In the beginning, there was Monte Vista On-Line Academy. Its state-assigned “pilot project” status signaled its daring, and its 13 students, wired up and logged on, were spared hours of bumping along rugged San Luis Valley roads to and from brick-and-mortar schools.
Now, no longer provisional or experimental, and championed by a strange-bedfellows mix of parents, school-choice advocates and social activists, online schools are a fixture of the Colorado landscape from rural outposts to inner cities.
Yet as online schools grow, offering solutions for many students who struggle in traditional schools, so do questions about performance and practice.
Each fall, thousands of kids enroll in online schools — in 2010, the number was 15,249, or nearly 2 percent of the state’s K-12 total. And each year, thousands disappear from attendance rolls after the annual October head count that determines schools’ per-pupil funding.
Those who remain generally fare worse on standardized testing than students in traditional schools, even as millions of taxpayer dollars feed a system that lurches ahead with sporadic official oversight.
“This thing is growing by leaps and bounds, and it’s without controls in place that are appropriate or necessary for fully accredited programs,” said online pioneer Lorenzo Trujillo, who contributed to a 2007 statewide report that served as the foundation for online regulations now in place.
Most troubling to critics are the vast numbers of students enrolled in online schools — authorized by charter authorities and brick-and-mortar districts — who seemingly disappear each year, according to data supplied by the schools to the Colorado Department of Education.
In the fall of 2009, the state’s largest online school, Colorado Virtual Academy, reported enrollment of 5,006. By the end of the school year, state records show, COVA had lost just more than 1,000 students, or 21 percent of its initial enrollment. With the state paying about $6,000 per pupil, based on its fall head count, the state paid COVA roughly $6 million to educate students who were gone by the end of the year.
At the state’s third-largest online program, Insight School of Colorado, enrollment plummeted by more than half from the fall of 2009 to the end of the school year in 2010.
Among other high-enrollment online schools, Hope Online Learning Academy Co-op lost 610, or about 22 percent of its 2,839 total. Colorado Connections Academy’s enrollment of 1,060 dropped 13 percent.
“That’s something we take very seriously and are looking at,” said Amy Anderson, assistant commissioner of innovation and choice for the Colorado Department of Education.
State Sen. Brandon Shaffer, a Longmont Democrat who is running for Congress, wants to take a look at it too.
Last week, Shaffer called for a state audit of online schools, saying the plummeting enrollment after the October count suggests student rosters have been inflated to maximize funding from the state.
Leaders at for-profit K12 Inc., which operates 29 online schools nationwide and two of Colorado’s largest, say they favor changing the state’s funding system from the current one based on a single-day student census to a process that calculates the average number of days a student is enrolled.
In January, a consultant’s report to CDE recommended doing just that in order for school funding to more closely reflect the distribution of students.
Heidi Heineke-Magri, director of COVA, one of K12’s schools, said the tendency of online students to move around exceeds even the ever-increasing mobility of traditional students.
“We tend to have kids who just need to get a couple credits” online to get back on track and return to a traditional school, she said.
She estimated that two-thirds of the high-school students who enroll in COVA are behind their grade level in credits they need to graduate.
Heineke-Magri said the No. 1 reason students give for leaving COVA is that they are returning to a traditional school, a finding that mirrors most larger online schools.
Still, dropout rates — kids who leave education altogether — are higher among online students than their traditional-school peers.
Online proponents point out that nearly all their students come from traditional schools, where things weren’t working out.
Juan Cervantes is one of those kids.
“I used to hang around with the wrong kind of people and get in trouble,” he said at the Center of Hope Academy in Lakewood, one of Hope Online’s 47 hybrid learning center sites across the state.
Learning center students work at their own pace online, but in a classroom, where teachers and aides hover around them.
Cervantes, now 15, didn’t flourish at Hope initially. He got in trouble, missed classes, generally kept up his old ways, school director Lavinia Lovato said, until she sat him down for a heart-to-heart talk.
Now, he’s the learning center’s success story, with plans to graduate in a year and a half.
Taking hard cases
Troubled kids, teen parents, kids with learning disabilities, kids who’ve been tossed from traditional schools, kids so smart they’re bored in traditional schools — all are part of the population that makes up online students.
Yet only two online schools have been designated Alternative Education Campuses — a status that recognizes the challenges of educating high numbers of students in poverty, or whose families are in crisis.
One of those is GOAL Academy, which qualifies because its students share one or more of 14 characteristics the state uses to define a “high-risk student.” Administrators say GOAL takes students other schools won’t — including kids who won’t graduate within four years — because they count against a school’s graduation rate.
“It’s the right thing to do for society,” said GOAL Academy executive director Ken Crowell. “Our goal is to get these kids with a life plan that’s going to launch them to be successful, taxpaying citizens.”
Meanwhile, GOAL’s test scores and graduation rates pull down the authorizing Colorado Charter School Institute’s overall numbers — a scenario that some complain is unfair. But Crowell acknowledges that time is short to prove its approach to helping hard cases actually works.
“If schools like GOAL Academy don’t work, what option would these students have?” he said. “It’s not a dropout rate. Let’s be honest: It’s a push-out rate, because (traditional) schools need to make themselves look good in the political light.”
Even among students who remain, test performance at online schools has stubbornly hung below that of brick-and-mortar schools. In 2010, six online schools clung to the bottom rung of the state’s four-tiered ranking system.
The percentage of students scoring proficient or better on the Colorado Student Assessment Program, the state’s annual measure of academic achievement, lags significantly in all categories and in some cases worsens with each advancing grade level.
In 2010, barely 9 percent of online 10th-graders scored well in math; slightly more than 27 percent in writing. Among 10th-graders enrolled in traditional schools that year, about 32 percent were proficient or better in math; nearly 49 percent in writing.
Trying to find a fit
Almost anyone involved with online education repeats the same mantra: It’s not for everyone.
Deborah Rogeness has a flexible job that allows her to function as a teacher while her son, Dylan Boop, learns online.
“It’s nice to be as much a part of the process, but I don’t see how you could do this if you’re working a regular full-time job,” she said.
Dylan, who has mild autism, struggled in school to control his emotions and handle taunts from other kids. Despite warnings that it could be socially harmful, his mom tried COVA’s program and said her son is flourishing.
“He feels good about his brain again,” she said. “Parents who are trying to get an education for their children, whether they have special needs or not, they need to be told they have choices.”
Many families thrive in the online environment, though probably few to the extent of Stephanie Martinez and her kids. After a brief try at home-schooling, she turned to the online option.
Martinez’s oldest, 20-year-old Selina, graduated from COVA and attends community college with an eye toward enrolling at the University of Colorado Denver next spring. Son Chris, 17, has thrived on the flexible schedule and challenging course offerings at Colorado Connections Academy. Matt, 15, also works through Colorado Connections, and Stephanie, 13, studies with COVA.
The Martinezes’ situation contains one element that virtually all online advocates describe as essential: an involved adult supervising the process.
“My normal school day is 14 hours,” Martinez said. “If you’re not an involved parent, this is not a program to be in, in any online school.”
In Woodland Park, the online option also proved a good fit for April Riggs, who enrolled her daughter in Branson School Online after the events of Columbine and 9/11 made her hyperaware of safety at a traditional school. She later enrolled her son.
“By the time my daughter was in third grade, she was independent enough to contact her teacher if she had a question about one of her classes,” Riggs said. “I liked the fact they were learning how to be self-starters. That was icing on the cake.”
The tiny Branson School District, a speck on the map near the New Mexico border, became one of the early online providers even though its traditional enrollment hovered around two or three dozen. And after some early administrative missteps, Branson Online has emerged among the better performing online schools.
Its enrollment this year will be about 450 students spread across the state.
Unlike most online schools in Colorado, Branson doesn’t contract with a larger company to administer its program, preferring what principal Leanna Christians calls a “home-grown” approach that also includes efforts to build community among its student families.
But a few years ago, as Branson’s enrollment ballooned to more than 1,000, a state audit found problems with the way it tallied students.
Branson said the errors were made in a good-faith effort to follow unclear count-day rules, but the issues covered five years and required payback to the state of $646,767 in per-pupil funding.
Last year, the district sought support through a mill-levy override. It passed easily.
Following the money
Financial concerns form the basis for much of the controversy surrounding for-profit online enterprises.
In its 2010 annual report, K12’s chief executive, Ron Packard, and chairman, Andrew Tisch, assured investors that “at K12 we are committed to creating shareholder value.”
In that respect, K12 has been highly successful.
In 2010, the company reported net income of $21.5 million, an increase of 74.8 percent over the previous year.
One reason Tisch and Packard cite for the enormous income growth is K12’s acquisition of former competitors. But sizable chunks of K12’s revenue come from the online schools it manages in 29 states.
In 2010, COVA paid its parent company $22 million — or $4,358 for each of the 4,595 Colorado students it reported in October of that year — in “professional services” and “technology service fees.”
K12 officials said the money was used for student computers, technology and a national teacher training program, as well as supplies and advertising.
“We believe in sending kids everything they need,” said Mary Gifford, regional senior vice president of school services.
CDE’s Anderson pointed out that under a new law, online schools will be required to file detailed financial statements.
For-profit corporations aren’t online education’s only financial beneficiaries.
In Colorado, each online school must be authorized by an existing public school district, which oversees matters like curriculum and standards, often in exchange for fees or a percentage of the online school’s state funding.
Though it authorizes Insight School of Colorado, the small Julesburg School District has only one student enrolled full-time in the online program. But last year the district netted a little more than $500,000 for serving as authorizer — a role that carried significant costs only in the first year of operation, said district Superintendent Shawn Ehnes.
The additional revenue has allowed Julesburg to withstand a massive loss of state funding, retain two music teachers, add technology and install geothermal heating systems at the elementary and high school.
But because online enrollment dwarfs traditional enrollment, the online school’s “turnaround” status has become a drag on districtwide accreditation.
“From the standpoint of district achievement, we don’t view it as, ‘just send us the check and we don’t care,’ ” Ehnes said. “Ultimately, if the financial gains are a driving force, it’s in our best interest to make sure this is a long-term relationship. It’s advantageous for us to get this right.”
As part of its state-ordered improvement plan, Insight has revamped its enrollment process, revised student assessments and instituted one-on- one counseling and a student performance agreement.
“The students who enroll and go through all of the steps are the ones who truly want to be here and understand what online learning is about,” said Insight’s executive director, Chuck Wolfe, who anticipates enrollment of 700 to 750 this year. “I think that, in itself, is going to produce a more committed student that’s going to stay longer.”
Quality concerns and backlash over attrition and completion rates are an inevitable byproduct of online learning’s hype and rampant growth, some experts say.
Brent Wilson, professor of information and learning technologies at UC Denver, one of the few schools to offer a graduate certificate in online teaching, notes that the re-examination ultimately will produce a better product.
“Data will bite back,” he said. “But the push-back of the data isn’t going to stop the phenomenon. It’ll make us reflect and make sure it’s being done well.”
Karen Auge: 303-954-1733 or kauge@denverpost.com
Kevin Simpson: 303-954-1739 or ksimpson@denverpost.com
