LRSD to keep online option for learning
Middle, high school students to see a new virtual academy
The covid-19 global pandemic with its call for isolation to avoid infection may now be in the rearview mirror, but the online delivery of education that mushroomed during the pandemic is sticking around in Arkansas school systems, including in the Little Rock School District.
Superintendent Jermall Wright said last week that the capital city school system will continue to provide an online school option for middle and high school families in the upcoming 2023-24 school year.
But, he said, the model will be “completely different” than the Ignite Virtual Academies for elementary and secondary school students that were established by the district in the 2021-22 school year in the midst of the pandemic.
The newly reconfigured virtual school will be for middle and high school students, Wright said.
The instruction will be taught or delivered by a contracted partner, Imagine
Learning, and its employees. That instruction will not be live but asynchronous, Wright said, meaning it is recorded by the instructor for playback by the student at another time. Imagine Learning does provide on its platform access to live tutoring for students, he said.
The role for a set of Little Rock district employees will be to monitor the progress of the online students in the Imagine Learning program, Wright said. The district employees will also provide some one-to-one, and even in-person, tutoring and other support to online students, if needed.
The district’s amped-up marketing of its reconfigured virtual school will target home-schooled families, among others, Wright said.
“There may be parents who don’t want to provide the direct instruction for their kids in a home school,” he said. “Now they can enroll in our virtual academy — for specific courses, for half a day or for all day and for specialty courses. Imagine Learning has a wealth of courses for kids.”
Another advantage for the home-schooled families is that their students can participate in activities such as choral music, or debate or play sports in the Little Rock schools, even as they get their instruction at home.
The district is advertising the virtual school on its website.
So far, there are 83 students registered for the coming school year, Pamela Smith, the district’s direc
tor of communications, said. That is comparable to the 86 that Smith said finished this school year as online students.
“We don’t have a numerical goal, just yet,” Wright said of the online program. “We really wanted to take time to make sure that this virtual academy was going to be built correctly and that the infrastructure and support systems were in place.
“In times past we may have put the cart before the horse and got kids into a system that wasn’t totally vetted and worked out yet. We are taking a careful approach, but we can serve as many kids as who want to sign up.”
More information about the Little Rock Virtual Academy — including information on available elective courses and registration documents, are available at this link: https://www.lrsd.org/virtual.
School districts scrambled in March 2020 to distribute Chromebook computers and hot spots to students when then-Gov. Asa Hutchinson closed schools to on-site instruction in an effort to slow the spread of the potentially deadly covid-19 virus. The remote instruction continued for thousands of students into the 2020-21 school year.
About 21% of the state’s more than 470,000 students — or more than 97,000 students statewide — relied on remote instruction in 2020-21. In the Little Rock district, about 8,300 of its 21,000 students were remote learners at one point in the school year.
The Ignite Academy for kindergarten-through-sixth grade and the one for students in seventh-through-12th grades were established at a time when school systems across the state were establishing similar digital schools, following on the heels of the few trailblazing systems such as the Arkansas Virtual Academy and Arkansas Connections Academy charter schools that offered remote instruction prior to the covid-19 pandemic.
In the Ignite Digital Academies plan, Little Rock teachers were assigned full time to online instruction. That was in contrast to instruction in the 2020-21 school year where classroom teachers juggled a mix of in-school and remote students.