This story by Yesenia Robles and Kae Petrin appeared on Chalkbeat Colorado on October 11, 2022.
When the pandemic first sent Colorado students home from school, Rachael Sheetz worried about the chaos of remote learning, but as the caretaker for her elderly grandmother, she also worried about COVID.
In her search for options for her two teenagers, she landed on Colorado Connections Academy, an online school. She figured they’d been doing online learning for a while and would be better prepared than traditional schools had been.
Today, 2½ years later, her son has returned to brick-and-mortar schooling at a popular local charter with high vaccination rates. But her daughter has stayed online, where she’s getting lots of teacher support and doing work that to Sheetz seems several grade levels ahead.
“I found that kids excel better when they can achieve academics at a pace that is comfortable for them,” Sheetz said. “My daughter has always been a decent student, but giving her more flexibility has helped her excel even more.”
Enrollment in online schools in Colorado grew steadily before the pandemic, then surged as schools shut down in spring 2020, despite overall enrollment in public schools dropping.
In fall 2021, the most recent complete data available, Colorado enrolled 30,803 students in online schools, 50% more than the 20,603 enrolled in fall 2018. Online students now represent about 3.5% of public school enrollment.
Although online enrollment declined slightly from 2020-21 to 2021-22, officials expect more steady growth over time.
School districts, aware of families’ interest, are opening their own new online schools to meet the demand. Yet much remains unknown about how online schools perform and how they’re managed.
One small district, Byers 32J, has increased its enrollment tenfold in the last decade by opening online charters. It now runs eight of them. That has increased its budget because the district keeps a portion of the state’s per student funds. Some of Byers’ schools posted the state’s biggest surges in enrollment and are the least transparent in data.
Statewide, seven in 10 online schools did not have enough data for the state to issue them a 2022 performance rating.
“It absolutely should be a concern,” said Van Schoales, senior policy director for the Keystone Policy Center. “The unfortunate irony is that online schools claim to be more connected to folks and yet a measure of connectedness is test participation and so it would suggest and reinforce a lot of the national research that online schools aren’t living up to advertising around personalizing instruction for kids.”
This fall, online school leaders say preliminary enrollment figures seem to show a slight dip again, but numbers still will be well above pre-pandemic levels.
Jeffco set up an online program last school year for families who weren’t ready to return to in-person classrooms, creating flexibility so that students could switch back and forth between remote learning during the year. This year, that program has converted into its own online school, here to stay.
Unlike the district’s Jeffco Virtual Academy, which has long existed, the new Jeffco Remote Learning Program school serves elementary age students too, and requires students to log in to receive live, real-time instruction from about 8 a.m. to 3 p.m.
At its peak last school year, the remote school had more than 1,300 students. This year, Principal Kala Munguia expects to have around 700 students. She said last year approximately 60% of students were enrolled because of pandemic health concerns, but this year students are more likely to prefer the learning model. Students who choose her school still want the live interactions every day.
“Our students tend to need or want that collaboration amongst other students,” Munguia said. She thinks more families will be interested in the model, once they learn it’s an option.
Adams 12 also set up a district-wide online program during the pandemic that now has turned into a new school, Five Star Online Academy.
Principal Adria Moersen said that the school was started in real time, or what’s called synchronous, but has since shifted to have more flexibility. Students can choose to be fully synchronous just for the mornings, or for certain days of the week, and now have more in-person opportunities for tutoring and other activities.
The school has about 520 students in grades 2 to 12, down from about 700 last year.
“This year these are students who are choosing online because it works for them,” Moersen said.
The district’s other online option is through Pathways, an alternative education school for older students off track to graduate. Before the pandemic, Pathways was a blended learning program that required most students to attend a few hours in person.
During the pandemic, the school tried allowing all students to be fully online, but found that it didn’t work for most students.
“Ours are students who really need that extra support,” said Principal Matt Schmidt. Still, this year, about 15% of students have been allowed to choose to stay fully online. The school’s model of six-week courses allows the students to opt to be online or in person for each six-week period.
District staff tout that flexibility as they try to reengage students who have left school. Moersen and Schmidt said that for some of their students, having to work or take care of family members means the online options work best.
When Sheetz chose an online school for her kids, she wasn’t sure it was going to work, but being a stay-at-home mom, she knew she’d be around to help them.
Sheetz was thrilled at the flexibility of being able to let her kids wake up later or take a break in the middle of the day to spend time together or run an errand. Still, she encouraged them to participate in some live classes at least once a week.
These are some of the same reasons families for years have chosen online learning. Bernie Zercher’s daughter’s social anxiety made it hard for her to participate in even the limited in-person programming that her siblings used as part of their home-schooling course. The biggest draw from GOAL Academy was more flexibility for her to participate live only as much as she wanted to, and that counselors and other available services could help her through her anxiety.
In four years in high school at GOAL, she’s become more comfortable with in-person activities and interactions, and now takes concurrent college classes in person, has an internship at the school’s multimedia department, and participates in a school music group.
“The GOAL setting was just so much more accommodating for her,” Zercher said. “I don’t know that that’s typical of online schools. I think it’s kind of unique to GOAL. They really were meant as a safety net for a lot of kids that had experienced childhood traumas or other issues.”
National data shows that online schools in general have lower student outcomes, including test scores and graduation rates, than do traditional in-person models. Studies of online learning during the pandemic also show students falling behind when they were learning virtually.
Of Colorado schools that tested enough students to report composite SAT scores publicly this year, online schools tested on average 25 points lower than brick-and-mortar schools, out of a 1,600-point maximum.
Yesenia Robles is a reporter for Chalkbeat Colorado covering K-12 school districts and multilingual education. Contact Yesenia at yrobles@chalkbeat.org. Kae Petrin is a data & graphics reporter for Chalkbeat. Contact Kae at kpetrin@chalkbeat.org.
Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.
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