Our Online Adventure - school district in Liverpool, NY, offers electronic education

School Administrator, Oct, 2001 by Laura Lavine

A suburban school district creates its own course offerings on the Web for statewide delivery

When John Cataldo, superintendent of the Liverpool School District in Liverpool, N.Y., announced 2 1/2 years ago he wanted the district to start a virtual school, I was one of the least likely administrators to respond to his call for project director candidates.

As an elementary principal, I used a computer regularly but mostly for routine tasks such as word processing, e-mail, spreadsheets and presentations. Although I facilitated the use of computers for instruction in my school and led the building technology team, I never considered myself to be a "techie." I marginally understood terms like "RAM" and "megahertz" but phrases like "FTP'ing files" were out of my league. When my computer crashed, I always called others for help.

So I thought to myself, "One of our techie administrators is going to have a lot of fun creating a virtual school." I was content as a building administrator and didn't think I had the knowledge or skills to bring the superintendent's vision to fruition.

Cataldo is an innovator in the use of technology in education as evidenced by a $9 million referendum that put five computers and a teacher workstation in every K-8 classroom in 1994. Subsequent referenda financed technology at the remaining grade levels including an $18 million renovation of our high school that includes a robotics wing, multimedia rooms, technology area and a new track facility with state-of-the-art technology. In addition, we are among the first schools in New York to offer a laptop instructional program in a wireless building. We are an Apple Distinguished school district and serve as a Cisco training center.

When the superintendent asked if I would consider taking a year or two away from the school to do the job, I gave an emphatic, "No!" before reconsidering. After 13 years as a principal and director of special education, maybe it was time to try something new, to see what I was capable of creating, to see if I could turn someone else's vision into reality. Knowing that the superintendent provides a safety net for those willing to take a risk or try something new, I decided to discuss the idea with him.

Cataldo met with me twice--once so I could more fully understand what he hoped to accomplish and then to discuss my options. My safety net? I could return to my building, whether I succeeded or failed in the virtual school, at any time.

A Stressful Start

My initial research revealed that not only do virtual schools not make money the first several years, they cost a great deal. In fact, that has been the case in Liverpool. Projected development costs, which were estimated at several hundred thousand dollars, significantly exceeded the delivery costs. Yet our board of education so strongly believed in the concept that it committed to financing the project for at least one year.

I moved out of my elementary building into an office at district headquarters. For the first two days, I was paralyzed by my ignorance. I simply did not know how to start. It did not help that the superintendent stopped in periodically to ask, "How is it going?" I quickly concluded I had made a big mistake and wanted to run, not walk, back to my building. After the first weekend, I jokingly told him to leave me alone, that he was making me nervous and that if he just stopped checking on me, I would get the job done!

Telephone calls, e-mail, Internet searches and journal articles helped me initially to map out what our program needed to accomplish and look like. Even though I was not very technologically proficient, I felt confident that my experience as an educator and administrator was more important--a point that proved many times over to be true.

Homegrown Courses

Some of my early decisions were made by instinct more than anything else and, fortunately, proved to be the right ones.

* First, I decided early on not to purchase commercial course software but rather to have state-certified teachers create our own courses.

Our school district, even with its 15 Advanced Placement courses, eight other college-level courses and a slew of electives, still has students who want additional courses.

In addition, of the 725 school districts in New York state, more than 400 are considered small, rural districts. Some have as few as 100 students in kindergarten through 12th grade. These districts cannot afford to offer the wide range of courses that a district like Liverpool, with 8,800 students, can offer. They would undoubtedly jump at the chance to broaden the course offerings to their students.

I felt certain that having state-certified teachers develop online courses meeting New York State Learning Standards would be important to those districts. In fact, many of them have told me they were looking out-of-state for online courses but because of our program, they no longer are.

We became participants in the Concord Consortium's Virtual High School (see related story, page 16) so that we could immediately offer online courses to Liverpool students. Two of our veteran teachers began training to teach through VHS as I continued to recruit teachers to begin a parallel track of creating what we envisioned to be a New York state virtual school.