Alongside five-days-a-week in-person instruction, Albemarle County is planning to offer an optional all-virtual school for elementary, middle, and high school students for the 2021-2022 school year. The virtual school will have its own principal and teachers, according to an Albemarle County Public Schools (ACPS) press release.
“My recommendation will be that our school board approve this plan as the default unless, of course, circumstances materially change,” ACPS Superintendent Matthew Haas said in the press release.
The press release said that in a poll of families with 6,500 responses, 90 percent supported in-person instruction, and about eight percent supported the all-virtual option.
“If this is optional, then you know, frankly, that’s what the traditional public school system should be doing more of anyways. They should be finding ways to create learning options that fit different students’ needs,” Heritage Foundation Senior Policy Analyst Jonathan Butcher said.
He said it is important that the virtual school will be optional.
“I think that was one of the problems with the move to all virtual learning during the pandemic was that the students didn’t choose that,” he said. “Part of the challenge was that you were forcing students into this way of life whose families, home life, or whatever, wasn’t a good fit for full-time online instruction.”
Butcher said a good full-time virtual schools will have time-tested ways of measuring student success, will include regular interactions with the teacher, and regular coursework-related interactions with other students.
“It’s not just a student’s going to watch a video and then fill out a worksheet online and that’s it,” he said.
He said the school needs to have a “well-rounded approach to keeping students engaged.”
“If that’s not what they’re intending, if this is sort of a fall-back plan so they can just move everybody back to virtual if they choose, that would not be in students’ best interest,” he added. “I would hope that the district would use this as an opportunity to be entrepreneurial about how they deliver learning.”
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Eric Burk is a reporter at The Virginia Star and the Star News Digital Network. Email tips to [email protected].
