Julie McInerney

Slm 521 SP03

02/08/03

Article Critique #2

The article, "A Virtual Tour of Virtual Schools," located in the September 2002 issue of the American School Board Journal gives a brief overview of eight highly functioning virtual schools in the United States. These schools are seeing a boom in enrollment and are trying to keep up to provide distance education to all students. The first school Lottie L. Joyner shows to us is the Kentucky Virtual High School. This school began in January 2000 with sixty students. Today, the Kentucky Virtual High School serves 500 students. The premise of this school is to provide specialized areas of instruction that students in very small schools would not be offered in their school with walls. Kentucky Virtual High School offers higher level courses, but also offers support to students in academic need. Another virtual school that was discussed in this article was The Illinois Virtual High School. This school offers sixty-nine courses to students in grades nine through twelve. Teachers are part time classroom teachers who also work as part time contractors for the online school. This school has about 3,500 students to date. The goal in this school is to be able to meet the needs of every student through online learning. In Florida, the Florida Virtual School was started as a solution to overcrowded schools, a lack of qualified teachers, and a high dropout rate. When this school was started in 1997 as a partnership of six districts, fifteen teachers and seventeen students were involved. Today the school serves more than 10,000 students including home schooled and private schooled students. The article discusses the same trends in CCS Web academy, The Virtual High School, Basehor-Linwood Virtual Charter School, Monte Vista Online Academy, and CoolSchool. Each school’s link is included for the reader to visit. Overall, this article gives a great look inside each virtual school and shows that this type of schooling is serving the many needs of students.

I enjoyed reading about real virtual schools and how they are working with students. It was wonderful for me to see the high enrollment of these schools. It shows me that educators are bending every way to provide students with an opportunity to learn. Originally, I thought that elementary or middle school children would not be able to handle on line courses, but I read that in the Basehor-Linwood Virtual Charter School there were courses provided to elementary grades all the way to AP courses for older students. The goal in education is to meet the needs of all learners, and it is great to see real schools trying to reach this goal in a new and exciting way.

Joyner, Lottie. (2002). A Virtual Tour of Virtual Schools. American School

Board Journal. September 2002. Retrieved February 5, 2003,

From http://www.asbj.com/specialreports/0902.html