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Feds give K12 Start-Up Money for Arkansas Charter

Ohanian Comment: This article raises a whole lot more questions than it answers.

The Arkansas Virtual Academy is now open to virtually every student in the state.

The Arkansas Board of Education gave permission Monday for the academy to open next fall as a charter school. By doing that, the board removed a cap on the number of students who may attend. "The biggest thing is that it will be a sustainable program now," said Randall Greenway, director of the academy.

The school, now based in Little Rock, will move its headquarters to Cabot. Teachers and students, however, will work and learn from their homes all over the state.

Students, many of whom were home-schooled before the academy opened, are taught in their own homes with Internet-based lessons developed by K12, a private Virginia-based company headed by former U.S. Secretary of Education William J. Bennett.

The Cabot Board of Education voted Aug. 19 to "wholeheartedly oppose" the charter, but no one from the Cabot School District attended the state board’s hearing Monday.

State Education Board member Shelby Hillman of Carlisle said she felt excited about the charter and she wished someone from the Cabot district were at the meeting to explain why that board opposed the plan.

A letter signed by all the board members said the board opposed the charter because it "undermines public schools by draining public dollars, attention and commitment from schools."

The virtual school, which has students from all over the state, began last year with the help of a $2.3 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Voluntary Public School Choice Program.

Virtual-school students enrolled through their public school districts and had access to gifted-and- talented and special-education services and extracurricular activities through those districts. The districts got to keep the full per-pupil expenditures from the state but had little responsibility for many of those enrolled.

Students next year will enroll directly in the newly approved charter school, which will receive those per-pupil expenditures — about $5,000 per child — and will bear responsibility for providing the services available through the resident districts last year.

Greenway said about 450 kindergarten-through-seventhgrade students are enrolled in the school now, and about 800 more are on a waiting list.

Next year the school will expand to include eighth grade and possibly ninth grade, Greenway said.

Eventually it will serve kindergarten through 12 th grade.

Bror Saxberg, chief learning officer for K12, said that along with a research-based curriculum the school provides interactive materials specially designed for lessons deemed hardest for children to master.

Each child works at his own pace, completing one lesson and assessment before moving on to the next. "What happens to that child [in a regular school] who gets 45 minutes of math but needs 55?" Saxberg said. "That question is irrelevant for virtualschool students," he said. "It’s not a race against the clock."

Former state Sen. John Brown, R-Siloam Springs, chairman of the Arkansas Virtual Academy board of directors, told the board that funding the public charter school would make efficient use of the state’s money. "I think we have here an opportunity for a choice that virtually any student in the state would have access to this program," White said.

He told the board that, regardless of "geographic location," students who signed up with the academy would have access to a high-quality educational program.

Carol Hooder, a virtualschool teacher who lives in North Little Rock, said most of her students live in the southern part of the state. "We wanted to work with families," Hooder said, explaining that the teachers appreciate the high level of parent participation they see from those working with the school.

James and Georgene Jackson of Maumelle have a fifth-grader in the school. "We were home-schooling already, and we saw this as a way to validate what we were doing," James Jackson said. "It did. We think it’s great."


— Kimberly Disongh
Arkansas Charters Virtual Academy
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
2003-10-14
http://www.nwanews.com/adg/story_Arkansas.php?storyid=44416

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