Ohio e-schools face scrutiny with greater focus on rules
About 3,800 students in Dayton area attend online institutions.
With the state’s largest online school racked with controversy, e-schools are undergoing increased scrutiny as lawmakers attempt to provide a framework for how the schools should operate and ensure that each one follows the rules.
The Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT) has been beset with problems, ranging from a high dropout rate to alleged inaccuracies in reporting enrollment.
ECOT claimed more than 15,000 students two years ago, but a state review of student log-in data put the school’s enrollment at just over 6,000. The state is clawing back more than $60 million in state funding from ECOT, and the school now hopes to rebrand itself as a “dropout recovery” school serving students 16 and
over, according to the Columbus Dispatch.
ECOT officials did not respond to requests for comment.
O nline s chools have many supporters, and for a decade the sector under- went rapid expansion, with a peak enrollment of 40,626 in 2013-14, according to the Ohio Department of Edu- cation. But since then, it has declined each year — to 39,284, then 38,020, then sharply down to 33,503 last year.
Spokeswoman Brittany Halpin said ODE has not analyzed the reason for the drop,
though a check with local districts found many have greatly increased their online offerings.
ODE is finishing 2016-17 enrollment reviews for more than 100 charter schools, including 20 online schools, where students’ participa-
tion time will be checked, Halpin said.
Because of concerns about oversight of onlineonly schools, the legislature in 2015 passed Ohio House Bill 2, which put a series of new standards and reporting requirements in place.
“We’re definitely in a period of transition,” said State Senate Education Chair Peggy Lehner, R-Kettering. “There were an awful lot of abuses of the system the way it was. House Bill 2 was designed to correct some of
the more egregious issues we saw. As with any change applying to multiple differ-
ent models, those changes are working well in some cases, and perhaps not so well in others.”
According to ODE data, about 3,800 students in the Dayton area attended purely online schools in 2016-17, ranging from the largest — ECOT — to more than a dozen smaller schools. That local online enroll-
ment of 3,800 is larger than two-thirds of the traditional school districts in the area — larger than Vandalia-Butler, Tecumseh or Talawanda, for example. And the number doesn’t count the hundreds of students who participate in some type of online education within their own regular public school.
Advocates say e-schools aren’t for everyone, but they provide an alternative for students who work best out
side of a classroom. “I think families really want the flexibility,” said Marie Hanna, superintendent of Ohio Connections Acad- emy, a statewide online char- ter school that serves about 3,500 students, including hundreds in the Dayton area. “Flexibility in daily sched- ule, flexibility in learning style and pace . ... If they’re at home, they can do that.” Online-only schools
In Ohio, online schools are charter schools, overseen by a sponsor and often run by a management com- pany. Students complete structured online lessons in regular academic subjects at home, monitored by teachers. Students take the same state tests as students in traditional public schools.
Hanna said Ohio Connections Academy has always tracked student attendance
and work, but added that the state’s new standards have required officials to add new tools and data reporting. She said there’s always a challenge in accurately reporting work that’s done both online and offline.
“Teachers are having to vet things even more thoroughly than in the past,” Hanna said. “So, we can’t be sure that the child spent
1.5 hours reading a book as reported, but the teacher can vet that the tests and the portfolio work — research
papers or projects – were done with good quality (to verify that).”
Ohio Connections’ state performance index of 80 last year was just behind Fair- born and ahead of Huber Heights. Its four-year graduation rate of 72 percent was behind all local districts, but ahead of ECOT and many other online schools.
Hanna cited student turn- over at online schools as a factor there, saying the grad- uation rate for students who stay there for all four years of high school is 92 percent. “We’re getting more ques
tions in regard to the situation with ECOT,” she said. “But we always had a lot of questions, because respon
sible people who are choos- ing a school for their child, we would hope would ask a lot of questions . ... We want to work with families who are engaged.” Family’s experience
Lillian Connolly, a seventh-grader who lives in Kettering, will start her third year at Ohio Connections this week. Lillian said she had a little trouble with bullying and fitting in socially in elementary school. Her mother, Shelley, said a flexible online school schedule also fit better with Lillian’s training and travel for figure skating competitions.
“You have to get used to not having a teacher right there with you, walking you
through everything,” Lillian said of online schooling. “You have to get used to having to learn things more yourself.”
But Lillian said she likes the ability to do lessons at any time of the day, and to move more at her own pace. Her mother said the flexibil- ity also allowed Lillian to be at home helping when Shelley was struggling with an autoimmune disease.
Lillian often starts school around 7 a.m., works for a few hours, then takes a break to skate and have
lunch before finishing up in the afternoon, Shelley Connelly said. “I was very scared about
the social aspect of things and how well she would be doing — whether she would be learning and retaining the knowledge. But she is,” Shel- ley said. “It depends on the student. This would not be a good platform for a student who isn’t self-motivated, or a parent who can’t be home.”
Shelley said there is online communication with teachers, as well as the ability to call, plus a once-a-month scheduled phone call that “kind of like a parent-teacher conference every month.”
Lillian says e-students have to be self-motivated.
“It can be a lot harder sometimes because you realize you have all this stuff that you can do at different times,” she said. “Sometimes you can tend to procrasti- nate and not do it till later.” Local districts
E-school enrollment may be dropping, but local dist ricts are offering more online education within their schools, as laptop computers and iPads become the norm. Sometimes that’s just a sin
gle math lesson, and other times it’s a formal online curriculum.
Kettering City Schools has about 80 students in its Kettering Virtual Learn- ing Academy. Spokeswoman Kari Basson said for some students, it’s a total online school approach, while oth- ers take individual courses for “credit recovery” if they’ve fallen behind.
Those programs are com- mon, with 115 students doing online credit recovery in Huber Heights schools last year, 80 participating in Tecumseh’s Arrows’ School of Advancement, and several Lebanon students taking online classes through the Warren County Educa
tional Service Center. Of 25 local districts that responded to a question about online school options, only Beavercreek, Oakwood, Piqua and Miami East said they had no such program. Dayton Public Schools just launched its online school in 2017, trying to draw back some of the 900-plus stu- dents who left the district for online options.
Mad River Superintendent Chad Wyen said his district serves more than 250 stu- dents in a blended online-tra- ditional program. He said students struggled with an earlier online model where
they did all of the work at home, so now there is a heav- ily online curriculum with in-school support.
“The big thing is it offers them a setting where they can process individually,” Wyen said. “Maybe a class of 25-27 students just doesn’t work for them. They’re distracted in there and can’t focus. In the
electronic classroom, they have their machine, working through their content, and they can put headphones on and listen to music and work through it.”
The Northmont and West Carrollton districts both sponsored their own charter schools with online components in recent years, but both districts closed them this summer, citing the new sponsor evaluation requirements from the state.
“The amount of resources needed to run the program just to meet a favorable rating within the state evalua
tion system for the 35 students was not cost-effective,” Northmont Superintendent Tony Thomas said. The district is now start
ing a small Career Credit Lab giving some middle school students access to an online
curriculum for core subject areas, career connections, and employment skills.
Lehner acknowledged that the changes mandated by House Bill 2 hurt some “pretty effective online schools sponsored by districts,” and thinks that should be addressed.
Mad River’s Wyen agrees, saying constant re-evalua
tion is needed. “It’s not a one size fits all model,” he said. “It never really was, but we forced people into a model that wasn’t that successful. That’s why graduation rates were (low). We have to approach things differently. “
He added: “Every generation is different and they engage differently. It’s a process.”