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Gracie, a junior at Roosevelt High School in Johnstown, missed lots of school last year. Gossip and drama were stressing her out.
“It was giving me a lot of anxiety,” she said. “It got to the point where I hadn’t shown up so much that I was scared to show up.”
This year, Gracie is one of 97 high schoolers in the online program in her small northern Colorado district — Weld RE-5J — taking a mix of online and in-person classes. She likes the freedom to work at her own pace some days, tapping out history, English, and Spanish assignments at her kitchen table.
As more Colorado districts look to add online offerings to blunt the impact of declining enrollment, Weld RE-5J’s longstanding online program is an example of what’s possible. Although the 4,200-student district doesn’t actively advertise the program, there’s been a waitlist for more than a year. In December, district leaders hired a second teacher to help oversee their online students. Next year, they plan to pilot an online program for up to five middle schoolers and expand the online high school program to 120 students — about 10% of the district’s high school enrollment.
“It’s really important to us to grow slowly enough that we grow well,” said Alexandra Ham, the district’s online administrator.
Weld RE-5J provides online classes primarily through Colorado Digital Learning Solutions, a state-supported nonprofit that offers a large menu of asynchronous online classes taught by Colorado licensed teachers.
Ham said most students in her district’s online program have at least one state-designated risk factor, often anxiety, depression, or health issues that make a full load of in-person classes challenging. About 15% of the program’s students take all their classes online. The rest, like Gracie, have hybrid schedules, with about half in-person and half online classes.
That set-up is ideal, Ham said, because it often addresses the problems students are facing while giving them in-person social opportunities and access to electives and hands-on career preparation classes at the high school.
Dan Morris, co-executive director of Colorado Digital Learning Solutions, described Weld RE-5J as a showcase for its online program.
“It’s my belief … that if a district will offer more hybrid options, fewer kids are going to want to leave for the full-time online,” he said.
Often, such full-time online offerings are provided by what Colorado calls multi-district online schools, public schools that enroll students from two or more school districts. Statewide, more than 30,000 students attend such schools. The big names include Astravo, GOAL, and Colorado Connections Academy. Some of them have optional in-person components, others operate fully online.
Over the last year, Morris’ group has worked with dozens of Colorado districts interested in launching their own online programs, in part to help win back students who’ve left for multi-district online schools or to keep them from leaving in the first place.
Weld RE-5J, which has run its online program for more than a decade, is in the enviable position of being among a small number of growing school districts in a state full of shrinking districts.
But Ham and her team still want to keep students local while satisfying the growing demand for online learning. The district has used other online class vendors over the years — Edgenuity and Florida Virtual School, for example. With Florida Virtual, it was trickier to get assistance because of the time zone difference. For some platforms, the rigor wasn’t there: Students were passive, showing knowledge through basic multiple choice assignments. Sometimes they completed semester-long classes in days or weeks.
All of Weld RE-5J’s online students — both hybrid and fully online — have a modest in-school requirement: three hours a week either at Roosevelt High or a freshly refurbished portable classroom in Milliken, on the east side of the district. That’s when the district’s two online teachers check in with students about their progress and grades.
“It makes sure that we have eyes on the students, especially with how much mental health stuff there is going on,” said Ham. “If they miss a meeting, they’re not ignored.”
Gracie, who hopes to be a realtor, attended a recent in-person session with three classmates in a second-floor room at Roosevelt High School. She looked over a chemistry assignment on her tablet, while her tablemate Briley worked on a digital vision board about her aspirations for a job in healthcare, maybe phlebotomy.
Briley, a junior, joined the online program in January. She’s not a morning person and regularly overslept last semester, causing lots of absences and frequent fights with her mom. When she did attend school, she struggled to sit through 90-minute classes when she knew could get the work done more quickly on her own, she said.
Now Briley takes English, history, and physical education in person, while doing math, chemistry, Spanish, and social and emotional learning online.
“It’s definitely been the best change ever,” she said. “My mental health, first of all, is 10 times better, and my grades have honestly never been this good.”
Ann Schimke is a senior reporter at Chalkbeat. Contact Ann at aschimke@chalkbeat.org
