Students pick up pace with online classes

CHICAGO — Joelle Contorno wanted to do it all in her last year of high school — drama club, band, student council, part-time work — and still take the classes she needed to graduate.

Juggling a packed schedule, the 17-year-old turned to cyberspace, joining a growing number of students nationwide logging into classes from the comforts of home.

Contorno worked at her own pace, sometimes in pajamas or late at night, when she took her first civics class with the state-run Illinois Virtual High School. Now she's enrolled in an advanced history class that her high school in the Chicago suburbs doesn't offer.

Illinois' Internet school was started in 2001 to give students from rural, small or low-performing schools a chance to take economics, oceanography or other courses not offered at their own schools. Enrollments in the cyberschool tripled this year, from 410 to 1,230.

Increasingly, such online schools are being embraced by students not as a replacement for their local brick-and-mortar academy but as a valuable adjunct.

Nationwide, about 40,000 to 50,000 kindergarten-through-12th grade students were enrolled in online courses in 2001, according to a study by WestEd, an educational research group. Those numbers may have since doubled, though tracking all such activity in local districts is difficult, said Raymond Rose, vice president of the Concord Consortium, an education research and development group.

He estimates that more than half of the states now offer some form of virtual education.

Beyond that, 67 virtual charter schools in 17 states served 21,000 students last year, according to the Center for Education Reform, a charter school advocacy group in Washington.

In Florida's Virtual School, which has mushroomed from just a few dozen students seven years ago to an expected 14,000 this year — including hundreds from across the nation and several foreign countries who pay tuition — the motto is "any time, any place, any path, any pace."

"The 'pace' part really caught my attention," said Jasmine Buckhannon, a 15-year-old student of English and chemistry in the Florida Internet school who also attends a regular brick-and-mortar school by day. "In the regular public school you didn't have any time that you could spend. You had to have it then, there, right there."

Buckhannon was assigned "Of Mice and Men" by John Steinbeck and "Great Expectations" by Charles Dickens for her English class and was mailed a chemistry kit with goggles, beakers and test tubes so she could do experiments in her kitchen.

The challenge at the Florida Virtual School is to find enough certified teachers to keep up with demand. The 60 teachers hired this summer give the school a faculty of 150 who work from home.