Online classes are expanding rapidly in Arizona’s public schools, reshaping the way children learn all the way down to kindergarten.
More K-12 Arizona students are trading in the traditional campus experience for learning by computer at home any time of day or night. The number of students in Arizona-approved online schools has more than tripled over the past six years. Nearly 36,000 students, or about 3 percent of public-school students in the state, took at least one online course in 2010-11.
Students attend for free because, like any public school, online schools get state funding.
The growth is being greeted with a mix of hope and alarm. Online education, a staple at colleges for years, holds a lot of promise because it strips away the limits of fixed time and place for school. It allows students in any place to be taught at any time, and at their own pace. It uses e-mail, chats, video, audio and animated graphics to engage. A dull lecture can become a compelling interactive lesson.
Two weeks into the 2009-10 school year, Peoria mom Stacy Gebhart was unhappy with the school her twins attended.
Class sizes had grown at West Wing School in the Deer Valley Unified district because of budget cuts. The sixth-grade lessons sometimes seemed full of fluff, Gebhart said. In one class, the first week of school was spent making a poster to illustrate life’s highlights.
A friend told her about online schools, so the family decided to try Arizona Virtual Academy. More than a year later, the stay-at-home mom says her 12-year-old daughters, Hannah and Sydney, are less stressed and more engaged in learning. They earned A’s and B’s in the online school, as they did at West Wing.
Stacy sees plenty of other benefits: No morning rush. No evening homework. No drama with other girls at school.
