’re happy with the program.

“Some of the parents were concerned that they wouldn’t have flexibility with attendance,” she said, but students can do their coursework at any time as long as it averages to 5½ hours of work each weekday.

“The fact that it’s Web-based is very convenient. They can do it from anywhere,” she said, referencing one parent who is a recording artist and frequently travels with their child to Nashville. “I think it appeals to those parents who are looking for a way to meet those individualized needs.”

Julie said the only worry she initially had about the program was whether the school system would be too intrusive.

“You never know with something like this that’s new, sometimes you have visions of them calling every day and wanting to talk to your child. But it’s not that at all,” she said. “If they need to contact us, they do so by e-mail.”

Now, Julie just has to figure out how she wants to educate her youngest child, Liam, who is in preschool.

“We’re discussing,” she said. “He’s one who might end up going to (brick and mortar) school, simply because he’s around women all day, and we think it’s important for him to be around boys.

“I definitely want to teach him to read first, just because I’ve taught them all how to read. I don’t want to give that away to anyone else.”