The district plans to increase the number of courses it offers online from three to 11.

Cory Tressler, the district’s director of virtual learning, said that expanding the offerings will give students a better opportunity to take high-level courses. Often these courses are not offered at each high school — too few students are interested in taking them to justify the cost or there’s no teacher available for them.

Currently, keyboarding, advanced placement physics and advanced placement calculus BC are offered. About 150 students are enrolled in the courses. Keyboarding is the most popular.

Next year, AP courses in world history, environmental science, Spanish and French will be added. Classes in creative writing, art history and contemporary music also are planned.

Teachers of each virtual course record their lectures and notes and post them to Moodlerooms, an online space where students can watch the videos, submit assignments and interact with the teacher.

Bluffton High School teacher Kevin Sandusky, who teaches the AP physics course, said teaching virtually can be challenging. Physics is visual, hands-on subject, he said, and doesn’t lend itself to teaching via computer.

He also realized how much he was energized by being in front of his pupils.

“I can’t teach without an audience,” he said. “I would go for about five minutes and then get tongue-tied. And I’ve been teaching for 15 years.”

Only practice has made him better, he said.

“The first 45 minutes and last 45 minutes of each day will be used to work on individualized things. There won’t be any homework because the children will have spent the day being very physically and mentally active and when they leave they should be able to be children again,” she said. “And the teachers won’t have a lot of homework, either. People forget teachers also have a lot of homework.”

Seeking students

With the beginning of the 2012-2013 school year, the school will be one of seven new public charter schools, joining the 13 schools operating within the South Carolina Public Charter School District. Program emphasis varies among the schools and includes a Chinese immersion curriculum, creative arts, gifted and talented, and several virtual schools that provide online instruction.

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ROCK HILL –

Online summer school was a success and enrollment is building for the academy, with the online charter school ready to begin session Aug. 10, district officials say. The goal is to start with 300 students, and the target can be met if parents turn in enrollment paperwork on time, said Southern California Online Academy Principal Veronica Godinez.

For the rest of the article, go to LEUSD Online Charter School Ready To Go

Regretfully, Gregg Rosann and Rebekah Richards of The American Academy feel that “trite, blame-the-victim themes only aggravate dropout situations.” This is their opinion, but it has no support on this side of the school leadership spectrum. Should K-12 school improvement gains be realized, the so-called “victims” must be part of the solutions.

That’s because SC Whitmore School doesn’t have doors or windows or any part of a building, other than its two-person office in Chapin. The public charter high school is completely online, and it’s enrolling now.

Whitmore’s curriculum is provided through CompuHigh, which is regionally accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. Whitmore will be the fifth virtual high school in the state, but Principal Ellen Ray said it is unique because its classes are mastery-based and year-round instead of semester-based.

Students must make an A or B in a lesson before moving on and can revise their work as many times as needed. Multiple revisions, however, detract from the end grade for the course.

Students can take up to eight courses a year and space out their work at their discretion, provided they don’t take a break for three consecutive days. Otherwise, they’ll get in trouble for virtual truancy. Parents are sent a weekly report on their children’s progress.

For the rest of the article, go to New high school exists only online

Ms. Sherman comes to Provost Academy from Orangeburg Consolidated School District 4, where she has served as Assistant Superintendent.  Previously, she was Director of Secondary Education in Orangeburg.

As the principal at Morningside Middle School in the Charleston County School District, Ms. Sherman led the school to a Palmetto Silver award for student achievement all three years she served as the principal. She also served as principal of West Ashley Middle School in Charleston.

For the rest of the article, go to Longtime South Carolina Educator to Lead Provost Academy

The National Association of School Superintendents announced the finalists Thursday. The other four are from Colorado, South Carolina, Louisiana and Wisconsin.

Theresa Daem, the association’s executive director, wrote in a news release that Namin’s outstanding achievements in Westbrook included the development of a strategic plan for the district, reduction in drop-out rates and the initiation of virtual high school courses.

Namin, who came to Westbrook two years earlier from the Ralph C. Mahar School District in Orange, Mass., announced in March that he had accepted a job as superintendent of the Spencer-East Brookfield Regional School District in central Massachusetts. He planned to stay through the end of the school year, but the Westbrook School Committee asked him to step down, as the district faced a budget crisis.

For the rest of the article, go to Dispatches

For the rest of the article, go to South Carolina Connections Academy

“I think this will help the community buy into the concept that as it takes a village to raise a child, it takes the community to see that children are educated,” she said.

“Right now, we are in the process of trying to find people who have opted out of school this year,” Cash-Greene said. “We will go out and try to get them back in school.”

District 3 plans to offer a variety of options to the dropouts, she said. Some of them may want to come back to school, but there are others who might want to go through a virtual school or work on a GED.

In 2008-09, District 3 had a dropout rate of 2.5 percent. It jumped to 3.8 percent in 2009-10.

Wilson says she’s not sure what caused the increase.

“We are still trying to examine our records,” she said. “Our enrollment dropped, so a few more (dropouts) would give it a higher percentage.”

For the rest of the article, go to Local schools seek to lower dropout rate