July 24, 2008

Kayla Andrus joins third class to

graduate from online high school

A student living in Ritzville made the trek to Sammamish, Wash., and joined about 30 students at a commencement ceremony in the Lodge at Beaver Lake on June 14.

As Kayla Andrus received her diploma from Insight School of Washington from the Quillayute Valley School District, she met her classmates for the first time that day.

Andrus graduated as third in the class after attending the Insight School of Washington, an online public high school where students from across the state take courses, interact with teachers and submit homework via the internet.

The online school serves about 1,300 students. This is Insight’s third year in operation in Washington, and it’s the first system of its kind in the country. Four states currently run Insight schools, with seven more slated to start in the fall.

Insight School of Washington received a six-year accreditation from the Northwest Association of Accredited Schools in December 2007.

According to the WIAA, full-time students at Insight may participate in school sports at their resident public school. But because Quillayute Valley School District is credited with students’ full-time status, participating in other activities at their resident school such as band and drama isn’t allowed.

Although Insight operates like a traditional school on the administrative level, the online aspect allows students to take classes – from Advanced Placement to basic courses – on their own schedule.

That flexibility is what Andrus needed. She chose online education to have her child while still completing her education and obtaining a part-time job.

“It’s like a regular class but I’m doing it online. It’s like a regular school. They have clubs, dances, sports. We just do our classes online,” she said. “I do think public school is still the best way… It takes just as much discipline to go to public school as online.”

Andrus chose the online school rather than ‘push’ the responsibility of caring for Jillian, who is eight months old, onto her mother while Kayla went to high school.

Washington residents may enroll in the online public high school tuition free. The school provides academic materials, a school-issued laptop and printer, academic support from certified instructors and various opportunities to socialize, such as dances, field trips and pizza parties across the state.

Each full-credit course is approximately 185 hours of coursework, which is about equal to one hour a day, five days per week, for a little more than 36 weeks, according to Insight’s Web site at http://www.insightwa.net.

“You have to get up, do your work. And it’s so much more boring because you’re by yourself,” Kayla said. “It’s a matter of organization, setting aside a certain amount of time to do your schoolwork.”

Coursework may include practice problems, home labs, quizzes, exams, essays, creative writing papers, class discussions, individual and group research projects and presentations, depending on the course.

Students can e-mail or call their teachers to ask questions, or go to weekly office hours held in virtual classrooms.

On these Web pages, teachers post information on a graphic of a white board in a format similar to a PowerPoint slide.

The entire class converses using headsets, but students must press an on-screen button and wait their turn to speak, as if they were raising their hands.

“Math classes are very challenging,” she said. Each unit had a discussion, Kayla explained, where students were required to read the discussion and give feedback. Activities and quizzes were frequent, and at the end of a unit students completed a unit project that always coordinated with the unit content.

According to Kayla, 135 seniors started the year, but only 36 graduated. She plans to attend a two-year or four-year college the spring of 2009 to pursue a career in journalism or as a para-legal.

 “I didn’t want to throw away 11 years of school… This is when hard work can bring so much success. People think it’s so easy,” she said. “It takes hard work to motivate yourself. My parents didn’t help me with school work or waking me up. I did it myself.”