Story originally printed in the Winona Daily News or online at www.winonadailynews.com
Published - Saturday, July 05, 2008
The new class: Local districts leading the online learning trend
The gravel road, the puppies gated in the yard and the horses grazing in the distance are tell-tale surroundings of a rural Winona County home, not a school.
But for Lisa Douglas, that scene describes both, all in one place. Between morning chores, such as tending goats and restocking firewood, Douglas’ 12-year-old daughter, Trianna, and 9-year-old son, Quentin, study history assignments and read about immigrant families. Like millions of others their age, Quentin and Trianna are home-schooled, but their method of learning separates them from most others and links them with a growing number of children taking part in a relatively new form of education: They are online students.
The Douglases are enrolled in the Minnesota Virtual Academy. Though they live off of County Road 12 in Warren Township, the family is enrolled in the Houston School District, which administers the school with the Minnesota Center of Online Learning, a similar program.
“We just felt that education for us shouldn’t start and stop at the classroom desk,” Lisa Douglas said. “We just love the flexibility.”
The number of kindergarten through 12th-grade online students is still relatively small. The North American Council for Online Learning estimates 2007 online enrollment nationwide at around 1 million, and the numbers are growing. In 2000, the NACOL estimated enrollment numbers at around 40,000.
In Minnesota, those numbers are even smaller — fewer than 10,000 students take courses online compared with about 850,000 traditional public school students. Yet the online learning numbers are increasing here, and the Houston-based schools are at the forefront.
Parents like Lisa Douglas say online learning gives families more freedom. But classroom teachers say a computer is no substitute for face time. Whatever the case, the rapid growth and the unconventional method of online learning have moved both educators and children into uncharted territory involving new challenges and debates.
Leading the growth
Created in 2002, MNVA is one of about 20 public online learning providers in Minnesota that sends Internet courses directly to families’ homes. Along with MCOL, the schools enroll students throughout the state; though most of the children who take classes are near the Twin Cities, the two enroll students from nearly every county in Minnesota.
“Online learning has grown by leaps and bounds,” MNVA director Angela Specketer said.
When it first started, MNVA enrolled about 75 students. In 2007-08, about 900 received instruction online and by phone, and Specketer anticipates enrollment for MNVA’s K-8 program to reach 1,000 next year. MCOL has seen similar increases — about 30 percent each year — with 2007-08 enrollment estimates of about 550 full-time and part-time students.
This growth has made MNVA the largest online-learning public education provider in Minnesota, a growth that the traditional schools in Houston have benefited from.
With a local student body under 500, the bump in enrollment provided by including online students from outside the county has helped Houston’s physical schools.
The boost is allowing the district to offer some services a similarly sized rural district wouldn’t be able to, like technology support and training. Parts of district administrative salaries also are funded through the online schools, allowing more local tax money to go directly into the classrooms.
Houston officials note they’ve been careful to not draw resources from their brick-and-mortar schools to fund their online programs. Resolutions by the school board ensure that no local tax levies will fund the online schools and draw resources away from Houston families to help students throughout the state.
“There’s a lot of sensitivity about spending local tax dollars on a family in say, Edina, for example,” Houston director of communications Kelly Stanage said.
But the size of the online schools compared with the rest of the Houston district has some drawbacks. Because more than half of Houston’s students are online students, the district does not draw any money from the home districts of its virtual school students.
Still, the programs run in the black. In 2007-08, the online schools’ $6.4 million revenues ran about $350,000 over expenditures.
Differences in style; differences of opinion
MNVA and Houston officials expect enrollment numbers to keep rising, considering a recent announcement that MNVA will expand its curriculum to high school students. Specketer said she and the district hope to enroll about 200 students into the new courses.
The expansion coincides with the gradual movement of MCOL from a purely secondary program to grades 7-12. Officials from both schools compared the situation to districts that have two physical high schools.
“Each of us really does things differently,” Specketer said. “They are very different learning environments.”
The differences in the two programs are rooted in their creation. MCOL, which was formed to offer additional courses to high school students that their resident districts couldn’t provide, enrolls about half of its students part-time, also known as supplemental learners. Students take classes in their home districts but take additional courses through MCOL.
MNVA enrolls entirely full-time students. About half of its enrollment comes from children who were already being home-schooled, and the rest previously went to public, charter and private schools. The program involves intense parental involvement — about 20 full-time licensed teachers offer instruction and aid via e-mail and phone, but much of the actual instruction is guided by a parent or guardian.
That bothers some state-wide classroom teachers, whose union, Education Minnesota, filed a 2003 lawsuit against the Minnesota Department of Education to block MNVA. The union said MNVA was essentially subsidized home-schooling.
The courts disagreed, and the union lost the case. Education Minnesota maintains its position, spokesman Doug Dooher said, but plans no more legal action.
The teachers union also bristles at both MNVA’s and MCOL’s associations with out-of-state, for-profit companies, which provide the online instructional curriculum for the schools. K-12, based out of Virginia, provides MNVA’s curriculum, while KC Distance Learning, a subsidiary of Arizona-based Aventa Learning, provides MCOL’s. Houston’s school district paid $2.1 million to the companies last school year.
“We are fundamentally opposed to teaching being a for-profit exercise,” Dooher said.
But for MCOL director Steve Kerska, his school’s involvement with its provider is no different than similar arrangements other public schools have.
“Text books, bus services, you buy that from a for-profit company,” Kerska said. “There’s hardly anything a school purchases that isn’t from a for-profit.”
It works for them
Lisa Douglas chose to keep her kids at home, mostly because she was concerned her children may have dyslexia, like other members of their father’s family.
“Some people do home-schooling to have total control of their kids,” Douglas said. “We aren’t separatists or anything; this just allows us a little more time to do the learning that happens outside of a classroom.”
Trianna and Quentin are required to turn in writing samples, math tests and projects to their teachers, but their studies happen at a more controlled pace. Students at MNVA don’t pass a class until they complete a percentage of their course work, which can happen on their own schedules. MNVA also gives parents more flexibility in how their children progress in grade levels. If an MNVA elementary student fails one course, he can still move ahead in other classes rather than being held back an entire grade level.
“We can spend more time on the subjects that the kids are having difficulty in,” Douglas said.
Douglas’ kids still read books, write papers and do the same work traditional students do, but they receive their instruction in different ways. Online programs and tests add to what their mother guides them through, and their homeroom teacher talks to them online or by phone.
MCA-II test scores showed mixed results for the schools, like many traditional public schools. MNVA scored above average in every reading section but below average in all math sections tested.
“Not everyone should be an online student,” Kerska said. “Traditional schools are still a great place for kids, but now there are valuable educational options for kids.”
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