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Registration open for SBISD online summer school

February 22, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Are you already planning for summer? Spring Branch ISD is offering a popular option: “virtual” or “online” courses to students in grades 6-12 through the Virtual High School (VHS).

The web-based courses require little on-campus time, which allows students and families to work around travel, vacations, jobs, camps, or activities. At their Spring Valley campus in west Houston, VHS instructors provide “drop-in” support for academic, technical or test-proctoring needs.

For the rest of the article, go to Registration open for SBISD online summer school

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Spring ISD hosts outreach walk

February 15, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Project Tomorrow is a virtual school program that provides students who have not been enrolled in a Texas Public School for more than 30 consecutive days, are younger than age 26 and reside within the Spring ISD a no-cost opportunity to earn a diploma.

The program has been made possible by a grant for Online Learning and Dropout Recovery that was awarded by Texas Virtual School Network at Region 10 Education Service Center.

For the rest of the article, go to Spring ISD hosts outreach walk

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ECISD in 2011: A year of budget woes and highs and lows

January 1, 2012 By Leave a Comment

That included elimination of 35 positions as part of “program adjustments,” which would affect the Virtual High School, the district’s truancy program, Channel 10, ECISD Police, Communities in Schools, as well as “extra” clerk positions.

In addition, 13 full-time employees were cut from central administration, while nine positions opened by attrition was not filled.

A list of employees cut was obtained by Odessa American through an open records request, showed two of 60 employees that were named, executive director of athletics Leon Fuller and executive director of special projects Randy Talley, made more than $100,000 a year. Meanwhile, nine clerks at magnet schools, who make between $13,739 and $22,399 annually, had their positions cut.

For the rest of the article, go to ECISD in 2011: A year of budget woes and highs and lows

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10 Parents Respond to the New York Times

December 26, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Jen said, “My son attends Texas Virtual Academy at Southwest – only he couldn’t start on time this year. He had open heart surgery on August 23rd, the first day of school. His surgery was 8 hours, and he was in the hospital three weeks. The surgeons wanted us to “keep him out of school” for another two months after that – when we explained about K12, that we would be able to pace him, that it would not be physically taxing, they gave us approval to start as soon as he was ready. He chose to return the week he was out of the hospital. His teacher was aware of everything, helped us get him back in a groove, and instead of missing the three weeks of school he was able to start from the first day of school 3 weeks late – without K12, I have no doubt his 8th Grade Year would have potentially been down the drain. Because of K12, he was able to ease back into his normal life at his own pace, with the support of his parents and the school – and most especially his teacher. I wish they would profile some of us for a change.”

Jody said, “It’s nice to have options! I have a wonderful sixteen year old son who is very creative & intelligent. He is bored to death in school. We have so much stimulation in the world today. We ask our kids to sit in a chair for hours, non stimulated. Our local public school system is on the cutting edge. But, it’s not changing fast enough for him. K12 allows him time to do other things. He already is a budding entrepreneur and has a YouTube sight with 5,000 hits. We are grateful for this outside of the box option.”

For the rest of the article, go to 10 Parents Respond to the New York Times

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Virtual High School offers students choice, flexibility

December 3, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Housed within Spring Branch ISD’s Academy of Choice are classrooms without walls, learning spaces where time management skills and analytical skills take on equal importance.

The Virtual High School offers Spring Branch high school students free access to locally developed online courses, and into a statewide network of courses that are available for a fee.

The idea is to provide students the flexibility for “any time, any place” learning, and access to courses that might not fit into a student’s daily schedule, or might not be offered in a particular semester — or at a particular campus.

“It’s all about opportunity and choice,” said Joyce Roberta Miller-Alper, a longtime teacher in Spring Branch ISD and a former Texas teacher of the year.

Courses are designed with the same rigor as traditional courses without the traditional classroom parameters. There is still material to be read, research to be conducted and assignments to be completed and graded.

For the rest of the article, go to Virtual High School offers students choice, flexibility

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Oaks Christian Online School Student Athlete Competes in Dallas Texan Fall Festival

November 23, 2011 By Leave a Comment

According to Vicki Conway, Director of Oaks Christian Online School, “Summer is exactly the type of focused, college-bound student that will thrive at our school.”

The main campus of Oaks Christian School in Westlake Village opened in the fall of 2000 and Oaks Christian Online School (OCO) opened for full-time, online students in the fall of 2011. The online school provides a rigorous and challenging college preparatory education for high school students all across the country in a Christian environment. Oaks Christian Online School continues to enroll part-time and full-time students throughout the school year and regularly hosts information sessions on its main campus – 31749 La Tienda Drive, Westlake Village, CA 91362, as well as virtual information sessions for prospective student families. Interested students can visit the website http://online.oakschristian.org to R.S.V.P.

For the rest of the article, go to Oaks Christian Online School Student Athlete Competes in Dallas Texan Fall Festival

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School Reform Is Making Advances across America

November 9, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Turning next to school choice, we have an interesting position paper from the Texas Public Policy Foundation. It reviews the progress Texas has made in liberating students from failing schools and offers some suggestions for taking reforms in Texas farther.

The paper rightly notes that “school choice” encompasses many mechanisms, from charter schools to tuition tax deductions and credits to voucher schools to (a more recent trend) “virtual” schools, where students can access software on the internet.

The Foundation’s report has useful information on all these areas.

Start with charter schools. Texas has come a long way from 1995, when the state legislature first allowed charter schools, to today, when the state has 185 of them collectively enrolling 120,000 students. This is an admirable growth, but there is much more to be done. The collective wait list for these schools has exploded, from 17,000 students in 2007-2008 to 40,000 in 2008-2009, and to 56,000 in 2009-2010. The problem here, as in other states, is that the vicious rent-seekers who oppose all school reform — i.e., teachers’ unions and their allies — put a cap of 215 on the number of charter schools.

This cap obviously should be eliminated. All the states should just let as many charter schools open as there are parents and students who want them. However, moves to remove this cap failed in the last legislative session, and while the state has agreed to guarantee bonds to allow new charters, it jacked up the regulations on them (even though they are already operating under the broad control of the public school system).

For the rest of the article, go to School Reform Is Making Advances across America

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Clay Road Baptist claims volleyball championship with six players

November 7, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Fellow eighth-grader Skrehot is a homeschool student who made the most of a chance to play interscholastic volleyball. Stewart said CRBS regularly offers opportunities for homeschool students and he was grateful to Skrehot’s parents for her contribution to the school and the team.

Skrehot’s mother, Sandy Skrehot, said the association has been mutually beneficial.

“Our daughter is educated from home through Texas Virtual Academy,” Skrehot said. “We have appreciated CRBS giving her the opportunity to participate in their athletics program for the past three years.”

Skrehot, Morel and Riley all played in and won a postseason all-star game Oct. 25 at Logos Preparatory Academy. Their leadership, particularly Morel’s return from injury, helped bring along the team’s younger players.

Stewart said opponents sometimes focused on sending the ball to the fifth-grade players, including Burt who took a serve off of her face during the tournament but finished the match.

For the rest of the article, go to Clay Road Baptist claims volleyball championship with six players

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Texas official defends online course network’s quality, oversight and transparency

November 5, 2011 By Leave a Comment

In a story we published Tuesday, state Rep. Scott Hochberg (D-Houston) told the Texas Independent he’s concerned about a lack of quality control in the state’s full-time online K-12 schools, and more generally in the Texas Virtual School Network, a statewide clearinghouse for online courses for K-12 students.

Started in early 2009 as a way to extend specialized courses to rural students, and to help special needs students and youths in juvenile detention earn high school credit, the virtual school network has seen a sharp enrollment increase over the last few years, though it dropped off sharply this fall.

Hochberg, who owns a software development company, said he hasn’t been impressed by the online courses he’s seen so far, and worried that sales pitches from for-profit course developers, not strategic plans developed by the state, are what’s driving the course network’s growth. Particularly troubling, he said, was that district officials must rely on sales pitches, rather than a look at the full online course, before deciding whether to offer it to their students.

But in an interview Tuesday afternoon, Kate Loughrey, the Texas Education Agency’s director of distance learning, said the state is constantly fine-tuning course offerings to meet districts’ needs. All the courses in the network are quality-controlled, she said, and TEA is developing new highlight reels of some courses to help districts see what they’re getting.

Today, Loughrey said, 17 school districts offer online high school courses in the state’s virtual network. Seven colleges also participate in the network, offering dual high school and college credit. About half the high school courses offered in the network are developed in-house by school districts in Texas, Loughrey said, while the other half are purchased from third-party software developers, like K12 Inc.

For the rest of the article, go to Texas official defends online course network’s quality, oversight and transparency.

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Hochberg: Online education business growing fast, without quality control from state

November 2, 2011 By Leave a Comment

In 2007, the Texas Legislature created a pilot program for a clearinghouse for online classes, a place where a large school districts around the state could offer specialized courses remotely to rural students, kids with special needs, or even students serving time in juvenile detention.

Since then, though, that pilot version of the Texas Virtual School Network has evolved into a much larger initiative, with some courses developed by public school districts and colleges, and others created by for-profit companies. It’s aged into a permanent program with few benchmarks and loose oversight, says one lawmaker who helped craft the pilot program.

While the program may be specific to Texas, it reflects a growing challenge across the country. An October New York Times/Texas Tribune story considered the “policy maze” officials in any state must navigate as online education grows:

It threatens many concepts that are fundamental to the identity of public education: districts defined by geographic boundaries and brick-and-mortar buildings. Among the challenges, however, is dealing with what it means to be publicly financed in a digital education world, where much of the curriculum and even employees can come from profit-making companies.

Gene V. Glass, a senior researcher at the University of Colorado’s National Education Policy Center, told the Tribune the for-profit nature of the industry, and its consolidation in the hands of five major companies, was problematic. “They are responsible to their shareholders, not to the kids or anyone else. They are in it for the money,” he said.

For the rest of the article, go to Hochberg: Online education business growing fast, without quality control from state

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