Don't kill statewide online charter

Lawmakers targeting hope academy

Published February 13, 2006 at midnight

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One of the great things about the Internet is that it isn't bounded by geography or limited by distance. So here's tiny Vilas, off in a remote corner of this state, with its own online school that enrolls several times as many students as show up in person. With its experience in online education, Vilas was a natural choice last fall to sponsor the Hope Online Learning Academy Co-op, a charter that already enrolls 1,600 students.

Praise the district and charter school for their entrepreneurial spirit? Cheer the fact that Hope serves mainly at-risk students? My goodness no. Declaring the situation gave her "heartburn," state Sen. Sue Windels, who chairs the Education Committee, introduced Senate Bill 125, which would effectively shut Hope down.

Worse, last week her Senate committee backed the bill in a 4-3 vote.

The school's model blends individual online study with a network of informal, mostly small "learning centers" where students can get help with the material being presented online and also form social support networks with their peers. Secondary students who study online at home often need somebody to help them besides their parents - who may be working. The centers offer them that mentoring.

Windels' bill would require that Hope obtain separate charters from most of the districts where it operates centers. They may not be adequately supervised, she frets, because nobody from Vilas will visit them.

In fact, staff from Vilas have visited a number of centers and plan to visit all of them. One day, they may supervise by remote audio-visual connections. Why not? This is an online school. Every student is following an individually designed program, and progress can be monitored from anywhere.

Remember that bit about the benefits of escaping the limits of geography? That's not a bug, it's an advantage.

A number of community groups have opened or sponsored learning centers for Hope. For example, LARASA, the Latin American Research and Service Agency, has five in the Denver metro area, and there are currently 44 along the Front Range. Their students' performance will be a guide to how well they carry out their function.

Perhaps it will turn out that Vilas is not the ideal chartering authority, although it seems to have as much experience as just about anybody else at running an online school. And Hope's blue-ribbon board of directors is evidence it will be an educationally serious enterprise. By all means, ensure that it has oversight. Just don't shut it down before anybody knows whether it works.

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