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

School Administrator, Oct, 2001 by Laura Lavine

In my presentation, I explain the genesis of the program, how online learning is often preferable to traditional distance learning and which students might benefit from online courses. Successful online students seem to demonstrate certain attributes so emphasizing the importance of the student selection process is crucial when I meet with school districts.

In addition, I explain the vision of a statewide virtual school that includes not only students from around the state but teachers, too. Online teaching can provide more opportunities for teachers, help districts address hiring problems associated with the teacher shortage and possibly retain teachers who might otherwise move on to larger districts.

One benefit of presenting widely is meeting teachers who want to become online teachers. Our first group of teachers included 17 elementary, middle and high school teachers, all from Liverpool. One of our most exciting developments this year was the inclusion of teachers from four neighboring school districts, which moves us exactly in the direction we envisioned.

Picking Up the Tab

* Fourth, we fund the project ourselves.

What makes our program different from most others in the United States is that ours is a local public school district initiative that will ultimately include teachers and students statewide.

Last October I attended the first national symposium for virtual school leaders. Most attendees represented either a governor's initiative or one from a state legislature or state education department. In the absence of such a statewide initiative in New York state, the Liverpool Central Schools felt an institutional obligation to use its resources, technology and expertise to provide a greater variety of teaching and learning opportunities for the state's students and teachers.

However, the support of one school district cannot sustain or help to grow what should be a statewide program. Unlike other statewide virtual schools that began with millions of start-up dollars and did not have to charge tuition, ours has been, until now, supported solely from our school district's budget. As a result, we charge $300 per student per semester-long course, except for our 4th grade English/language arts course, which costs $2,000 per class. Ultimately, though, our goal is for the program to be available at no cost to participating school districts and families.

Keeping in mind that the development costs for this type of program far exceed the delivery costs, it is easy to figure out that the tuition does not cover our expenses unless each course we offer is full or nearly full. Over the last two years, my salary, the staff development costs for training two groups of teachers, consultant fees, travel, marketing, the monthly server fee and teacher compensation totaled nearly $500,000.

Moving Statewide

Our focus now is on building a statewide alliance or consortium of organizations and leaders who support the program. Because we just completed our first year of delivering online courses to students in other school districts, we know this is a viable program and can convey this reality to potential supporters.