NORTHWEST

EDUCATION

WINTER 2004 / VOLUME 10. NUMBER 2.

A PUBLICATION OF THE NORTHWEST REGIONAL EDUCATIONAL LABORATORY

ONLINE 

SCHOOLS

A NEW FRONTIER IN PUBLIC EDUCATION

Welcoming home-schoolers 6

Searching for funding 12

Moving ahead in Montana 20
ON THE COVER

A farm town finding its way in the modern world, 

Fairfield, Montana, has welcomed a new online distance

education program into its high school. Nine students

from Fairfield High School are participating in the pilot

phase of the Montana K–12 Online Distance Learning

Initiative, one of two major distance ed initiatives being

launched across this Big Sky state. See story, Page 20.

Photo by John Reddy
NORTHWEST EDUCATION / WINTER 2004 1

Web exclusives at nwrel.org/nwedu

6

26

34

20

FEATURES

6 Crossing the Public School–Homeschool Divide

Lauded and lambasted for its innovations, the tiny school district in Galena,

Alaska, has helped to start a revolution in distance education.

12 The Search for Funding

Online education is shaking up the school-funding establishment.

Reports From the Frontlines of Online Ed

Additional Reading and Web Sites

Minding the Gap: State Cybersolutions to NCLB Mandates

States launch online programs to help schools meet federal requirements.

20 Moving Ahead With Distance Education in Montana

The road to statewide distance ed is rocky, but online courses may smooth 

the way for rural kids to get the classes they need—and want.

26 Letterature

Essayist Brian Doyle reminds us of the joys of exchanging letters, those

“papery handshakes,” through the post.

28 Long-Distance Relationships

Teaching Web design to a blind student, a seasoned online teacher sees his job

afresh.

Accessible Information Technology in Education

32 The Online Teacher: When the Wee Hours Are Prime Time

An old-fashioned love of teaching thrives online.

Making the Link to College

Teaching at the Federal Way Internet Academy

34 Family Connections

A Web-based translation service breaks down language barriers and fortifies

parents’ ties to the classroom.

Giving Fresh Starts

When students are on the brink of dropping out, school counselors can offer

online options to keep them coming back.

NORTHWEST

EDUCATION

CONTENTS / WINTER 2004 ONLINE SCHOOLS: A NEW FRONTIER IN PUBLIC EDUCATION VOL. 10 / NO. 2
2 nwrel.org/nwedu

DEPARTMENTS

3 Forum

4 Editor’s Note

18 Gallery

Scenic photos are vivid evidence of the reach of

online learning.

39 Voices

Teaching Writing in the Digital Age

40 Resources

Resource Annex

41 Research Brief

Research on E-Learning Is Emerging

44 Region at a Glance

Spotlight on Online Supplementary Services

45 End Note

Online in the Early Days

Expert Opinion

The art of online pedagogy

Money Matters

Surprising places to find funds for 

online programs

Q&A

An Intel ethnographer talks about 

technology’s place in the home

On the Web

Northwest Education is available online in both 

PDF and HTML versions at www.nwrel.org/nwedu.

Look for Web exclusives, marked with .

Northwest Education is a quarterly magazine of the Northwest

Regional Educational Laboratory. Past and current issues of the

magazine are available at www.nwrel.org/nwedu/.

ISSN 1546-5020

Chief Executive Officer

Dr. Carol F. Thomas

Deputy Executive Officer

Dr. Robert E. Blum

Administrative Director, Development and Communications

Dave Wilson

Communications Director

Karen Lytle Blaha

Editor in Chief and Issue Editor

Denise Jarrett Weeks

Editor

Rhonda Barton

Assistant Editor

Bracken Reed

Technical Editor

Eugenia Cooper Potter

Contributing Writers

Brian Doyle, Michael Heavener, Michael McGregor

Design

a.k.a. design, Seattle

Denise Crabtree

Data Analyst

Richard Greenough

Resource Development

Jill R. Oppenheim

Library Support

Linda Fitch

Webmaster

Vicki Jean Beauchamp

Circulation

Lorelei Aldridge

Statement of Purpose

Northwest Education aims to promote a regional dialogue and to elevate teaching and learning by giving readers the best information,

ideas, and personal stories from practitioners, researchers, and other

experts. 

Copyright © 2004, Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory.

This publication is based on work sponsored wholly or in part by

the U.S. Department of Education under contract number ED-01-

CO-0013. The content of this publication does not necessarily

reflect the views of the department or any other agency of the U.S.

government. This publication was not printed with government

funds. Articles and information in this publication may be reproduced and distributed without permission for nonprofit educational

and professional development purposes. Please acknowledge

NWREL as the source.

NORTHWEST

EDUCATION 
NORTHWEST EDUCATION / WINTER 2004 3

Design Matters

Thank you for your comments regarding beautiful schools affecting people—

both students and teachers, and

communities as a whole (“Designs for

Learning: School Architecture,” summer 2001). I am an architect in Charlotte, North Carolina, and I often get

discouraged when school leaders’ only

focus is on the dollar. We don’t have to

break the bank but—like you say—we

do need courage to explore ways architecture and places can have a positive

effect on students and teachers and

how they perform. If you know of

other resources that reinforce this idea,

I would love to have it as ammo to take

to our customers and school leaders.

Tom Balke, AIA

Senior Associate

Little Diversified Architectural Consulting

Charlotte, North Carolina

Editor’s note: A helpful Web site for

those interested in school design is

offered by the National Clearinghouse

for Educational Facilities at www.

edfacilities.org. The site, funded by

the U.S. Department of Education,

features separate sections on design and

construction with numerous case studies and information on everything from

color theory to outdoor learning environments and roof selection. Also,

Business and Professional People for

the Public Interest (at www.

bpichicago.org) recently published a

book on their national design competition for Chicago public schools. The

competition, called “Big Shoulders,

Small Schools,” drew more than 100

entries from top architects around the

country and focused on accessibility

issues and small school design.

More Resources on Native Education

I enjoyed reading your issue on Native

students. I thought you might be interested in two recent related publications. The first is American Indian

Education: A History, which you can read

about at www.oupress.com/book

detail.asp?isbn=0-8061-3593-X. The

second is Nurturing Native Languages,

the full text of which is online at

http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~jar/NNL/.

Jon Reyhner

Professor of Education

Northern Arizona University

Flagstaff, Arizona

Inspiration for Students With Dyslexia

This article (“From Personal Advocacy

to Public Activism,” spring 2003) was

truly inspirational to me. I have a 10-

year-old dyslexic student whose greatest wish is to be “normal.” She doesn’t

believe she is as smart as her peers and

is struggling to appear as if she has no

reading problems. I got some great

ideas from this article. Thanks so

much. I feel like there is hope!

Rashonda Gudger

Teacher

Jefferson High School

Portland, Oregon

We want to hear from you! Send your

letters to the editor, article ideas, and

tips on places where good things are

happening to nwedufeedback@nwrel.

org. Letters may be edited for length or

clarity.

FORUM

NWREL BOARD OF DIRECTORS

John Pugh (Chair)

Chancellor, University of Alaska Southeast

Sharon Parry (Vice Chair)

School Board Member, Idaho Falls School District #91

Dennis Haverlandt (Secretary-Treasurer)

Teacher, Great Falls School District (MT)

Jerry Colonna (Member-at-Large)

Superintendent, Beaverton School District (OR)

Rubén Degollado (Member-at-Large)

Assistant Principal, Hillsboro School District (OR)

Kay Purcell (Member-at-Large)

Principal, St. Rose Parish School, Longview (WA)

Dr. Terry Bergeson

Washington Superintendent of Public Instruction

Susan Castillo

Oregon Superintendent of Public Instruction

Dr. Marilyn Howard

Idaho Superintendent of Public Instruction

Linda McCulloch

Montana Superintendent of Public Instruction 

Roger Sampson

Alaska Commissioner of Education and Early Development

Dr. John Davis

Superintendent, Bering Strait School District (AK)

Joanne Erickson

Assistant Professor, Montana State University–Bozeman

Jeff Estes

Manager, Office of Science Education Programs, 

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (WA)

Dr. Larry Harris

Dean, Idaho State University

Steven Jacquier

Teacher, Southwest Region School District (AK)

Jerry Keane 

Superintendent, Post Falls School District (ID)

Nancy Larsen

Teacher, Coeur d’Alene School District (ID)

Richard Mauer

Chair, Alaska State Board of Education and 

Early Development

Dr. Richard McCullough

Superintendent, Snoqualmie School District (WA)

Dr. Bill McDiarmid

Professor, University of Washington

Dr. Geoffrey Mills

Dean, Southern Oregon University 

Ted Popplewell

Principal, Oregon Trail Elementary School, Twin Falls (ID) 

Dr. Jan Rauth

Teacher, Longview School District (WA)

Barbara J. Riley

Community/Business Representative, Missoula (MT)

Perla Rodriguez

Principal, Cornelius School District (OR)

Dr. Timothy Skinner

Superintendent, St. Ignatius School District, Ronan (MT)
4 nwrel.org/nwedu

One of the most surprising things to

learn about online education is that

it’s a deeply human endeavor. Call

it “e-learning,” “cyberschool,” “virtual.” Call it what you will, it stirs

genuine emotions. In the print and

online stories that appear in this

issue of Northwest Education, teachers and students tell us that the intimacy of one-to-one computing has let them get to know and understand each other

better than they ever could in a crowded classroom. In “LongDistance Relationships,” a blind student speaks about the

uncommon bond he feels with the online teacher who taught

him to design Web pages. Similarly, a teacher featured in “The

Online Teacher: When the Wee Hours Are Prime Time” says

one of the greatest rewards of teaching online is when students express themselves freely in the personalized environment of her online courses.

Administrators tell us, in a rush of enthusiasm, that their

online programs are drawing former drop-outs back to

school. Read the Web Exclusive story, “Giving Fresh Starts,”

in the online version of the magazine at www.nwrel.org/

nwedu/. In a story about Alaska’s radical experiment in distance education, “Crossing the Public School-Homeschool

Divide,” homeschooling parents express relief and gratitude

that they can tap high-quality resources that are available from

online education programs.

It’s not roses every day, of course. Online education is playing havoc with public education as we know it. Policymakers

are scrambling to write new laws and guidelines to support

this new mode of delivery, while respecting the principles of

public education, such as free and universal access, equity, and

local control. State legislatures and education departments are

quickly catching up with the explosion of online programs

that are being launched from Barrow to Brookings. But the

pressure to make weighty decisions, in the midst of so many

uncertainties about this educational innovation, can make

even steadfast proponents anxious, frustrated, and testy. Nevertheless, we heard a lot of optimism and conviction in the

voices of the men and women who talked to us about the

future of online education in this region. Be sure to read “The

Search for Funding” as well as the Web Exclusive story,

“Minding the Gap: State Cybersolutions to NCLB Mandates.”

While the jury’s still out on how—and how well—online

education can serve young people’s learning needs,

researchers are setting to work in this new field of study.

They have much to do to fully uncover the strengths and

weaknesses of online education at the elementary and secondary level. Nevertheless, it looks like it’s here to stay. As

many as 1 million high school students in the nation are taking online classes, according to one estimate, and online

learning is a staple offering of colleges, universities, and professional development providers.

Teachers tell us that being a good online teacher requires

every bit of the art, craft, and professional skill that it takes to

teach in a conventional classroom. But it is different. As one

teacher puts it, online pedagogy requires a teacher to be warm

and engaging over a keyboard. There are practical strategies

for achieving that kind of personal touch, says NWREL’s Kirk

deFord. A member of the Northwest Educational Technology Consortium (NETC), deFord speaks around the country

about the art of online pedagogy. In December he helped lead

an Online Teachers@Work Symposium in SeaTac, Washington. Teachers from all over the country came, sharing their

tips and insights so that NETC can prepare resources to help

teachers excel online. Visit NETC’s expanded Digital

Bridges Web site, www.netc.org/digitalbridges/, where

you’ll find tools and resources for Web-based learning as well

as videoconferencing. The fruits of the Online

Teachers@Work Symposium will also be made available on

this Web site when they’re completed next summer.

Online education is a sprawling topic. We chose to focus

mostly on statewide online programs that are coming from

the K–12 public school sphere. We also give special attention

to what is taking place at the state level. But we’re focusing on

moving targets. As I write, I can be certain only that the circumstances and details of the programs and people we’ve featured here are changing. These are stories that are still in the

making. Online learning is a new frontier for K–12 schools,

and the risks and benefits can be substantial, but the Northwest has always been rich with enterprising pioneers. Some

of these hardy and visionary folk are featured in this issue of

Northwest Education. With forward-thinking pragmatism, they

are making tracks in new territory.

—Denise Jarrett Weeks, jarrettd@nwrel.org

EDITOR‘S NOTE
5

NORTHWEST EDUCATION FEATURES

ONLINE SCHOOLS

A NEW FRONTIER IN PUBLIC EDUCATION 

WINTER 2004 / VOL. 10. NO. 2

The epicenter of Alaska’s online-school explosion was in tiny Galena 6

States grapple with how—even whether—to pay for online schools 12

Two state initiatives vie to serve Montana’s rural kids 20

Teacher and pupil find an affinity in cyberspace 28

The language barrier falls away for these Russian-speaking families 34
Students raced to sign up with Galena’s new Web-supported correspondence school 

when it opened seven years ago. Lauded and lambasted for its innovations, the tiny school

district along the Iditarod sled dog trail helped to start a revolution in distance education.

Photo by Jim Lavrakas. Copyright © 2004, Anchorage Daily News

6 nwrel.org/nwedu
CROSSING THE

PUBLIC SCHOOLHOMESCHOOL 

DIVIDE

STORY BY RHONDA BARTON
8 nwrel.org/nwedu

GALENA, Alaska—Hard by the icy Yukon River,

Galena seems an unlikely place for a $16 million educational

empire. The Athabascan village—with fewer than 700 residents and no roads to connect it to the outside world—sits

halfway between Fairbanks and Nome, at the midpoint of the

famed Iditarod dogsled race route.

It would have been easy, and understandable, for this isolated frontier outpost to accept its fate as just another struggling Native community in Alaska’s vast interior. How then

did Galena catapult itself to the forefront of Alaska’s distance

education system with a program serving more than 3,700

students in all corners of the state? Ask Galena’s boosters—

and even some of its detractors—that question and they’ll

point to a combination of online technology, bold entrepreneurialism, and unbridled vision. It’s a mixture that’s

brought the district both praise as an educational innovator

and criticism as a crass opportunist.

DRIVEN BY NECESSITY

According to the old adage, necessity is the mother of invention. That neatly sums up the situation Galena found itself in

during the early 1990s. The Air Force base that served as the

economic lifeblood of the community was on the verge of

closing and packing up its 300 airmen. Village elders and

business leaders considered their options for softening the

blow. They came up with a plan to turn the soon-to-be-abandoned base into a residential vocational school, loosely modeled after the state-run Mt. Edgecumbe boarding school in

Sitka. The sticking point, of course, was how to pay for such

a facility. Figuring that out became the first priority of the

new superintendent, Carl Knudsen.

Knudsen went to work gaining charter school status for

what was dubbed PERS or Project Education Residential

School. Using the charter authorization as a bargaining chip,

he got the Air Force to agree to let the school district occupy

the base, buying some of the buildings and leasing others.

Looking for a revenue stream for the school, Knudsen—who

had created a successful computer-based distance learning program in Montana—stumbled onto a revolutionary idea: Why

not use online technology to tap into a market that no one else

in public education was serving—the homeschool student?

IDEA—for Interior Distance Education of Alaska—was born.

The idea behind IDEA was to entice homeschoolers with

a package that included computer equipment, access to

instructional resources, assistance from certificated teachers,

and guidance from a network of field representatives who are

also homeschool parents. Under Alaska’s educational funding system, IDEA was able to do that with public funds that

are student-based rather than place-based. In other words,

Galena could sign up students living anywhere in the state

and receive a stipend equaling 80 percent of the basic rate

paid for students in their own district. They could grow from

a district of 120 students to one of thousands, stretching from

the Arctic Circle to the Aleutian Islands.

Chris Reitan, one of the first teachers at PERS and now

principal of Galena’s K–12 City School, recalls the uncertain

expectations that surrounded the launching of IDEA. “The

first director of IDEA was based out of Fairbanks, and Carl

worked out an agreement with him: He’d start without a

salary and if he could attract so many people to the program,

then there’d be a [paid] position. I remember they were

looking at a couple of hundred people [as the target], but it

really mushroomed,” says Reitan.

With 3,712 students last year, IDEA served more than 44

percent of all the students who enrolled in distance education

programs in Alaska; its closest competitor—Nenana—claimed

fewer than 1,200. In addition to the original field office in Fairbanks, IDEA now has satellites in Anchorage, Soldotna,

Wasilla, and Juneau. And, there’s even an independent international branch that serves 1,000 children of military families

in the Pacific Rim under a Department of Defense contract.

Tiny Galena has become an educational Goliath. 

FILLING A NICHE

In an industrial area of South Fairbanks, rubbing elbows with

machine shops and battery outlets, IDEA occupies a sizable

dark blue metal–clad warehouse. Entering through the back

door, the visitor is greeted by towering stacks of Dell computers and Hewlett Packard copier/printer/fax machines, fresh

from the manufacturer and ready to be shipped out to IDEA

families. Come in the front door and you’ll find a suite of

offices and a brightly lit, carpeted resource library crammed

with everything from math manipulatives to sample textbooks, games, tapes, and kits designed for unit studies. 

Alyssa Rogers picks up a book, studies it, and then reaches

for another. She’s checking out materials for her six-year-old

son, Joseph, whom she teaches in a specially outfitted den in

her home at the Ft. Wainwright Army base in Fairbanks. Last

year Joseph attended kindergarten at the base school, but

Rogers opted to homeschool him this year after spending six

months doing research and agonizing over the decision.

“I had been brought up with the thought that you send

your kid to school—that was the way it was,” she explains.

“But I knew he wasn’t going to get individualized attention

... that if there was something he didn’t get, then the teacher

couldn’t stop the whole class for him to catch up. But with

home school, I can customize the instruction.

“IDEA made my decision so much easier,” she continues.

“They provide resources and encouragement that you can educate your child as well as or better than a public school because

you know your child better.” IDEA’s promotional materials—

posted on the Web at www.ideafamilies.org—describe its program as a partnership “offering educational support while

honoring parental choice in curricular materials and methodology based upon the needs of each individual child.”

In addition to supplying each family with one computer for

every four children enrolled, dial-up Internet access, and a

multifunction office machine, IDEA also pays the subscription for premium online educational services such as World
Book Online, INET, Lightspan,

Enchanted Learning, and the Alaska

Career Information System. Most

important, the program gives the

family an allotment that can be used

for curricular materials as well as

art, music, and sports lessons. That

allotment, from state public school

funds, amounts to $1,400 per student for kindergarten through third

grade, $1,600 for grades 4–8, and

$1,800 for grades 9–12.

The rules are clear, though, on

what that money can buy: While

parents are free to teach any curricula they want, they’re barred from

using their allotment for faithbased materials. Rogers centers her

lessons on Alpha Omega Christian

materials, which she pays for out of her own pocket. She

spends her public fund allotment on art supplies and coaching in archery and basketball. Next year she anticipates purchasing secular curricula, continuing on the educational path

she’s chosen for her son. “I was there for his first step and his

first word,” she says with fervor. “I want to be there the first

time he reads a book.”

TIGHTENING UP RULES

Growing concern over potential—and real—abuses by distance learning programs prompted Alaska to tighten regulations and funding guidelines in 2004. Galena superintendent

Jim Smith, a transplant from Montana who favors jeans and

plaid shirts, emphatically states that Galena wasn’t in the

state’s crosshairs when calls came for increased scrutiny.

“On numerous occasions we were told that we weren’t the

target. We were an example of proper operations,” says

Smith. “Remember, there are about 10,000 kids out there

who are involved in correspondence schooling of some kind

and we have 3,700. Our operations are high profile and we’ve

been responsive to any audits, any questions. The regs

changed some things but we’ll embrace that because they’re

educationally sound.” 

Under the new Alaska Department of Education and Early

Development rules for “correspondence” or distance education programs, the district must work with the parent to

jointly develop an individual learning plan (ILP) for each student. The plan must include ongoing assessment and each

student must be monitored by a certificated teacher. Teacherstudent or teacher-parent contact is required on at least a

monthly basis with quarterly reviews of the student’s work or

progress in the individual learning plan.

The state also reined in how families could spend their

allotments: Reimbursement for family travel, family memberships to sports facilities, paid services to a student by a

family member, clothing, pets, and furniture is expressly prohibited. The rules specify that the total amount spent on

tutoring or lessons in art, music, and physical education can’t

exceed 15 percent of the student’s allocation, and all expenditures must be tied to the individual learning plan. In addition, a correspondent student must take at least half of his or

her coursework in core subjects. 

Harry Gamble, the public information officer for Alaska’s

education department, explains the rules were prompted by

“letter-writing by concerned Alaskans, the legislature asking

questions, and us taking a look around.” Gamble says there

were stories of abuses, including private school students

enrolling full time in correspondence programs and using

their allotments for things like scuba lessons, trips to Disneyland, family gym memberships, and horseback riding. 

Gamble notes that while charter schools have governing

laws, there aren’t similar laws guiding correspondence programs. “These regulations are a compromise between the

legislature and the state board,” he says. “Those (correspondence) schools have their supporters and detractors, but they

obviously meet the needs of some parents. What we try to do

is provide the best programs for kids, make sure there’s a

quality program, and that it’s not just a money-making venture for the school districts.”

A TEACHER WITHOUT A CLASSROOM

The tightened regulations have made Candi Ahiers’s life more

difficult. Her phone at the Fairbanks IDEA headquarters has

been ringing off the hook: eight calls in the last 90 minutes

from parents trying to finalize their ILPs before the deadline.

Ahiers, a certificated elementary school teacher and librarian,

juggles the needs of 150 children—primarily by telephone and

e-mail with an occasional face-to-face office meeting and

infrequent home visits. Under the new rules, Ahiers is

required to sign off on all 150 individual learning plans.

CROSSING THE PUBLIC SCHOOL-HOMESCHOOL DIVIDE

NORTHWEST EDUCATION / WINTER 2004 9

THE NUMBERS 

IDEA 2003–2004 student enrollment: 3,712

ALASKA BENCHMARK TESTS

% Proficient

IDEA Statewide IDEA Statewide IDEA Statewide

Grade 3 Grade 3 Grade 6 Grade 6 Grade 8 Grade 8

Reading 72 74 84 70 81 68

Writing 47 59 80 76 82 76

Math 63 73 63 65 61 64

ALASKA HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATION QUALIFYING EXAM

% Passed

IDEA Grade 10 Statewide Grade 10

Reading 82 70

Writing 90 86

Math 67 67

Sources: Galena School District; National Center for Education Statistics
“The state regulations have increased my job tremendously, paperwork-wise,” she sighs. “I don’t think they were

necessary for our place; we’ve always been cognizant that the

money follows the ILP. But more and more programs have

grown up behind us and the state’s intent was to standardize

things. From that perspective it was a good thing.”

Ahiers, a bubbly blonde grandmother, joined IDEA seven

years ago. “It was education out-of-the-box big time,” she

remembers. “It was very exciting, energizing.” At the outset,

most families selected structured, “boxed” curriculum, all from

the same publisher. Today, though, parents use an à la carte

approach, and Ahiers is there—if needed—to help them pick

and choose materials. The way families structure their instruction is also all over the map: Some do four days a week yearround, while others go five days and take the summers off.

“When we started, we had families that were a hidden population: Some had been in the public education system and

some had not,” says Ahiers. “They came out of the woodwork

and were thrilled to have a solid educational umbrella or

foundation. There wasn’t a program like ours, so they were

doing it all on their own in the kitchen. Now, the families

tend to be parents of kindergartners or first graders who’ve

made the choice to begin their education in the home.”

A TRIP TO THE NORTH POLE

One of Ahiers’s families is the Phillips clan, seven adorable

youngsters who could serve as poster children for the homeschool movement. In a log house surrounded by birch trees

in North Pole, a town 20 miles from Fairbanks that is permanently in Christmas mode, Betty Phillips takes multitasking to new heights.

She alternates making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches

and checking math problems for fifth-grader Stephan and

fourth-grader Julie; hustling up art supplies for third-grader

Nathan and first-grader Joseph; and occasionally glancing

over the shoulder of her ninth-grader, Shasta, who’s working

on a history assignment at the computer. Rebekah, a seventhgrader who recently won a regional essay contest, plays the

piano while five-year-old Victor dips into a basket of plastic

animals and practices his lion

roars. In the small open-plan

kitchen/living/dining room,

it’s enough to make a visitor’s

head spin, but Betty Phillips

maintains great equanimity.

Phillips is an old-timer

when it comes to homeschooling. She started about a

decade ago when Shasta was

four years old. “I actually

made the decision to homeschool before Shasta was

born,” she confides. “We were

living in southern California (where) I went to a high school

that was locked-down with iron bars on the windows. I didn’t

want my kids going to school in that environment.”

When Phillips began teaching her oldest daughter, she says

the choices were public school or independent study programs where the curriculum was predetermined. “I wanted

to pick my own stuff, so I began asking other homeschoolers

what they were using,” she recalls.

Two or three years into the experience, after she and her

husband moved to Alaska, they heard about IDEA. “I was

nervous about the program because I wondered will they tell

me what to do? Was it legitimate? Where are the funds coming from? Will the state stop funding it after we get started?”

Putting aside those fears, the Phillipses signed up. They

simply told IDEA what their children’s names and ages were,

and were handed an allotment of $750 per semester for each

child with the caution that they couldn’t spend it on faithbased materials. Now the intake process is considerably more

formalized with a teacher or field representative interviewing

the family, holding orientation sessions, and proffering

forms: They make it clear that IDEA is operated by a public

school district and that one parent is required to be home

with the child during homeschool hours.

ASSESSING RESULTS

Phillips turns to Ahiers when she stumbles on a roadblock,

like grading. “It would be a problem for me if I didn’t have

someone like Candi to talk to,” says Phillips. “My first two

girls are such good students, I think everything they do is

wonderful. But, at the same time, I know what my kids can

do, so they can’t fool me: I know when they put their best in

(an assignment) or when they didn’t care. When we got past

elementary school, I asked Candi for advice on grades and

she told me there’s something called a ‘rubric.’ She e-mailed

me several types of rubrics so I could decide what to use.”

In order to make homeschooling work for her seven offspring, Phillips prepares a weekly schedule for each child

with everyone concentrating on the same themes. For example, all the Phillips children

are studying biology as their

science topic this year: while

Shasta is dissecting animals

with a kit provided by IDEA,

Rebekah is putting together a

paper skeleton, Julie and

Nathan are writing a paragraph incorporating scientific

vocabulary, and Stephan is

doing a three-paragraph essay

with diagrams. 

Ahiers points to standardized test results to back up her

claim that families like the

Phillipses are doing a solid

job. Last year, 97 percent of 10 nwrel.org/nwedu

The Phillips boys show off an art project. (Photo by Rhonda Barton) 
IDEA’s students turned out for statemandated tests held at 72 sites. On the

Alaska high school graduation exam, 82

percent of IDEA’s 10th-graders passed

the reading portion, 90 percent passed

writing, and 67 percent passed math.

On the state’s benchmark proficiency

tests, sixth- and eighth-graders scored in

the 80 percent range in reading and

writing and slightly above the 60 percent mark in math; third-graders scored

lower, posting a 72 percent in writing,

63 percent in math, and 47 percent in

writing. In most cases, IDEA’s test

results were the same as or better than

state averages.

Tim Cline, the director of both IDEA

and its international operation, says

matching core curricula to state standards is one of his main goals this year.

“We’re putting a lot of belief in the curriculum guidelines we’ve put in place

for parents; we’ve started aligning all

curricula, including faith-based, to the

standards,” he notes, adding that IDEA

has 200 names on its approved list of

educational vendors.

While the district has developed its

own series of courses on CD-ROM—

called GOLD for Galena On-Line

Delivery—it’s shied away from offering

online instruction that is the hallmark of

a true cyberschool. Cline, a former middle school principal and Milken Foundation award winner, scoffs that such instruction “would never

be as cheap as ordering from vendors,” including what he

calls high-quality providers such as the firm K–12 Inc.,

founded by former Education Secretary William Bennett.

Besides, adds Cline, what makes IDEA work is its ability to

honor the parent as the primary instructor. “Once we have to

prescribe what goes on,” he says,” we won’t be as successful.”

IDEA’s success has indeed prompted other districts to

launch their own correspondence programs—most as online

programs—rather than see their students and dollars flow to

Galena. Carl Knudsen, now retired in Montana but working

on an IDEA network in the Lower 48, admits that the funding issue created “animosity” toward IDEA. At the same

time, though, it’s forced educators to confront the fact that

school is no longer confined to brick-and-mortar buildings.

“The important thing is educators and school administrators have to realize people are going to homeschool anyway.

Instead of weeding them out, this brings them back into the

fold: It lets them do their own thing in a way where progress

is noted,” he says.

BACK HOME AGAIN

In Galena, the vocational boarding

school that spawned IDEA proudly

shows off its aviation, automotive, culinary arts, and cosmetology programs.

About 82 teenagers from almost three

dozen communities—almost all of

whom are Alaska Native—live and go to

school here. For some, says Superintendent Smith, the Project Education Residential School offers a chance to pursue

a career pathway as well as find a “safe

harbor” away from family problems

such as alcoholism and poverty.

PERS may have started out as IDEA’s

raison d’être, but that’s no longer true

today. The school has been able to

attract high-powered corporate sponsors

like the Doyon Regional Native Corporation and Frontier Airlines. Meanwhile, IDEA is pumping more and more

of its funding back into its own programs. According to Cline, only about 5

percent of IDEA’s revenue returns to the

Galena School District for administrative support. That 5 percent, though,

continues to provide employment to

village residents and benefits for children in Galena’s elementary and secondary school.

Perhaps the biggest benefit has been

the money Galena is able to invest in

professional development. The district

has embraced Spencer Rogers’s “PEAK”

model of Performance Excellence for All Kids, which focuses

on the content, context, and process of teaching. Both Smith

and Principal Reitan credit Rogers and the district’s staff

development efforts for the fact that Galena achieved adequate yearly progress in all 34 areas of interest for NCLB.

Those results—especially notable for rural Alaska Native students—made Galena elementary and junior/senior high

“Schools of Choice.” 

Smith, who replaced the visionary and often controversial

Carl Knudsen, says he’s not interested in expanding to new

frontiers like his predecessor. He’d rather concentrate on

“managing the district’s affairs in a more accountable fashion.” Yet he recognizes that this small community in Interior

Alaska has taught the big-city folk an important lesson. “It’s

easy to become complacent if you have a captive audience,”

Smith observes. “Whether it’s distance learning or the option

for students to leave your district, No Child Left Behind has

come forward strongly mandating school choice .... You

can’t be afraid of change. You’ve got to reach outside your

comfort zone.” ■

CROSSING THE PUBLIC SCHOOL-HOMESCHOOL DIVIDE

NORTHWEST EDUCATION / WINTER 2004 11

Students in Galena have benefitted from the

district’s online venture. (Photos by Paul

Apfelbeck)
12 nwrel.org/nwedu
THE SEARCH FOR

FUNDING

The winds of change are sweeping online schools across the K–12 vista

—and shaking the foundation of public school funding.

BY DENISE JARRETT WEEKS

The question of funding online schools is all about how

you define school. Systems for funding public schools

are built around the traditional notion of the brickand-mortar schoolhouse. Children gather together in one

place to study discrete subjects with certified teachers in

blocks of time, with students progressing in their learning at

more or less the same pace (and those who can’t keep apace,

drop out).

But a “perfect storm” of circumstances has given rise to

the phenomenon of online education. And this new mode of

schooling not only dismantles the confines of bricks and

mortar—time, space, and pace—it’s rattling the foundation

on which public school funding is built.

The expanding capabilities of telecommunication technologies have combined with strong movements favoring

public school choice, charter schools, and homeschools, along

with the stimulus of technology-funding initiatives and the

No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). Responding to these

forces, enterprising people in the public and private spheres

are developing online education programs to supplement and,

in some cases, provide alternatives to traditional schooling.

Across the country, online schools and programs are popping up all over the place. This school year, 41 percent of all

K–12 schools will offer some sort of online learning option

for students—10 percent more than last year, say market

researchers at Quality Education Data Inc. States are grappling with how—even whether—to pay for them with public school funds.

There are a few states with groundbreaking legislation to

look to as models, (notably Florida, Minnesota, Ohio, and

Pennsylvania) but states are at their most idiosyncratic when

it comes to their laws and regulations surrounding public

education. To even begin crafting policies and laws that

address online education, each state is having to grapple with

the bedeviling complexity of its individual statutes.

With its rugged vastness and its penchant for innovative

technologies, the Northwest would seem fertile territory for

online distance education. And it is. Online K–12 education

programs are being readily developed in the region by states,

school districts and educational service districts, colleges and

universities, and charter schools.

Determining how to fund this new mode of public education involves interpreting different sets of laws governing

school funding formulas, homeschools, charter schools, conventional distance education and, in the rare cases where

there are actually laws on the books for it, online education.

Add to that mix the legal requirements of NCLB, and you

have a gathering front—for opportunity or calamity.

BREAKING WITH CONVENTION

For seven years, the federal E-Rate initiative pumped some 

$8 billion into educational technology nationwide, helping

states to create robust telecommunications infrastructures.

For the past three years, the NCLB initiative Enhancing Education Through Technology (E2T2) has directed $1.8 billion

toward technology infrastructure, professional development,

NORTHWEST EDUCATION / WINTER 2004 13

Copyright © 2004, Minga Creative
and online education—Northwest states received about $72.5

million. (However, neither initiative’s future is assured. This

fall, the federal government temporarily froze $3.28 billion in

E-Rate requests from school districts and Congress cut $200

million from the E2T2 program.)

This massive infusion of funding has created desire, willingness, and the capability to use the full power of technology to educate children, even if that means breaking with

convention. But while start-up money to launch online education programs often comes from federal and state grants,

the search for funding thereafter becomes much less straightforward. Sustained funding models such as those for brickand-mortar schools are lacking.

Schools and districts typically look to their regular state

education funding to pay for online programs. But that can be

an iffy proposition if the online program serves students in

multiple districts. Generally, education funding is distributed

by states to school districts based on the number of full-time

students being served in the district. In calculating this, states

look at how many hours students are receiving instruction—

“seat time”—to determine how many students are participating in school full time. In bureaucratic parlance, this means

the number of students who are “full-time equivalent” (FTE).

And this is where things can get tricky for online schools

and programs.

Some states have no adequate mechanism for funding

anything more or less than 100 percent FTE. Yet, many students who enroll in online courses do so on a part-time basis

to supplement their educational program. So, how does the

state per-student apportionment for that student get divvied

up between the student’s home district and the online

provider who may well be in another district or even another

state? If a student who is enrolled full time in her regular

school also enrolls part time in an online program, must the

state pay more than 100 percent FTE for that student? 

What if a district launches an online school that draws a

large number of previously homeschooled students? It’s not

uncommon that a state’s education budget for a fiscal period

is finite. Large, unanticipated enrollments of new students

into the public school system can draw down that budget,

meaning every district would receive less per pupil than it

would have otherwise.

Alternatively, some states have systems in which the level

of per-pupil funding to school districts is guaranteed, so that

a surge in new enrollments in one district doesn’t dilute

funding to other districts. Nevertheless, if District A suddenly draws a significant number of public school students

away from District B, District B is going to feel a sharp pinch

in its purse.

All these issues and more have to be addressed as states

evaluate whether online programs qualify for funding under

existing laws. If not, lawmakers are finding they must roll up

their sleeves and start rewriting.

‘THIS IS TOO IMPORTANT’

Oregon is in the midst of sorting out its own tangle of questions. Though forward-thinking in its development of a

statewide Internet and videoconferencing network, it was

still caught off guard by some aspects of the online education

phenomenon.

This fall, for example, two school districts in Oregon had

hoped to launch online public charter schools, only to find that

their innovations overreached the flexibility of the state’s charter school law and funding system. The tiny Coquille School

District, near the Oregon coast, applied for a charter to open

the Coquille, Oregon, Independent Distance Education Academy (COR-IDEA). Based on a model that originated in the

sub-Arctic community of Galena, Alaska (see “Crossing the

Public School–Homeschool Divide” on Page 6), COR-IDEA

would have targeted homeschool families across the state.

Following Alaska’s model, COR-IDEA would have given

a portion of its per-student funding to parents, who are the

instructors, so that they could purchase curricular materials

and supplementary services of their choosing. While, at present, this falls far outside Oregon’s legal definition of the kind

of “comprehensive instructional program” required of public

schools, the case of COR-IDEA—which, in fact, is being

heard in Marion County Circuit Court—is raising some

important questions.

Watching the Coquille situation closely, another online

school, Oregon Web Academy, was also poised for a fall

launch to serve students statewide. But when its founders

saw the clouds gathering over Coquille, they sought the aegis

of the North Clackamas School District, renaming their program Clackamas Web Academy and reshaping it as a more

conventional alternative program for district students only.

Oregon’s funding formula was “built on a set of assumptions that was true even 10 years ago,” says Randy Harnisch,

who is the Oregon Department of Education’s executive officer to the State Board of Education. “The world is very different today.” There are parts of the funding system that are

“The unintended consequence

of passing new laws, such as

those that increase school

choice, is that there is always

one more thing 

to think

through.”

14 nwrel.org/nwedu
“anachronistic,” he says, “just not quite right if you’re looking at some of these technological methods of delivering

instruction.

“It’s one of those things that sounds like we should’ve

taken care of a long time ago, but every time you turn around,

there’s another issue that complicates the question,” he says.

To help sort through it all, Oregon hired the Education

Commission of the States, a policy research agency in

Denver, to examine which of the state’s education policies and practices are helping or hindering innovation

in e-learning. In October, the commission gave a draft

of its policy brief, “PK–20 Virtual e-Learning/Distance

Education,” to the state board of education. In just two

years, the report said, Oregon has moved to the leading edge of online distance education, but much

remains to be done.

“This is one of those areas that would be really

easy to screw up. And you could do that by being

too aggressive or you could do that by being completely head-in-the-sand,” Harnisch says. “This is

too important to get wrong. It’s coming whether we like

it or not—and we like it—so we want to do the absolute best

possible thinking in advance so that when we get to the point

of making some policy-level decisions, we’ll be comfortable

that we’re making the right ones.”

SPIKING ENROLLMENTS

Idaho is one of the few states that has amended its charter

school law to include online delivery of instruction. In 2002,

the Idaho Virtual Academy was launched as a K–5 public

charter school, enrolling 1,000 students from around the

state (www.idahova.org). In 2003, the school expanded to

grades K–7, and enrollment in the charter school nearly doubled to 1,900 students.

In January 2004, Idaho State Superintendent Marilyn

Howard warned the state legislature that Idaho’s student

enrollment was surging. The state’s total student enrollment

for that school year had increased by 3,500 from the year

before. 

“Roughly half of this is due to anticipated growth in charter schools, including Idaho Virtual Academy ....” she told

them. And it appeared that many, if not most, of the students

enrolling in the Idaho Virtual Academy were previously

homeschooled. She worried that budget estimates were going

to fall short. Even so, Howard said she is in favor of welcoming homeschool students into the public school realm.

“Even if these students were previously homeschooled,

they have just as much right to attend a public school—charter or regular—at state expense as any other student has,” she

said. “I’m simply noting that bringing these students into the

public system has a cost to it ....” 

(This school year, the Idaho Virtual Academy expanded

again, serving grades K–8, though enrollment dropped somewhat, to 1,800 students.)

Idaho law allows students to enroll in more than one public school, but as online charter schools emerged, students

began enrolling in more than one district. That raised the

inevitable quandary: Which school district gets the FTE perstudent funding? As it now stands, schools and programs

must negotiate between themselves how to divide up the

FTE funding for those students who are dually enrolled. Tim

Hill, chief of finance for the Idaho Department of

Education, thinks it’s likely that legislators will be

asked to provide more clarity on this issue at the

next legislative session in January.

“The unintended consequence of passing new

laws, such as those that increase school choice, is

that there is always one more thing to think through,”

he says. “Sometimes you have to go through that first

year of a new law to see what still needs to be taken care

of. The state legislature has been very good about revising or writing new laws to deal with unanticipated consequences. We’re doing pretty well at making the necessary

changes as we go.”

Authority over charter schools in Idaho has shifted sharply

away from school districts. Last spring, the legislature created

the Idaho Charter School Commission to authorize and oversee charter schools, previously the province of school districts.

And the Idaho State Board of Education ruled that charter

schools could apply to the commission to become their own

local education agency (LEA), meaning, in part, that federal

funds can be sent directly to the charter school rather than

having to pass through a sponsoring school district. 

MARKET DRIVES

Alaska vigorously supports parental choice within the public

school system. Since 1939, it has operated a public correspondence school. In 1995, it was among the first states to

pass a charter school law, and in 1997 it passed legislation creating an exemption from the state’s Compulsory School

Attendance Act that allowed for homeschooling. Instructional philosophy and method, as well as curricular choices,

are left entirely up to the homeschooling parents.

Enterprising public school districts began launching

statewide correspondence schools to serve this growing market

of homeschooled students. They commonly passed on a portion of state per-student funding to parents so that they could

purchase curricular materials and other instructional supplies.

As competition for this segment of students heated up, districts

began offering alluring extracurricular courses in such things

as private scuba diving lessons, whole-family memberships in

health clubs, and family trips to the nation’s capital. Families

happily signed up, all at the state’s expense. But parents and

educators at brick-and-mortar schools complained that that

was unfair. Public school students should have equal access to

the same learning opportunities, they said.

The Alaska State Board of Education agreed and, last summer, led by Chairman Rich Mauer, it amended the regulations

THE SEARCH FOR FUNDING

NORTHWEST EDUCATION / WINTER 2004 15
governing correspondence schools. The new rules institute

accountability measures and clarify how Alaska’s correspondence schools and parents can spend state school funds. 

“We found what we felt was a good middle ground where

we could stop or abate the misuses and yet still provide the

programs, allow those parents the opportunity for choice

within the public education system,” says Mauer.

SEPARATION OF HOME AND STATE

Montana also strongly supports school choice, but some are

deeply ambivalent about blurring the line between public

schools and homeschools. Last summer when a proposal was

put together by a university professor and a couple of legislators to develop an online distance education program that

would serve both homeschool and public school students

across the state, it raised some eyebrows.

Claudette Morton, executive director of the Montana

Small Schools Alliance and an influential proponent of educational technology, had mixed feelings about the initial proposal. “We didn’t feel that any money, based on our

constitution, should be going toward homeschooling

directly,” she says.

Granted, she says, Montana allows homeschool students

to supplement their homeschool program by taking courses

at brick-and-mortar public schools. Providing they take a

minimum of two courses at a time, the state will direct partial FTE funding to the school district for each of those students, she says.

But the idea of the state creating and funding an online

program that would serve homeschool students in their homes

wasn’t a road Morton and like-minded educators in the state

wanted to go down. That’s because Montana has no way to

supervise them, test them, or determine the quality of the

instruction, she says. Parents simply tell the county superintendent that they are homeschooling their children, “and

that’s it,” she says.

“When we’ve tried to amend [the homeschool law], we’ve

had a thousand people up at the legislature with all the kids in

nice, fluffy dresses and neckties and so forth saying, ‘We don’t

want any state oversight,’” Morton says with a laugh. And

when county superintendents have tried to visit some of the

homeschools to check on the quality of the programs, she says

only half-jokingly, “They were met with shotguns at the gate.”

Last summer, Montana’s governor at the time, Judy

Martz, directed about $250,000 in federal money to the University of Montana in Missoula to create the Montana K12

Online Distance Learning Initiative. This school year, the

university is piloting the program in which certified K–12

teachers teach courses that are available for dual high school

and college credit. In the end, after hearing input from Montana’s Office of Public Instruction and people like Morton,

the dean of education at the university, Paul Rowland, crafted

a plan that limited the program to students who are already in

the public school system. (See “Moving Ahead With Distance

Education in Montana” on Page 20.)

Says Morton, “Public education is very clearly spelled out

in our constitution, and it doesn’t say that any money goes to

homeschools.”

TESTING AND MAKING ‘AYP’

Alaska’s homeschooling families can be as fiercely independent as those in Montana. For many homeschooling families,

Alaska represents freedom from overregulation and government interference. To them, it is not a contradiction to expect

the state to be hands-off while handing over public funding

to pay for homeschooling. And many can’t or don’t want to

make sure their children travel to a testing site once or twice

a year to take the standardized achievement tests that are

required of public school students.

“We’re certainly not trying to interfere [in] those home

programs,” says Harry Gamble of the state’s department of

education. “The Alaska legislature has spoken on that one

and has said that that’s a valid option for parents, and we

believe that. But once they step across and enroll in a public

school, whether that’s a brick-and-mortar or one of these

correspondence programs, then they are subject to the

[same] kinds of rules and regulations that public school students are subject to, including testing.

“It’s a distinction that’s hard to make.”

And in this NCLB era in which schools are required to

show “adequate yearly progress” (AYP), it’s important that all

students take the standardized tests. A minimum of 95 percent of a school’s students must participate in testing or the

school automatically fails to meet AYP.

“Delta Cyber School did not make AYP, not for test results

but because they didn’t have 95 percent in testing,” says

Board Chairman Rich Mauer, who lives in the Delta/Greely

School District, which launched one of Alaska’s first

statewide online schools (www.dcs.k12.ak.us). The students

who did take the tests performed very well, he says, but, in

the end, that didn’t matter when it came to receiving the

dreaded label of not having made AYP.

“I would love to see us go to online testing as much as possible,” he says.

Idaho and Oregon have online testing systems in place.

It not only facilitates testing, it can also ease resistance

to online instruction, says Oregon’s Randy Harnisch.

“We’d be remiss in not making

online learning a vital part of

our system. We have to do

that.”

16 nwrel.org/nwedu
THE SEARCH FOR FUNDING

NORTHWEST EDUCATION / WINTER 2004 17

“The fact that we have online testing is very significant,” he

says. “It kind of primes us for accepting an online instructional

program, given the fact that we are ... implementing very successfully an online assessment system. It’s kind of like: ‘We’ve

done that. It’s working. There have been problems, but we’ve

fixed them. OK, we can do this, too.’”

WHO GETS THE FUNDING—WHO GETS THE “DING”?

In last November’s election, Washington voters rejected

charter school legislation for the third time in a decade,

so all public online K–12 programs must be sponsored

by a school district. (Although some colleges and universities offer dual-credit online courses to public high

school students.) 

While the state’s K–20 Educational Telecommunications Network links every school district to highspeed Internet and videoconferencing, and the

newly minted Digital Learning Commons

(www.learningcommons.org) is being piloted as a

portal to online learning options, policymaking is

lagging behind the advanced technology infrastructure. At present, Washington doesn’t have statewide policies regulating online education programs. Some districts use

the State Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction’s

criteria for providing “alternative learning experiences” to

help guide their development of online programs, says David

Walddon, who oversees the K–20 Network for the state

(www.dis.wa.gov/K20/).

Rules addressing “alternative learning experiences” allow a

student to receive instruction outside the traditional classroom setting, but beyond that, the criteria break down when

applied to online programs. The criteria require each student

to have an individual learning plan, and a teacher to manage

the plan, including meeting face to face with the student at

least weekly, says Martin Mueller, director of learning and

teaching support for the Washington Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction.

The criteria don’t clarify how state apportionment funds

should be distributed when a student is enrolled in multiple

districts. “No one really wants to give up the money for the

FTE,” observes Walddon, adding, “and what about accountability?” For example, if a student who’s enrolled in his local

district takes math courses from an online program in

another district, then does poorly on the math portions of

standardized tests, which school district should be responsible? By law, the school district in which the student lives is

accountable for that student’s learning. But should that student’s low test score count against his local school or the

online program when it comes to federal reporting of AYP?

“Who should get the ding?” asks Walddon.

In 2002, former Governor Gary Locke appointed a task

force to help the state become “a magnet of innovation in

digital learning.” The group reported its findings in the

“Washington State Digital Education Initiative Task Force

Report” and urged the state to develop a policy allowing students to transfer their state funding apportionment to online

providers of accredited courses (www.governor.wa.gov/

econo/report.pdf).

“Funding for the costs of student enrollment in courses

was one of the harder issues that the task force addressed,”

the group reported. “After lengthy discussion, the task force

was of the unanimous opinion that the student’s interests

should prevail ... districts should be obligated to pay

the provider of the online course, up to the

amount of the state apportionment.” 

In last spring’s legislative session, the state legislature took up the matter and directed the Joint

Legislative Audit and Review Committee to review

policies addressing “alternative learning experiences”

and to study what additional policies are needed to

address online learning, says Mueller. The committee is

expected to recommend to the legislature in June 2005

what the state’s role in online learning should be.

“The Digital Learning Commons and the Digital Education Initiative got ahead of the funding model,” says

Mueller. “Now we’ve got to get caught up to the reality in the

schools.”

THOUGHTFUL MANNER

Not long ago, the prospect of introducing online schools into

public education stirred a Jurassic Park kind of response in

educators, says Martin Mueller: “The fact that you can do it,

doesn’t mean that you should do it.” Like the dinosaurs’

destruction of paradise in Michael Crichton’s novel, would

this technological advance bring ruin to the education environment, some wondered.

“We’re past that now,” he says. “We are moving into an era

in which education practitioners have thought about educational technology and how to get kids the knowledge and

skills that they need with the help of technology. We’d be

remiss in not making online learning a vital part of our system. We have to do that. There isn’t any choice, but we need

to be thoughtful about it, too.”

Walddon agrees. “This needs to succeed. This is clearly,

clearly the way education is going. It’s going to reach populations that we haven’t been able to successfully reach before,

but it has to be done in a thoughtful manner or it will fail

drastically.” ■

Editor’s note: Bracken Reed and Rhonda Barton contributed

to this article.

Web exclusives:

Minding the Gap: State Cybersolutions to NCLB Mandates

Money Matters

Additional Reading and Web Sites

Reports From the Frontlines of Online Ed
18 nwrel.org/nwedu

NORTHWEST EDUCATION

GALLERY

From Virtual to Vista

These scenic photos were taken

by Washington students, and they

are vivid evidence of the reach of

online learning. The student photographers were enrolled in an

online photography course

through the Federal Way Internet

Academy when they took these

shots from far-flung hometowns

and vacation spots.

Learning from the same

veteran teacher and artist, who

taught the online course from a

small business park in Federal

Way, these students mastered 

the rudiments of camera mechanics and photo composition. Their

teacher, Lowell Schaefer, taught

for 25 years in a conventional

classroom at Seattle’s Thomas 

Jefferson High School before 

trying his hand at online teaching.

He was won over by the intimacy

of one-to-one computing. 

Schaefer and a former student

share their thoughts about online

teaching and learning in the story,

“Long-Distance Relationships” on

Page 28.
NORTHWEST EDUCATION / WINTER 2004 19

Photo credits,

clockwise, for Federal

Way Internet Academy

students: Matt, Alexis,

Matt, Jonathan, and

Karen

“What I have found is that working with students on the Internet I actually get to know them better, in many cases,

and get to know more of them in a more personal way than I ever did in the regular classroom.”

—Lowell Schaefer
Moving Ahead with

Distance

Education

in Montana

STORY BY BRACKEN REED

PHOTOS BY JOHN REDDY

20 nwrel.org/nwedu
n

FAIRFIELD, Montana—It’s not what you would expect.

It’s late September. You turn off Highway 200

and head northwest on U.S. 89. The two-lane

road runs through grain fields—barley cut to

blonde stubble, and rolls of alfalfa left sitting in

the fields like random, ice-age boulders. On this

flat, treeless benchland you can see the town

miles before you reach it: a clump of windbreak

trees, a water tower. You can imagine its wide,

dusty streets, the tidy, modest houses, the rail

line passing below grain silos whose corrugated

metal you can just make out, glinting in the sun

on this blue-sky afternoon.

Ten miles out, you pass a day-care center run

out of a manufactured home. Four small girls

bounce wildly on a trampoline in the shade of a

giant cottonwood, its bright yellow leaves falling

around them. Small-town life. The stark beauty

of autumn in the Big Sky grain country of north

central Montana. A man in a cowboy hat passes

in a white diesel pickup and lifts two fingers

from the steering wheel in ritual salute, a gesture as natural as wind over wheat. This is all as

you might expect it to be. 

But rounding a curve, you crest a small rise,

and suddenly the town is laid out before you.

The Harvest Hills Golf Course sprawls to the

left, as flat and false-green as a pool table. Ahead

on the right, a scraggly game farm sits back from

the road—a few camels, some tired-looking elk,

a llama, possibly, lurking in the shadows of a

muddy barn.

A golf course in a farm town with less than a

thousand people? Camels? It’s a strange sight.

Before you can make sense of it all, you’re into

Fairfield proper where suddenly things look

familiar again. Here are the false-front buildings,

the wide streets, the Cozy Corner Cafe, the Servicemen’s Club at the VFW Post 4109 (“public

welcome”). Here, too, are the Busch Agricultural

Resources, the Treasure State Seed Company, the

Faith Bible Church, and a Sinclair station with a

convenience store called, “The Store.”

At the east end of the main street, next to the

water tower, stands the brown brick schoolhouse. Elementary, junior high, and high school

all run out of one campus—the modern version

of the one-room schoolhouse. Behind the school

the grain fields spread to the eastern horizon.

CHANGING WITH THE TIMES

Fairfield is not the stereotypical isolated, rural

outpost you might have imagined. Neither as

unpredictable as a Montana camel, nor as typical as a Cozy Corner Cafe, it is, instead, a traditional farming town finding its way in the

modern world. To survive, it has had to adapt

and diversify. 

Although it still relies heavily on the agricultural market for its malting barley, which is primarily bought by Anheuser Busch, Fairfield also

has one foot in the world of high technology.

One of its largest employers is Three Rivers

Communications, which started as a small telephone cooperative but now provides cell phone,

Internet, digital TV, and regular telephone service to a large area. 

NORTHWEST EDUCATION / WINTER 2004 21
Beneath its farm-town surface, Fairfield is a fully connected community that is not afraid of change. It’s not surprising, then, that Fairfield High School was one of the first

schools in Montana to sign up for a new, statewide distance

education program. 

A VISION AND A PLAN

The story of how the Montana K–12 Online Distance Learning Initiative came into being, however, is another case of

overturned expectations. While several states have created

centralized, statewide distance learning programs, few of

them are run entirely out of a university, with little or no

involvement by the state department of education. 

John Lundt, a professor in the School of Education at the

University of Montana, in Missoula, is the primary architect

of Montana K–12 Online. A self-described “educational

futurist” and “political conservative,” Lundt is the co-author

of a book called Leaving School: Finding Education (Matanzas

Press, 2004), which argues for radical changes to the current

public education system. A one-time public school teacher

and principal himself, Lundt is not afraid of controversy. 

In person, he is an articulate and forceful speaker, with a

passionate temperament that burns just under the surface.

He has the slightly impatient air of someone who believes he

has found important answers and is irritated that others cannot immediately see the wisdom of his plan. His conversation is peppered with potentially explosive comments, such

as “No Child Left Behind reminds me very much of Lyndon

Johnson’s Great Society, in that it was built on a fallacy,” and

“Public education has been in pretty much of a free fall for

the last 50 years.”

Lundt is a polarizing figure within Montana’s education

system, with ideas for the future of public education that are

compelling to some and appalling to others. Chief among

those ideas is the use of online learning to meet the needs of

cash-strapped schools and districts, while simultaneously

addressing issues such as the need for highly qualified teachers, and the need to individualize instruction. 

Among those who have found his ideas compelling are a

small group of conservative legislators and political activists,

most prominent among them, Republican State Senator Rick

Laible from the Bitteroot Valley, just south of Missoula, and

U of M law professor Rob Natelson, whose conservative

political views are well known in the state.

According to Lundt, Senator Laible read his book, which

also advocates homeschooling in some cases, and approached

him with questions about creating a statewide distance education program. Around this same time, in June of 2003, the

state was the recipient of $73 million as part of President

Bush’s federal economic stimulus package. 

Judy Martz, the Republican governor at the time, at first

declined to spend the portion of this federal windfall that was

not expressly designated for tax cuts and emergency forest

fire relief. Eventually she was swayed by public opinion and

parceled out the remaining funds. At a news conference in

November of that year, Martz asked that a $250,000 grant be

directed toward expanding distance-learning programs in the

state. She was reported as saying, “I think these dollars would

be best served in a program for our K–12 students. The

money can be used for instruction where it’s most needed,

for rural and isolated students.”

How this grant came to be awarded to the University of

Montana is a matter of some controversy. According to

Claudette Morton, executive director of the Montana Small

Schools Alliance, “several of us in public education were

quite taken aback. We were quite surprised, in fact, that it was

the U of M that would get the pilot because of their ‘outstanding program,’ because we all said, ‘Gee, we hadn’t heard

much about the program.’”

Some people were uneasy about the deal being struck outside of a competitive grant process that would take into

account an applicant’s proven track record in online learning.

Several universities, not including the U of M, had been the

recipients of federal Preparing Tomorrow’s Teachers to Use

Technology (PT3) grants, and had already done significant

work in online learning, for instance. 

According to Morton, a longtime proponent of distance

education in Montana, this only scratches the surface of the

many successful distance education programs that already

existed in the state prior to the grant. These projects range

from small schools or districts that share expert teachers via

Web or video technology, to the Advanced Placement courses

that Montana’s Office of Public Instruction provides to

approximately 80 schools. Such programs are the result of

years of hard work by many organizations, schools, districts,

and OPI employees, says Morton. For her, and many others

in the state, the grant was an opportunity for the governor’s

office and the legislature to finally recognize and support

these efforts. “It seems a shame that the governor’s office

chose not to build on the work of these ongoing programs,”

she says.

22 nwrel.org/nwedu

“Many [public school employees] are afraid that any change will

upset the system that they work in,and they are right in that respect.

It will force them to change the way they do business, and there is nothing more

frightening to people than change.”
For many in the state, awarding the $250,000 grant to a single institution was also a point of contention. As Michael Hall,

instructional technology coordinator for OPI and a major

contributor to the development of the state’s distance education standards observes, “In Montana the focus has always

been on local control. Typically, it has been districts that have

taken on the issue of distance learning and made it work.” 

That the grant would fund a program to be overseen by a

university professor with outspoken views on the failure of

public education was even more troubling to some.

Lance Melton, executive director of the Montana School

Boards Association (MTSBA), puts it plainly. “I take issue,” he

says, “with the fact that our [former] governor dedicated

sorely needed public funds to the direct control of an individual whose goal is to destroy public education as we know it.”

But Lundt says, “I have a reputation for getting things done,

and that is what they needed with this rather than having it get

lost in the quagmire of committee and compromise.” Yet, as it

turned out, holding meetings and reaching a compromise

were some of the first things Lundt had to do. With the help of

Senator Laible, Lundt was able to address the concerns of those

in public education, at least in the short term.

Among those concerns were that some of the grant money

might be used to provide services to homeschooled students,

that uncertified teachers might be hired, and that courses

might be developed without oversight from either the OPI or

the Montana State Board of Public Education to ensure that

they met Montana Student Content Standards.

According to Lundt, these concerns were misplaced. “It

was never my intent to use uncertified teachers” he says, “and

serving homeschool students through their home district was

always part of the plan. All courses are aligned with state standards and have the exact same content as the courses presented in schools.”

For Lundt, the controversy is less about the specifics of the

K–12 Online program and more about the fear of change and

a public school establishment that does not want competition. “Many [public school employees] are afraid that any

change will upset the system that they work in, and they are

right in that respect,” he says. “It will force them to change

the way they do business, and there is nothing more frightening to people than change.”

While Lundt’s comments back up his own admission that

he is “not much of a politician,” and “doesn’t have those tactful diplomatic skills,” he has also lived up to his reputation as

a hard-driving administrator who gets things done. 

Within two months of officially being awarded the grant,

the Montana K–12 Online program had already chosen its

software program, called Blackboard, and completed a

statewide assessment of the need for online classes. By spring

2004, planners had selected which courses would be offered,

based on that needs assessment, and had started recruiting

teachers. Before the school year was out they had also

selected which schools would be participating, based on

need, and most students had already signed up for fall classes. 

The process, says Lundt, was thorough and devoid of politics. “We looked at the courses that would give us the greatest amount of enrollment,” he says, “based on the greatest

need as expressed in the survey, and then we picked the top

13 courses, which is the number we had determined we

could afford [to offer].”

Teacher hires were similarly handled. “We advertised, and

we also received nominations from administrators around

the state,” says Lundt. “We went through an elaborate hiring

process: We did online interviews, phone interviews, talked

to their references, and hired 13 excellent people.”

That summer, the teachers were given three full weeks of

face-to-face training in the use of the Blackboard system and

the elements of effective online teaching. By this fall, less

than a year after the grant was first awarded, students were

participating in online classes. Among that first crop of students were several from Fairfield High School. 

FEELING THE SQUEEZE

When former Governor Martz first awarded the pilot grant

for Montana K–12 Online, she mentioned the specific needs

NORTHWEST EDUCATION / WINTER 2004 23

MOVING AHEAD WITH DISTANCE EDUCATION IN MONTANA
of rural and isolated areas, as well as the need for highly qualified teachers as required by the No Child Left Behind Act.

What she did not mention was the woeful condition of educational funding in the state. Both Lundt and Morton agree

that the OPI simply did not have the people or resources to

support a statewide distance education program. 

Lundt points to a recent lawsuit brought against the state,

in which school boards hired a consultant to examine the

funding of public education in Montana. The outcome of

this study was a call for a $350 million infusion of funds into

the system. Lundt is far from alone in his observation that

that infusion “isn’t going to happen,” although the Montana

Supreme Court has ruled in favor of those who brought the

suit, which included both the MTSBA and the MREA. 

While this ruling may eventually bring some relief, it’s

clear that Montana’s public education system is in the middle

of a severe financial crisis. And no one has been hit harder

than rural schools. 

Fairfield High School Principal Les Meyer is all too familiar with the scenario. In the past school year, the Fairfield district lost both a math teacher and a principal, neither of

whom have been replaced due to budgetary constraints. In

fact, Meyer is now the principal for grades 6–12, while the

district superintendent, Mark Anderson, covers grades K–5.

At the same time, the high school saw an increase in

enrollment. With a total of about 175 in grades 9–12, the district, which also absorbs junior and senior high students from

the feeder schools in two nearby communities, has been

stretched to the breaking point. “We were looking at larger

classes,” says Meyer, “and in some cases, it was even a matter

of, where are these students going to go?” 

When the school heard about the Montana K–12 Online

program, they jumped at the opportunity to participate. “It

really helped relieve some of the pressure of the schedule,” says

Meyer. “I don’t know what we would have done without it.”

A LEARNING CURVE

The 13 courses eventually offered to students range from an

advanced U.S. History class to an elementary science class to

geometry, Spanish, French, and U.S. government. Each class

accepts a maximum of 20 students, and most are either at or

just below maximum capacity.

24 nwrel.org/nwedu
At Fairfield, nine juniors and seniors are currently taking

an online creative writing class, which the school would otherwise have been unable to offer. The course had a few snags

at first, says Fairfield’s academic counselor, Cindy Luoma.

“The main problem for us is that they didn’t start the class

until September fifteenth,” she says, “while we started school

in the middle of August. That meant that we had to figure

out something for them to do for a few weeks.”

Principal Meyer, a former English teacher, stepped in ably,

teaching the class face-to-face for the first several weeks, but

the transition from that format to an online format was a bit

shaky for some students. Brian, a senior who also serves as

the school’s assistant computer technician, admits that he

preferred the face-to-face approach, even though he is

extremely comfortable with computers and the Internet.

“It was just a lot different,” he says. “It was hard to get used

to the online format at first. I didn’t really understand what

was expected of us.”

Despite some reservations, Brian and his fellow creative

writing students all expressed a willingness to take more

online classes. As another student, Vince, put it, “The flexibility is great. You can do your work during the study hour or

you can do it at home, if you’ve got other things going on. I

would definitely take another online class.”

TURF WARS

Whether those online classes will continue to be offered

through the University of Montana is difficult to say. Legislators will determine the fate of the program in their January

2005 session, and some people are still unhappy with a university-run program. Melton says the university has no state

constitutional authority to operate such a program. Only

local, elected trustees may have supervision and control over

K–12 public education, he says.

In fact, the Montana School Boards Association has

already been working with the Montana Rural Education

Association to create a competing proposal. Their program

would use both VisionNet (a consortium of telephone cooperatives that provides a statewide videoconferencing network) and Blackboard courseware to provide distance

education courses to all participating districts.

The program, called the Montana Schools E-Learning

Consortium, focuses on local control, with each district paying a flat fee of $4,000 to join. The program’s backers estimate the need for approximately $200,000 to cover start-up

costs, but according to the MTSBA’s Melton, “It’s already in

full swing, with 36 participating districts, representing 52,000

students” signed up to participate in fall 2005. (The Montana

Schools E-Learning Consortium Web site is at www.

mtsba.org/dlprogram.)

As Lundt puts it, “There’s a turf war going on in Montana”

over the future of distance learning in the state. Lundt finds

the current struggles less important than the continuation of

online learning, no matter who is running it. 

“There are more reports on the failure of public education

than would fit in this room,” he says, from his university

office. “There is certainly a need for change.”

Whether the Montana K–12 Online pilot program receives

continued funding or not, it’s clear that Lundt will continue

to work toward realizing his vision of change, and online

learning will continue to be a central part of that vision. 

When asked what the future might hold for Montana’s

public schools, Lundt says, “I think that the local school will

survive simply as a community learning opportunity, and it

will always be here in some form. But it will not be in the

form of a factory model that we have been so used to in the

twentieth century. It will be more like it was prior to that

time, in which learning had a variety of options. School was

one of them, but it was not the only one.”

LOOKING AHEAD

As the Fairfield creative writing students gather for a photograph in the bright glare of the afternoon sun, it’s impossible

to look at their fresh faces and polite, shy demeanor and not

think of the future that lies ahead for them.

“Nobody ever wants to stay in farming, if that’s what

you’re asking,” the counselor, Luoma, had said earlier in the

day, when asked about the average student’s plans.

As they stand in a field of barley stubble in the middle of

the Fairfield Bench, the beauty of Big Sky country stretching

into the distance in every direction, you wonder. They may

not want to farm, they may want to wade out into the depths

of the larger world, but it’s hard to believe that some of them

won’t long for home. Whatever the future holds for online

public education in Montana, whatever the future holds for

these teenagers standing in a field on a glorious autumn day,

there’s one thing we can probably all count on: It won’t be

what we expected. ■

MOVING AHEAD WITH DISTANCE EDUCATION IN MONTANA

When the school heard about the Montana K–12 Online program,

they jumped at the opportunity to participate. “It really helped relieve some

of the pressure of the schedule,” says Meyer. “I don’t know what we would have

done without it.”

NORTHWEST EDUCATION / WINTER 2004 25
To write or read a personal letter is to

connect with someone you love or

respect; it is affection and care parsed

into words on the page; it is a papery

handshake drawn with ink and sealed

with the tongue of a friend. A letter

arrives in the mailbox, where it waits

decorously and silently for your hand

to pull it forth. You sit, open it eagerly,

read it with delight or despair, read it

again, file it away, find it years later,

read it a third time, treasure its yellowing ancient papery emotional power,

history, preserved time. Rarely is a personal letter thrown away. They are uniformly saved, I suspect: in desk

drawers, shoe boxes, between the pages

of a book.

It is fashionable in these times to

bemoan and bewail the Death of the

Letter—killed, with the accompaniment of a braying laugh track, by television, video, and computers. But is

this so? Just how many letters are written these days?

“Somewhere between 50 and 60

million ‘real’ letters are mailed in

America every day,” says U.S. Postal

Service spokesman Lou Eberhardt.

“Total United States mail is about 600

million pieces a day. On the whole

planet there are approximately a billion

and a half letters in daily circulation.”

By Eberhardt’s professional guess,

then, about one in five Americans is

sending or receiving an honest-to-God

letter today. Not a bill, not a request,

not a sale notice, but a real, live letter,

with a salutation and a signature, with

news, anecdotes, anniversary greetings,

perhaps even a photograph of little

Elwin covered with his birthday cake.

Every Wednesday for the past year I

have appeared in a nearby third-grade

class to talk about Writing and Editing

and Letters and Stories. I gave many

small amusing speeches about letters.

Nearly every Wednesday a moppet

would approach me and ask, in a small

voice, “But what can I write a letter

about?”

Here is what I wanted to tell those

children:

Write about the vagaries of health

and wealth, travel plans, anecdotes, tall

tales, books read and movies seen, the

odd and poignant behavior of parents,

pets, and neighbors; quirks of the

weather, tales of the city, the exuberance

of birds, the waltzing of insects, the

manner in which late afternoon sunlight stacks itself in golden bars on the

rug, the stinging shout-note of a trumpet, the gravel-moan of a saxophone,

the wisdom of water, the extraordinary

dinner you had Tuesday, how Aunt

Trudy successfully dealt with the problem of bats in the belfry, starlings in the

eaves, death in the afternoon.

Anything. Everything. Letters, as

tiny cries from the heart, are small cars

in which both clowns and kings fit.

Letters also bring the world to the

door, hat in hand, polite and agreeable.

I travel through the mails, keep in

touch with various and sundry communities, feel tremors in the strings

that connect me to the world. So many

connections, worlds, circles of friends

and family, work and play, past and

present. The web woven by letters is

dense and has a power far beyond its

ingredients: ink, paper, a gummed

stamp. Isn’t the power and pleasure of

a letter like that of love, in which the

opening is thrilling, the process a labor

of pleasure, and the memory savored

long afterward?

A small child is still tugging at my

pants-leg. “But what can I write about?”

she asks.

What I write about:

How I always got a haircut after breaking up with a girlfriend. How my

mother went back in the house for her

forgotten gloves and returned to the

porch to find my brother, one year old,

suddenly dead in his stroller. How I

once fouled out of a basketball game

26 nwrel.org/nwedu

Digital connections can kindle uncommon relationships among kids, teachers, and the wider world. Yet, 

as important as these cyber-relationships can be, essayist Brian Doyle reminds us of the joys of exchanging

letters through the post, those “papery handshakes” that endure across time and space.

Letterature

BY BRIAN DOYLE
before halftime and walked two miles

home in the snow, furious and

ashamed. How I saw angels in the attic

as a boy, their wings huge and muscular,

their faces empty and terrible. How my

father, lanky and young and in a war,

wrote poems to my mother in the thick

dusk of the Philippines. How my

grandmother held her dead husband’s

name in her mouth for an extra second

when she mentioned him. How my

daughter gracefully holds out her left

hand, palm up, greeting the water,

when I carry her to the sea.

“Every letter written,” said a

medieval abbot, “is a wound inflicted

on the devil.” His point, I think, was

that words are evanescent, and so are conversations; what lingers in the

mind is only an impression of speech, a sense of

having communed and

communicated, an idea

of what transpired

between yourselves. The

memory of a personal

conversation is inevitably

mostly fiction. Perhaps a

phrase or an idea stands

forth against the tide of

lost words. Not so with a

letter, in which words are

preserved as if frozen in

amber. That medieval abbot thought

that letters were holy. I agree with him.

They connect us in a most cordial fashion; they preserve the past, which had

saints and angels and grace in it; they

make us remember their authors, living and dead, and such memories are

gentle prayers for those who sat down

to write something of themselves.

There are times in my life when all

the world seems intricately related,

when my mind snaps open with the

clear snicking sound of a lock unlocked,

when all things seem both circular and

humorous. It is on moments like these

that my spiritual life depends, and I

have learned to wait as patiently for

them as I do for the train.

When they arrive I relish and

remember them, and hurriedly scribble down the words they were dressed

in, and stuff the scraps of paper in my

pockets. Sometime later, when the

world has stopped rushing by and no

one expects me anywhere, I write them

down and send them to the people I

love and respect. I think of these stories, and the letters and postcards on

which they are scribbled or hurriedly

typed, as small prayers, bulletins from

the universe, stray and telling notes

from the Big Song. With care and

affection I scrawl my name at the bottom, affix a stamp, and entrust the

paper packet to the air and to the

United States Post Office. And soon

enough, from everywhere, letters come

back to me, each one the written voice

of its author, each one a prayer, each

one a gift. ■

Brian Doyle is the editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland and the

author of several collections of essays, including Leaping: Revelations & Epiphanies.

This article first appeared in Portland

Magazine in 1992. It is adapted here by

permission of the author.

NORTHWEST EDUCATION / WINTER 2004 27 Copyright © 2004, Minga Creative
28 nwrel.org/nwedu

“[Mr. Schaefer] 

was extremely

easygoing and easy

to communicate

with. I feel like I

made a better

connection with

him than I have

with any teacher,

except for a very

few others, out of

all my classes in

public school.”

“Darrell was so

interested in the

coursework. He was

catching on so quickly,

and then I got into

conversations with

him about what he

was doing, how he

was doing things, what kind of set-ups

he was using, and it built from there.”
Long-Distance

RELATIONSHIPS

Teaching Web design to a blind student, 

a seasoned online teacher sees his job afresh.

STORY AND PHOTOS BY BRACKEN REED

FEDERAL WAY, Washington—When veteran teacher Lowell

Schaefer first heard about a new online school being developed by the Federal Way School District, he was skeptical.

“My first reaction,” Schaefer recalls, “was, well, here we go—

another way of taking the teacher out of the classroom,

another way of making things more impersonal.”

An artist as well as a teacher, Schaefer had been at Thomas

Jefferson High School for 25 years and was not afraid of

change. In his photography, drawing, graphic arts, and Web

design classes, he had always attempted to stay on the cutting

edge, incorporating new technologies and sharing the latest

trends and techniques with his students. Still, there was one

tenet he held sacred: forging meaningful, face-to-face connections with his students was, for him, the foundation of a

successful classroom experience.

“I’ve always had a teaching style where I get to know my

students,” says Schaefer, “just by doing things like throwing

my own interests out there and letting them respond to that

and vice versa.” That kind of back-and-forth, give-and-take

was what made teaching enjoyable for him, and what made

students enjoy taking his classes. 

Online classes, he felt, would take away that connection

and leave only a bland, uninspired transfer of information.

Not exactly a recipe for success. 

GETTING ONLINE

Schaefer’s natural curiosity got the better of him, however.

Despite his doubts, he couldn’t resist attending the district’s

first couple of meetings about the online school. What he saw

at those meetings turned his assumptions upside down.

“They did some presentations with elementary and middle school teachers who were working with small groups of

students within the district, mostly online,” he says. “I got to

thinking about it, and I realized that it was quite different

than what my first uneducated impression was.” 

Schaefer began to reexamine his current situation. His

ability to create a dynamic classroom environment had been

slowly deteriorating, he felt—eaten away by budget cuts,

larger class sizes, limited equipment and supplies, and occasional disciplinary problems. Despite his best efforts, the

classroom was becoming less personal and less individualized. The more he thought about online learning, the more

he saw its potential to sidestep these problems and allow him

to teach straight to the individual student.

As the district pushed forward with its online initiative,

Schaefer went from skeptic to curious observer to full-on

participant. The shift was gradual, but by the fall of 1996,

when the Internet Academy—as the online school came to be

called—was fully operational, Schaefer had written curricula

for several courses, including photography, graphic arts,

drawing, Web design, and middle school art appreciation. 

NORTHWEST EDUCATION / WINTER 2004 29
It was not long before he found himself driving each day to

a one-level business park in this sprawling suburb south of

Seattle. Surrounded by insurance companies, mortgage brokers, and other small businesses, without a school bus in sight,

the Academy was unlike any school he could have imagined

when he first chose the profession in the early 1970s. 

As he settled in to the new job, logging on to a computer

each day from his comfortable, low-lit office, Schaefer saw

that his initial fears were not only unfounded, but that the

reality was better than he could have imagined. For the first

time in years, he felt that he was able to focus directly on the

curriculum and the students, with few distractions.

“What I have found,” he says, “is that working with students on the Internet I actually get to know them better, in

many cases, and get to know more of them, in a more personal way, than I ever did in the regular classroom.”

The reasons for this, he says, are many. “Number one, in

the regular classroom you’re dealing with large groups of students and you’re lucky to be able to interact, uninterrupted,

for more than just a few seconds or at most a minute, with

any one student. Also, when you’re doing presentations or

you’re doing instruction, maybe one or two hands pop up,

one or two kids who are actually responding, whereas, in this

[online] format, every single student is responding, because

every student has their ‘hand’ up as soon as they finish their

homework. Anytime a student has a question or needs help

they can e-mail me and I get back to them as soon as possible. They get immediate attention, and that’s something I

couldn’t always do in the classroom—get to everybody, each

day, whenever they really needed help.”

The online format also allowed Schaefer to individualize

the curriculum more effectively by adding supplemental

materials, encouraging students to find the learning style that

worked best for them, and to go at their own pace. 

He also rediscovered the power of the written word.

According to Schaefer, whatever Web-based courses lack in

visual cues and verbal subtleties is more than made up for by

the inherent intimacy of one-to-one writing. “Most students

are much more open in an e-mail than they would ever be in

class,” he says. “They don’t have the anxiety of speaking up in

front of a whole group, and there’s time to compose their

thoughts and to get them down just how they want them.

The English language is so powerful, an e-mail can express a

lot about you—your sense of humor, your mood—that

might not get expressed in a regular classroom.”

The online format also appealed to Schaefer’s natural

affinity for the nontraditional student. “We have a lot of students who couldn’t be educated as effectively in any other

way,” he says. “We had a student a couple years ago, for example, who was an extreme hemophiliac. He could only type for

about five or 10 minutes at a time or he’d be black and blue

up to his wrist. He couldn’t leave home—any little bump or

scratch could be fatal for him.” 

Whether it’s a foreign exchange student needing to take

English-language classes while overseas, a homeschooler in

rural eastern Washington, a traveling musician, a child actor,

a cancer patient, a single mother, or the Olympic speed

skater, Apolo Ohno, Schaefer enjoys the diversity and

uniqueness of working with all those who find themselves

outside the ring of the mainstream classroom’s campfire.

Ironically, the one common thread that connects nearly all

of Schaefer’s online students is that he will never meet them.

But this, too, he has come to see in a positive light. “Ninetynine percent of my students I never meet face to face,” he

says, “but that’s one of the aspects of teaching online that can

actually be great. I’m not influenced by their daily activities—

whether they’re ‘good’ in my class or not. I don’t know what

color they are, how tall they are, whether they’re heavyset,

whether they’re delaying a bit in doing their assignments,

whether they’ve had past behavioral problems. I’m just looking at the product of their efforts in my class.”

THROUGH THE LINES, ACROSS THE DIFFERENCES

Among the online students whom Schaefer has never met is

a senior at the Washington State School for the Blind (WSSB)

in Vancouver, Washington, named Darrell. 

When he signed up for Schaefer’s Web Design class in the

spring of 2004, Darrell had only taken one other online class,

an eighth-grade course in the history of the Pacific Northwest, which had been a mixed success. He had liked the

instructor but had failed to connect with the subject matter

or to fully embrace the online format. But in the Web Design

class it all clicked. 

A big reason for that was Schaefer’s flexible teaching style

and ability to create personal connections with his students.

“He was extremely easygoing and easy to communicate

with,” says Darrell. “With all of my courses I feel like it’s

30 nwrel.org/nwedu

THE NUMBERS

Student enrollment in the 2003–2004 school year: 1,050

Online courses offered in the 2003–2004 school year: 3,618

Percentage of students by grade level in the 2004–2005

school year (to date):

61.7% in grades 9–12

26.9% in grades 6–8

11.4% in grades K–5

Percentage of students attending the Internet Academy full

time (5 classes or more): 17%

Percentage of Internet Academy students from outside the

Federal Way School District: 87.5%

School districts and communities: currently serves students

from 92 different school districts and 145 cities, all in Washington state

Approximately 100+ subject areas are offered in core 

English, social studies, math, science, and a broad choice of

electives
LONG-DISTANCE RELATIONSHIPS

NORTHWEST EDUCATION / WINTER 2004 31

important that teachers try to communicate as though they

understand our generation. I found it very nice that even

though on his home page he said to use proper grammar and

all that, Mr. Schaefer was communicating as if he was about

20 in our e-mails. I feel like I made a better connection with

him than I have with any teacher, except for a very few others, out of all my classes in public school.”

The difference in appearance and circumstance between

Darrell and Schaefer would be hard to exaggerate. Grayhaired, nearing retirement, and casually but neatly dressed,

Schaefer exudes calm and a certain level of hard-earned, middle class comfort. Though well over six feet tall and with a

bear-like frame, there is a grace to his manners, a glint of

humor in his eyes, and a soft, deliberate way of speaking that

belies a contemplative and artistic nature.

At 18 years old, with wavy brown hair and a stocky,

wrestler’s build, Darrell is a complex mix of teenage energy,

breathless enthusiasm, and a wise-beyond-his-years intensity.

Behind the heavy-metal garb, mutton chops, and rebel attitude is a remarkably disciplined, mature, and focused individual who has endured a great deal of hardship without

letting it dampen his infectious love of life. 

Legally blind from birth, Darrell has had a multitude of

operations to stabilize his degenerative vision. Active

cataracts interfere with his already limited sight, which, at

best corrected, is rated at 20/200. In layman’s terms, that

means that what he can see at 20 feet, a person with 20/20

vision can see at 200 feet. In practical terms, it means that

activities such as driving are out, but working on a computer

is still possible. In fact, Darrell chooses to work on a computer by placing himself one to four inches from a high-contrast color screen, rather than by using adaptive tools such as

magnifiers or screen readers, which he finds intrusive. “I

don’t need them, they get in the way, and I don’t like them,”

he says in a tone that fully conveys his fierce independence.

For the past four and a half years he has shuttled back and

forth along the I-5 corridor, spending weekends at his parents’ house in Auburn and weekdays at his small cottage

dorm room on the WSSB campus. Every Friday afternoon

the school’s charter bus takes him home and every Sunday it

carries him back to the school again. 

In between, he leads a life of intense, self-imposed strictness, getting up at 4:30 every morning (“3:30 on laundry

day”) and taking a full class load that starts at 6:15, includes

classes at nearby Hudson’s Bay High School, and extends

through an after-school exercise program called goalball. The

sport was designed specifically for the blind, and he takes

obvious competitive pleasure in participating. 

On top of this he pursues his other passions: computers,

art, sci-fi and fantasy novels, heavy metal and alternative rock

music, and an obsession with the Japanese style of animation

called anime. His desire to live life to the fullest, squeezing

every drop out of a day, means he routinely gets only four

hours of sleep a night, making up for it, he says, with lazy

weekend mornings. 

It’s this passion for life and thirst for knowledge that came

through loud and clear to Schaefer. “Darrell was so interested

in the coursework,” he says. “He was catching on so quickly,

and then I got into conversations with him about what he was

doing, how he was doing things, what kind of set-ups he was

using, and it built from there.”

For Darrell, the class was an ideal match of interesting subject matter, a great teacher, and a flexible schedule. “I could go

at my own pace,” he says. “I didn’t have to try and push the

slowest people in the class so that I could keep learning. And

Mr. Schaefer was just so cool. He greatly appreciated my work

ethic and he always got a kick out of my Web pages.”

The bond was sealed when the two realized that Darrell’s

Auburn home and Schaefer’s residence at the time were only

five miles apart. Attempts were made to arrange a face-to-face

meeting, but separate spring breaks, travel plans, and busy

schedules got in the way. The two never met, but they still

speak fondly of each other. And the connection may not end

there. While Schaefer nears retirement and looks forward to

enjoying his new home on Anderson Island, Darrell nears

graduation and is busy applying to colleges. His desire, he

says, is to someday be a high school English teacher. ■

Accessible Information Technology in Education

RESEARCH AND RESOURCES

“Using Computers in Distance Study: Results of a Survey

Amongst Disabled Distance Students” by Rainer Ommerborn

and Rudolf Schuemer of FernUniversitat in Hagen, Germany.

www.fernuni-hagen.de/ZIFF/ommsch4.doc

The authors of this paper interviewed adult disabled students

who were enrolled in the university’s distance education program. The students reported that computers and the Internet

were valuable tools that facilitated their distance learning. The

students also offered suggestions for how to make computerbased distance education more accessible to disabled students.

Center for Applied Special Technology

www.cast.org

This nonprofit educational organization in Wakefield, Massachusetts, works to make education more accessible and flexible for disabled students through the use of technology. It

created BOBBY, a free online tool for testing the accessibility

of Web pages: http://bobby.watchfire.com 

Northwest ADA & IT Center

www.nwada.org

This center, located at the Oregon Health & Science University

in Portland, Oregon, aims to foster the development of accessible education-based information technology. For more information, contact Nathan White at whitena@ohsu.edu
THE 

ONLINE 

TEACHER:

When the Wee Hours Are Prime Time

Story and photo by Bracken Reed

PORTLAND, Oregon—Teaching in your pajamas at 2 a.m. might

sound like a bad dream to most educators, but for Denny

Nkemontoh, it’s just part of the job. By day, Nkemontoh

(pronounced kim-OWN-toe) teaches technology skills and

sixth-grade math at Saint John Fisher School, a K–8 parochial

school in Portland, Oregon. By night, she teaches two online

courses through Oregon State University’s K–12 Online

program, and six courses through Oregon Online, a K–12

public school run by the Southern Oregon Education Service

District (ESD), headquartered in Medford.

For the record, that’s three institutions, an average of eight

online courses and five classroom periods, serving 300 students (including an average of 45 online students per quarter), across 12 different grade levels. It makes for a lot of long

nights.

“I had thought about getting my Ph.D. in online learning,”

says Nkemontoh dryly, “but I’d have to give up sleeping.”

LOVE OF TEACHING

Ph.D. or not, Nkemontoh is obviously a high-energy overachiever. She has two master’s degrees, has traveled throughout the world, has a busy home life with a husband and three

children, and somehow finds the time to read more than 200

books a year. But none of this explains her willingness to

endure such a busy schedule. Why take on such a heavy

teaching load? Why teach online classes? 

“Money” might seem like the obvious answer, but, as with

any teaching job, it’s hardly the whole story. Yes, the extra

income Nkemontoh earns teaching online classes does help

pay the bills, but it’s a combination of flexibility, variety, and

an old-fashioned love of teaching, that keeps her up into the

wee hours, answering e-mails and guiding her online students through the intricacies of an Edgar Allan Poe story or

the fine points of a well-structured research paper.

“Online teaching works for me, because I have a full-time

day job and three kids at home,” says Nkemontoh. “I can be

home with my kids in the evening. I can help them with their

homework, then get online, then stop and make dinner, then

get back online. For me, it’s very flexible, and I have to

believe it is for my students, too, because they’re logging in

at all different times.”

Equally appealing to Nkemontoh is the one-on-one

nature of online teaching. “I feel like I really get to know the

students on a more personal level,” she says. “They feel free

to express themselves because they’re not standing up in

front of a class—they don’t have to worry about what other

people say or think. It’s a very special time because they are

open and honest.”

Nkemontoh also loves the diversity of students who take

online classes. While her classroom students are a homogeneous group, drawing from the predominantly white, middle

class suburbs south of Portland, her online students come

from a variety of backgrounds. Rural to urban, coast to

desert, homeschooled to world traveling, they provide a variety that keeps Nkemontoh excited about teaching.

“I love my [Saint John Fisher Elementary] students,” she

says, “but I do miss the diversity. I started out as a teacher in

a girl’s school in Cameroon, in West Africa. And I also taught

in an elementary school in south central Los Angeles. The

online teaching really opens up more of the world to me

again, and I do enjoy that.”

Nkemontoh goes to unusual lengths to open up the larger

world for her students as well. In many of her online classes

she uses Weblogs (“blogs”) to facilitate discussion. Sometimes she gives students the option of creating their own

blogs, in the same way she encourages her classroom students to keep journals, and other times she has students log

on to her blog as a kind of centralized discussion board.

32 nwrel.org/nwedu

Denny Nkemontoh
NORTHWEST EDUCATION / WINTER 2004 33

Either way, she frequently uses her international connections

to involve students from other countries. 

“I invite them to join in our blog,” she says, “and that’s

really been a neat exchange. We’ve had language arts students

from Ukraine, Poland, the Czech Republic, Cameroon, and

a few other places. It gives students a completely different

point of view.”

PERSONALIZED PEDAGOGY

In her willingness to embrace technology, to take a global

view, to create personal bonds with a diverse group of students, to individualize her courses, and to adapt to a wide

variety of teaching situations, Nkemontoh represents a new

breed of teacher.

According to Tina Mondale, the director of school

improvement for the Eagle Point School District in southern

Oregon, and formerly a lead administrator for Oregon Online,

this kind of adaptability will be a necessity, not a choice, as

schools strive to better meet the needs of their students. 

“Schools are being asked to become more and more individualized for their clients, who are their students,” says

Mondale. “I think in the very near future kids will take part

of their classes online and part of their classes at a school; part

of their instruction will be given individually and part of it

will be in groups.”

The reason for this, Mondale says, is that the factory

model of public education simply has not worked. “That

kind of mass education—throw a whole bunch of kids in one

room and teach them all the same thing at the same pace—

doesn’t work very well,” she says. “We see that by kids not

succeeding. For that reason alone, individualizing education

is the way of the future.”

All forms of distance learning are on the rise, Mondale

points out, but online learning is especially popular. “It’s

growing at just a phenomenal pace around the world,” she

says, “because it has some very definite advantages. Part of

what education does, or is supposed to do, is to prepare kids

to succeed in the world we’re living in now. Online learning

certainly does that, because we’re living in a technological

world. The way we communicate is with the same tools that

students use in an online class. So, besides the content,

you’re teaching them how to communicate using technology.

That’s really critical—it connects them to the larger world.”

INSTITUTIONAL SUPPORT

Mondale began her professional life as a first-grade teacher

and quickly became a proponent of technology. “I saw how it

motivated the kids in my classroom,” she says. “I saw its

potential for getting kids excited about learning.” Her enthusiasm eventually led to her position as the technology coordinator at the school, and she has not looked back since.

For six years Mondale has been promoting both online

education and the use of technology in the regular classroom.

Through courses offered by the Southern Oregon ESD and

Southern Oregon University, she has taught others, via the

Internet, effective online teaching practices and instructional

design. One of her students was Denny Nkemontoh. 

While Nkemontoh was already technology-savvy and an

accomplished classroom teacher, she found the online training to be invaluable. “The teachers I had modeled good

online teaching,” says Nkemontoh. “That was really important. They got back to me in a timely fashion; they treated me

like an individual person rather than just a student with a

number; they remembered things about me. There was also

a sense of organization, professionalism, and consistency in

the courses and in how they presented them.”

A focus on personalized communication and a clear, consistent instructional design, complete with assessments, are

the absolute bedrock of successful online teaching, says

Mondale, but equally important is an often-overlooked need

for institutional support, for both teachers and students.

“Right now, most traditional school systems are really not set

up to support students in online learning,” she says.

Those supports can be as basic as making sure students

have a place to do their work, to more complicated investments, such as providing a mentor at the school who can

offer face-to-face help, having well-trained counselors who

can do a good job of placing students in online classes and

preparing them for the self-discipline that is required, or providing teachers with building-level technical support. 

But, according to Mondale, the most important and most

complicated support that is necessary for the success of online

learning is less tangible. “A lot of the policies we have now

don’t lend themselves to online learning,” she says. “And it’s a

battle, because it’s trying to change a very strong traditional

school culture, which is that you come in and you sit down

every day and you’re marked absent or present, and that’s how

you take classes. We need to have a broader definition of education in order for the online model to succeed.”

The cultural change needs to happen at every level, says

Mondale, including higher education. “Online education is

going to be a part of how all kids learn, and I think it’s going

to be a part of how all teachers teach.”

Web Exclusives:

Making the Link to College

Expert Opinion: The Art of Online Pedagogy

Teaching at the Federal Way Internet Academy
34 nwrel.org/nwedu

Photo by Michael Heavener

Family Connections
DELTA JUNCTION, Alaska—Nine-yearold David Abramov quietly practices

his spelling list, neatly printing words

such as “the,” “is, “you,” and “we” in

rows on lined notebook paper. He

recites vowels and occasionally stumbles over an o-a or o-u sound, but

that’s understandable: David arrived in

the United States just one month ago

from Uzbekistan. This is his second

one-to-one lesson with Sirje Kulakevich, a Title I aide from Estonia who is

a resource for the Slavic families that

have flooded this town at the end of the

1,400-mile Alcan Highway that

stretches from Alaska to Canada.

One-third of the students in the

Delta/Greely School District share

similar stories to David’s. From the

Ukraine, Moldavia, Romania, and

Russia, they’ve come to this spot where

farmers raise yak and grain, and where

some of the businesses on the commercial strip are named for an elusive

herd of bison that populate nearby

woods. Families are drawn here by

cheap land, jobs in the gold mines, and

a supportive immigrant community

that revolves around the charismatic

Pentecostal church. They seek opportunity and an easier life for their children, free of the turmoil of homelands

still struggling to adjust to noncommunist rule.

For children and parents alike, the

language barrier presents the biggest

challenge in adapting to their new life.

For the 844-student school district,

communications is a stumbling block

in helping immigrant children succeed.

But, technology may hold one of the

keys to bridging the linguistic gap and

bringing Slavic and American cultures

together.

Breaking the Barrier

At Delta High School, a small room

crowded with hard drives and servers is

the nerve center of Project Parent Connect, an uncommon attempt to use

computers to increase parent involvement and improve student academic

performance. Initially funded by a

$284,000 Enhancing Education

Through Technology (E2T2) federal

grant and subsequently by school district dollars, the project has two main

components: switching to a Web-based

student information system and using

Russian language translation software

to make that information—and teacher

communications—accessible to nonEnglish-speaking parents. By encouraging parents to actively participate in

their children’s schooling, the project

seeks to mitigate the high risk of educational failure that accompanies

poverty and limited English skills. 

The initiative is the brainchild of Rick

Johnson. It grew out of his personal

frustration with paperwork and the rising and falling fortunes of Delta Junction. Settled into a comfortable booth at

the Buffalo Diner, Johnson launches

into the story of how Project Parent

Connect (or PPC) was conceived. 

Johnson was teaching third grade at

nearby Fort Greely when the Army

NORTHWEST EDUCATION / WINTER 2004 35

An ambitious project aims to prove 

Web-based technology can break down language barriers and increase 

parents’ ties to the classroom.

STORY AND PHOTOS BY RHONDA BARTON
base was mothballed and the base school

closed. Casting about for a way to make a living in Delta Junction, he bought the diner—

known for its buffalo burgers—and started

teaching part-time at the Delta Cyber

School, a statewide online charter school.

Three years later, when Fort Greely

reopened as a national missile defense site

and the town swelled with Slavic immigrants, Johnson was able to sell the diner and

return to teaching full time. But, making the

transition from a technology-based school

system to a traditional one was tough. “My

pet peeve was that I was expected to take

attendance on a piece of paper, enter it into a

computer, then have a student take the paper

to the office where that staff would enter the

numbers into their computer,” he recalls. “I

began to design in my mind what was

needed for an automated information system that would originate in the classroom

and eliminate all those steps.”

At the same time, Johnson was searching

for a way to engage the families of his Slavic

students just as he had at the closely knit Fort

Greely school. “If you can bring the parents

into the information flow, and make them

aware of their child’s progress on a real-time

basis, they’re much more likely to get

involved with his education,” he observes. 

PPC was the answer. The district’s new

Web-based student information system and

translation software allow any Slavic family

with a computer to monitor classroom performance, review it with their student, and

freely communicate with teachers. Families

without home computers—especially those

whose children receive free and reducedprice lunch or are recommended by their

teachers as needing improvement—can borrow the equipment from the district. One

group of families is being selected to receive

computers and training during the first

semester while a second group will get

equipment and training during the second

semester.

Measuring the impact of the program on

students’ test scores, attendance, and report

card results is a PPC priority (see “The

Research”). An assessment plan calls for surveying parents and teachers on a regular

basis, conducting interviews, and tracking

the number of computer hits to see how

they correlate to student improvement. The

group that received computers and training

during the first half of the year will be compared to the “control group” that will be

served at a later time. 

The plan to capture rich data and use a

randomized experimental evaluation design

is what distinguishes the program and

excites Gary Graves, a Northwest Regional

Educational Laboratory evaluator. “This

project has many strengths,” says Graves,

“but one feature of PPC sets it apart from

any other E2T2 grant that NWREL is aware

of: a commitment to and support for using a

scientifically based evaluation model to

measure the project’s results. The U.S.

Department of Education is asking for evidence of impact, and PPC has the potential

to help answer one of education’s more difficult questions: What difference can technology make in student learning?”

Getting Started

Armed with the federal grant, Johnson

started putting the pieces in place last year

but discovered that PPC’s goals were simply

too ambitious for a one-year time span. The

bulk of the 2003–2004 school year was spent

replacing outdated district software and

hardware and fine-tuning the student information system, which uses the Web-based

PowerSchool program. Familiarizing teachers with the system, putting the translator

server online, and getting the word out to

parents started in earnest as the semester

drew to a close. This year, the project will

concentrate on placing computers in the

homes of low-income English-language

learners, offering training to both parents

and teachers, and continuing to collect and

analyze data. 

Johnson has relied heavily on his bilingual technology assistant to get the project

off the ground. James Shestopalov, a 21-

year-old Estonian, not only has the perfect

combination of language and technical skills,

but can relate personally to what the Slavic

families are experiencing. He arrived in the

United States at age seven, not speaking a

word of English. 

Shestopalov’s Jeep bumps along the rural

roads, bringing computers and technical

assistance to the far-flung homes of Slavic

families. An unofficial goodwill ambassador

for the district, he installs the equipment—

patiently showing parents how to access

their children’s homework and grades and 36 nwrel.org/nwedu

THE RESEARCH

An initial evaluation by the

Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory found that

Project Parent Connect is

“very likely to have positive

impacts on student and

teacher, technology literacy,

parent involvement in their

children’s education, and

teacher professional growth.”

The report—completed in

August 2004, after PPC’s first

year of operation—concludes

that “if the project continues

it may also show impacts on

student achievement.”

NWREL evaluators surveyed 90 parents and 34

teachers on computer use 

and their perception of the

effectiveness of technology in

improving home/school communications and student academic performance. The

NWREL evaluators also

observed computer training

sessions for teachers, conducted interviews with 

teachers and parents, and

examined student data. The

information will be used to

establish a baseline from

which data gathered during

the project’s second year 

can be compared.

Evaluator Gary Graves will

closely watch the latest phase

of the project: providing computers with translators to a

group of randomly selected,

low-income Slavic families.

The district will offer bilingual

training to the parents and

track how they use the computers to monitor their children’s educational progress.

“This is the only district we

know that’s doing a randomized study of the impact of

technology and parental support on student achievement,”

says Graves.

Graves expects to complete a final evaluation of 

the project in summer 2005.
how to use the translator. So far, he says,

families seem to be embracing the new tool.

“They like it because whenever they want to,

they can find out how their kids are doing,”

he says. “They don’t have to wait for a report

card.” 

Keeping Track

Shestopalov pulls off a deserted road onto

the long driveway of a two-story wood frame

home where the Kurilchenkos live. Olga—

in a flowered skirt, sandals, and T-shirt that

belie the five inches of snow covering her

garden—warmly welcomes him with a burst

of Russian. With Shestopalov translating, she

explains that her four children attend two

different schools in the Delta/Greely district.

Her husband, a musician who supports the

family as a school bus driver, goes online

once or twice a week to look at the youngsters’ progress reports or to e-mail teachers.

She uses the translator to help her children

with homework assignments in between

shifts as a cook at the local pizza parlor. It’s

been two years since the family emigrated

from the Ukraine—brought by “the style of

living,” she says—and her children are progressing in their studies. “Someday, I’d like

to see them go to college,” she confesses

with a shy smile.

Sirje Kulakevich, the Title I aide, has also

found that PPC helps her keep a close watch

on her flock of nine school-age children. “I

use the computer for my three high-schoolers because I don’t have time to check on

them (with their teachers). PowerSchool

helps me know what’s going on—especially

when there’s a problem,” she reports.

It’s also a huge benefit professionally, cutting down on requests from harried coworkers at the elementary school. “Before, I was

spending part of my time translating letters

to parents,” says Kulakevich. “Sometimes it

was overwhelming because teachers would

leave me papers and say, ‘How fast can you

do this? It’s an emergency.’” Now, teachers

can simply e-mail messages, send school

documents, and update student Web pages

that are automatically translated from

English to Russian. Parents’ replies are

instantly converted from Russian to English. 

Bringing Teachers on Board

Johnson has found that winning teachers

over to the system depends on their basic

comfort level with technology. “My challenge has been to provide some teachers

with an introduction to PowerSchool and

the translator server concept while I’m holding the hands of others who are intimidated

by turning the computer on.” This year, he’s

scheduled a series of one-hour sessions—

held immediately after school—where

teachers receive training in Web page development plus a small stipend for their time. 

Michelle Beito, a Title I teacher, admits

she needs to become more proficient so

using the computer doesn’t take her so long.

But, she already knows she’ll put the translator to work “talking about what we’re doing

in reading and why literacy is so important.”

She adds, “Most of our students are Slavic

FAMILY CONNECTIONS

THE NUMBERS

2003–2004 enrollment: 1,160

(includes 316 district 

students enrolled in 

Delta Cyber School)

Graduation rate: 56%

Students eligible for free and

reduced-price lunch: 55%

Students classified as English

language learners: 33%

Total number of students 

who tested proficient in

assessments (grades 3–10):

Math, 61.5%

Language Arts, 69.8%

Number of LEP students who

tested proficient:

Math, 41.4%

Language Arts, 46.7%

Statistics from Delta/Greely

School District 2003–2004

Report Card to the Public 

NORTHWEST EDUCATION / WINTER 2004 37

“I use the

computer for 

my three highschoolers because

I don’t have time

to check on them

(with their

teachers).

PowerSchool

helps me know

what’s going on—

especially when

there’s a

problem.”

—Sirje Kulakevich
38 nwrel.org/nwedu

and their parents need to be sure they read to

them and talk about books at home—whether in

Russian, Ukrainian, or English. Getting that

message out is my goal.”

Wayne Butler, who teaches high school social

studies and coaches the fledgling football team,

has nothing but praise for the system and its

ability to give parents a real-time window on

their child’s progress. “Some parents last year

would check on their kids daily—I swear hourly,

in some cases! I’d get e-mails saying, ‘Why does

so-and-so have a 50 percent? F’s are unacceptable in our family,’ and I’d be able to leave a

message saying he only did half the assignment.”

Besides bolstering communications and “tearing down boundaries,” Butler also sees the

updated student information system as an essential piece of his practice. “I can really look at my

assessment data and use that to drive instruction.” 

Just how much of a difference Project Parent

Connect makes won’t be known until at least

the end of this school year, but Johnson is hoping for a 3 to 5 percent improvement in student

scores. Even if those gains aren’t realized right

away, Johnson firmly believes that the program

has the potential to help other school districts

struggling with similar issues. He and

Shestapalov are working on a template with a

Slavic language library that could reach families

like David Abramov’s wherever their quest for a

better life takes them. ■

DELTA CYBER SCHOOL

Project Parent Connect isn’t the only innovative technology tool in

Delta/Greely School District’s arsenal. The district is home to Delta Cyber

School (DCS), a statewide charter school that offers almost 100 high school

and middle school courses online. 

Founded in 1997 as one of Alaska’s first Web-based correspondence

schools, Delta Cyber School uses an interactive software program (Elluminate)

for real-time collaboration between students and teachers. According to the

school’s promotional material, synchronous pacing of courses “allows students

and teachers to get to know one another, develop a sense of community, and

provide firmer deadlines to facilitate course completion.”

Program coordinator Pam Krepel says the school attracts students aged

12–20 for a variety of reasons: Some are picking up a class or two to complete

graduation requirements while others take specialized electives like German

or oceanography that aren’t offered in their resident school. One district in

the Aleutian Islands has asked the Cyber School to be their “highly qualified

partner,” using the school’s seven highly qualified staff to meet requirements

of the No Child Left Behind Act.

Krepel emphasizes that DCS is not a homeschool support service, though 

a few homeschoolers are among the current roster of 400 students. Public

schools pay a small tuition fee for students taking DCS courses through the

Alaska Online Consortium—a group of Internet-based schools that share

resources.

Students—whether they’re from public, private, or home schools—are

strongly encouraged to have a mentor: an adult whose role is to help them

succeed. Mary Corcoran, one of the original founders of DCS who now works

for the Alaska Online Consortium, notes that schools using DCS’s services

through the consortium must commit to providing a mentor in their building

who is a contact for the student. The mentor’s not there as a tutor, but to

troubleshoot, she says. Besides having a responsible adult at one end of the

computer, Corcoran lists other key components for a successful online school

experience:

• The student must want to be schooled that way—She must ask herself, Am

I organized and self-disciplined enough to sit down and do the work? Will I

miss not being in a building, surrounded by classmates?

• The teacher has to be flexible and attuned to potential difficulties—“You

could have a computer geek who’s certified making the lessons, but he

won’t connect [interpersonally] with the student unless he can put himself

in the student’s place,” Corcoran advises.

• The student needs an appropriate workplace—A physical space that’s dedicated to schoolwork must be available, as well as well-organized spaces on

the computer so assignments don’t get lost.

For more information on the Delta Cyber School, check out www.dcs.k12.ak.us.

—Rhonda Barton

James Shestopalov Rick Johnson
Of all the students I’ve taught, few seemed less likely to spark

an epiphany than he did. A white-haired, hard-faced man in

his 50s, he had squandered his post–high school years dealing drugs and living the high life. When we met to discuss his

writing, he told me he once had a mansion, expensive cars,

and his choice of any number of women. Then the police

arrived at his door. He spent the next seven years inside one

of America’s least-enlightened institutions, a Texas prison.

After his release, he drifted to New York and somehow found

his way into the continuing education program at Columbia

University. He was still on probation that year and his writing, as you might imagine, was a mess.

When I met him, I was a second-year graduate student

teacher. My first year, I’d learned to cruise through freshman

composition papers. I could mark a two-page essay and add an

endnote in 10 minutes flat. But the continuing education students slowed me down. Life experience made their writing

more diverse and many of them had idiosyncratic habits of

thought. The man from Texas did more than slow me; he

stopped me dead. As I stared at his paper one day, trying to

understand his syntax and word choice, I realized I was looking at something other than an essay: I was looking at a map.

It was a tortured map, granted—one you wouldn’t want to

use if you were seeking the shortest route from A to B—but

it was a map nonetheless. A mental map. The map of a mind

shaped by a particular set of circumstances and experiences.

And it changed my thinking about how to teach writing, especially the creative kind.

The counterpoint to the man from Texas was a young

woman who’d been in one of my freshman composition

classes the year before. She was the smartest student I’ve ever

taught—from Columbia, she went on to graduate work at

Oxford—and she had an interesting ethnic background that

might have enriched her writing in unexpected ways. But her

writing was completely conventional. When I required a

revision, she revised exactly as I suggested. Each essay came

out technically perfect, but lacking life. She had a map, too,

but its contours were completely different.

When I moved on to teaching creative writing fulltime, I

held on to this idea of reading maps—studying an individual’s patterns of thought before offering writing advice. In

these times of shrinking budgets and larger class sizes, writing teachers are tempted to adopt a one-size-fits-all approach,

offering a set of guidelines or imaginative exercises meant to

lead all students to the same creative pot of gold. But each

student’s mix of education and life experience is different,

and the sources and destinations of compelling writing

are unpredictable. The type

of guidance one student

needs might be the most

damaging kind for another. 

For example, the man

from Texas needed to be

made more aware of how

grammar and syntax usually

work, so readers could

understand his writing—but

without losing the uniqueness in his use of language.

The Oxford-bound student, on the other hand, needed to

have some of her mental fences torn down, so her imagination could roam through fields of the unexpected. A careful

study of their maps revealed their differences, showing me

how best to work with each of them.

Since my days in graduate school, reading students’ mental maps has become more difficult, and yet more important,

because technology now plays a bigger role in students’ lives.

Whereas schooling and life experience alone once determined how young people thought and wrote—with schooling supplying forms and conventions and experience voice

and content—in recent years, technology has come close to

overwhelming these other influences.

In America today, television, movies, video games, and

computer programs flood young people with a standardized

set of images, ideas, and storylines that tend to systemize

their thinking. Unlike the systemizing that takes place in

school, which provides the building blocks for independent

(and perhaps creative) thought, the systemizing offered by

consumer technology substitutes passive reception for active

engagement, conventionalizing both thoughts and creativity.

Instead of running free, the mind follows paths traced out by

others. The result in writing classes is student writing that

has neither the Texas man’s intriguing idiosyncrasies nor the

Oxford-bound student’s understanding of form but only

mimics what is mass-produced. In other words, the maps a

writing teacher tries to read today are often mere facsimiles,

not authentic tracings of an individual’s thought.

Distance learning can make the task of reading students’

mental maps even harder because the teacher’s contact with

students is mediated entirely by technology. Because the

NORTHWEST EDUCATION / WINTER 2004 39

VOICES

A Professor’s Voice: Teaching Writing in the Digital Age by Michael McGregor

See VOICES, Page 43
40 nwrel.org/nwedu

The Distance Learner’s Guide (2nd ed.), by Sally M. Johnstone

& George P. Connick (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, 2005).

Developed by the Western Cooperative for Educational

Telecommunications, this book is a practical, studentoriented guide to taking distance education classes. Every

counselor should have a copy. For more information go to

www.wcet.info/.

E-Moderating: The Key to Teaching and Learning Online, by

Gilly Salmon (Sterling, VA: Kogan Page, 2000).

Somewhat jargon-heavy and focused on the United Kingdom, but still one of the best available books on effective

online teaching practices and curriculum development.

Engaging the Online Learner: Activities and Resources for Creative Instruction, by Rita-Marie Conrad & J. Ana Donaldson

(San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2004).

A teacher-oriented guide to adapting effective teaching practices to an online format. It emphasizes group collaboration,

peer interaction, and activity-based instruction. A great

source of ideas for involving students more effectively in

their own learning. 

Keeping Pace with K–12 Online Learning: A Snapshot of StateLevel Policy and Practice, by John F. Watson, Kathy Winograd,

& Steven Kalmon (Naperville, IL: North Central Regional

Educational Laboratory, 2004).

The results of a national survey that looked into the online

education programs and policies in 22 states. Looks at key

issues such as funding online programs, providing support

for special needs and nontraditional students, ensuring

course quality, and combining state, district, and programlevel policies into a cohesive framework.

Virtual Schools and E-Learning in K–12 Environments: Emerging Policy and Practices, by Robert Blomeyer (Naperville, IL:

North Central Regional Educational Laboratory, Policy

Issues No. 11, 2002). Available online at: www.ncrel.org/

policy/pubs/html/pivol11/apr2002c.htm

Developed for policymakers at both the state and district levels. A good overview of the major policy issues involved in

developing effective, research-based online programs.

Virtual Schools: Trends and Issues. A Study of Virtual Schools in

the United States, by Tom Clark (San Francisco, CA: WestEd,

2001). Available online at: www.wested.org/online_pubs/

virtualschools.pdf

This study summarizes a 2001 survey of 44 state-approved or

regionally accredited online schools. It describes the wide

variation in program types and compares the funding, tuition,

curriculum, technology, staffing, and types of students

served. A good starting point for understanding the kinds of

programs currently offered.

On the Web

Digital Bridges: Connections for K–12 Teaching and Learning

Over Distance (Portland, OR: Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory, Northwest Educational Technology Consortium). Available online at: www.netc.org/digitalbridges/

A great source of information on both interactive videoconferencing and Web-based learning. Easy to navigate and very

practical for both teachers and administrators. 

“Virtual Schools & Distance Learning” (State Educational

Technology Directors Association, National Leadership Institute 2003 Toolkit). Available online at: www.setda.org

State policymakers will find this resource worth excavating.

Follow this trail: About SETDA, Initiatives, SETDA’s NLI

Toolkit, NLI 2003 Toolkit. The 2004 Toolkit, due out in

April, will focus entirely on online learning.

K12 Online Resources & State-Level Virtual Schools (Hoboken,

NJ: eLearners.com). Available online at: www.elearners.

com/resources/k12-online.asp.

A good general site on distance learning, with a comprehensive list of statewide online learning programs. A good starting point for policymakers who want to see how other states

have developed centralized online learning programs.

Resource Annex

RESOURCES
“The hottest high-tech trend” ... “The best hope for school

reform” ... “A daunting technological frontier of irreversible

changes.” These are the kinds of things you hear when you

listen to the buzz about online education. That online

schools and programs are blooming like fireweed across the

education landscape seems to be everyone’s perception,

whether one views the innovation as benign or intrusive.

Depending on whom you ask—education or tech-industry

researchers—somewhere between 40,000 and 1 million K–12

students across the nation are enrolling in online courses

these days.

Learning Point Associates of Illinois, a nonprofit education research agency, pointed to a government estimate that

there were 40,000 to 50,000 online students in 37 states last

school year. They identified 2,400 publicly funded online

schools run by charter schools, states, and school districts. A

much more robust estimate was made by the technology

market research firm the PEAK Group, which projected that

by this school year there would be 1.2 million students

enrolled in online courses. In the group’s report, Virtual

Schools Across America: Trends in K–12 Online Education 2002, it

notes that the lack of research on the effectiveness of online

education hampers its development.

“The concept is still very new and relatively untested,” the

authors write. “To further complicate the issue, virtual

schools employ a variety of teaching and learning methodologies and vary considerably from program to program

making general analysis difficult.” By and large, the success

of individual online programs has been measured by test

results, student retention, and course completion rates, and

rarely by experimental research examining students’ learning.

EXCAVATING EVIDENCE

Searching for scientific evidence of the effects of online

learning on students’ academic achievement, Learning Point

researchers trawled library shelves and the World Wide Web

for rigorous experimental studies. Out of thousands of

reports, only 14 studies met their standard.

Working with researchers from two Florida universities,

Learning Point Associates synthesized these few experimental

studies on Web-based distance education programs. In October, they issued their report, The Effects of Distance Education on

K–12 Student Outcomes: A Meta-Analysis. The studies they

chose involved grades 3–12 and addressed reading, writing,

math, science, social studies, physical education, and listening.

“The analysis shows that distance education can have the

same effect on measures of student academic achievement

when compared to traditional instruction,” they conclude,

saying that research indicates “no significant difference in performance between students who participated in online programs and those who were taught in face-to-face classrooms.”

They found that online students were better problem

solvers, decisionmakers, researchers, and critical and creative

thinkers than their classroom-bound peers. Yet, online students were more likely to feel isolated and show less

improvement in listening and speaking skills than their peers

in conventional classrooms. Text-heavy online programs can

present a particular challenge to students with language difficulties, and highly technical subjects, such as math and science, can be difficult to teach online.

But with only 14 studies to go on, the evidence is thin and

must be interpreted with caution, the researchers write.

“[C]urrent Web-based distance education systems have only

been studied for about the last five years at the K–12 level, a

very short time in which to build a body of literature.”

They go on to say, “The importance of knowledge about

effective virtual schooling cannot be overstated, because of

the current boom in the numbers of virtual schools and students, and because of the essential role virtual schools can

play in school reform movements and workforce development efforts.”

The same month they made this claim, however, the

Alliance for Childhood issued Tech Tonic: Towards a New Literacy of Technology, a report contradicting the truism that children must become savvy users of technology in order to

become successful adults.

Writing about educational technology in general, the

authors say, “The supposed benefits of this techno-revolution for children are relentlessly promoted by high-tech corporations, even though independent research (conducted by

those with no financial stake in the outcome) has produced

little evidence of lasting, long-term gains.”

The group is particularly critical of immersing young children in technology. “We remain convinced that, at the elementary school level and below, there is little evidence of

lasting gains and much evidence of harm from the hours

spent in front of screens,” it says.

At present, the great majority of online education programs are for high school and middle school students. Few

have been developed for very young children. The Alliance

contends, however, “Research strongly indicates that face-toface relationships with people and the rest of the natural

world are critical not just for young children but for older

students as well.”

Research on E-Learning Is Emerging by Denise Jarrett Weeks

RESEARCH BRIEF

NORTHWEST EDUCATION / WINTER 2004 41
KEY TO SCHOOL REFORM

The federal government increasingly sees online learning as

a tool for school reform. It has directed $1.8 billion to schools

through its Enhancing Education Through Technology program, or E2T2. The program is in Title II of the No Child

Left Behind Act, and officials encourage schools to use E2T2

funds for distance learning.

Last summer, the U.S. Department of Education hosted

the Secretary’s No Child Left Behind Leadership Summit—

Increasing Options Through e-Learning. Governors, legislators, education leaders, and education technology experts

were asked to explore virtual education as a “powerful technology innovation expanding opportunities for online learning anytime, anyplace in support of NCLB.”

Online education can be key to helping schools meet

some of the most challenging aspects of the NCLB legislation, said Susan Patrick, director of educational technology

for the department, in her remarks at the summit. Supplemental services, professional development, and difficult-toprovide courses can be delivered to teachers and students

through the Internet. Online programs from public and private providers foster school choice. 

Some rural schools see online education as their best hope

for preserving the personalized nature of their small schools.

“[D]istance learning can enable small schools to remain open

and small—thereby embracing more than a half century of

education research showing that smaller schools offer a multitude of educational advantages for students over larger

schools,” writes the author of The Promise and the Power of Distance Learning in Rural Education, published last fall by the

Rural School and Community Trust.

President George W. Bush has indicated that he will be

turning the focus of his education agenda to high school

reform, including making them more personalized. The U.S.

Department of Education has launched Preparing America’s

Future: The High School Initiative to improve the quality of

high school education for all students by emphasizing rigor,

relevance, and relationships. Some see online learning as a

good way to serve these aims. The authors of the Learning

Point report say that technology, including e-learning, is

increasingly seen as a force that can transform education

because of the power of e-learning to individualize, personalize, and differentiate instruction.

The federal education department and national education

groups have identified high school reform models that promote small school size, scheduling choice, charter schools,

career academies, early college initiatives, and student

engagement as strategies for boosting student achievement,

say the Learning Point authors.

“Each of the reform models described and recommended

by these groups is an example of a strength that has been

shown by virtual schools,” they say. “By offering scheduling

flexibility, personalization, freedom from a large physical

school, engaging tools of distance learning, opportunities to

accelerate learning, and access to rigorous academic programs, virtual schools are not just important examples of

school reform models, but virtual schools may represent the

best hope for bringing high school reform quickly to large

numbers of students.”

A CALL FOR RESEARCH

Four years ago, when the impulse to launch online schools

was at a tipping point, the National Association of State

Boards of Education claimed soberly, “[T]he uncomfortable

reality is that education leaders are not currently driving the

policy agenda. Rapidly moving trends are outpacing the ability of policymakers to keep up.”

In the association’s report, Any Time, Any Place, Any Path,

Any Pace: Taking the Lead on e-Learning Policy, it said that the

nation was “rushing pell-mell” into a new sphere of online

education that was being driven by commercial interests as

well as public. “By allowing this policy vacuum to continue,

education leaders are failing to meet their obligation to assure

that all students are provided a quality education.”

Today, it’s clear that the message has been heard. Legislators

and policymakers in the states are writing new laws and regulations to guide the development of online education, and education agencies are issuing guidelines for online programs. 

The summons, now, is for research. 

And the U.S. Department of Education is putting money

behind the call. Altogether, it has directed $56 million toward

recent studies of educational technology at the K–12 level. In

2003, it awarded $15 million in E2T2 grants to nine states to

conduct rigorous studies of how technology, including Internet-based distance education, affects student achievement in

elementary and secondary education. The studies are

intended to seed this area of education research with highquality investigations that will beget yet more research. It’s

urgent to know what online education can offer 21st century

schools, and what unintended consequences this new mode

of public education might introduce.

“Virtual schools are calling into question longstanding

ideas about the definition of a public school, the social goals

of public education, and local control of public education,”

write the authors of Preserving Principles of Public Education in

an Online World: What Policymakers Should Be Asking About Virtual Schools.

The paper was published in 2002 by the Center on Education Policy. “America’s system of free, nondiscriminatory, religiously neutral public education has been the lifeblood of our

democratic society. As a nation we have been careful to fiercely

protect basic principles of public education, while remaining

open to new ideas that could improve education for students.”

Acutely aware of how fast new technologies can infiltrate

people’s lives, the authors write, “Like any innovation, [virtual schooling] should be implemented with careful deliberation and good planning. ... Without these conversations, the

landscape could change so quickly that essential principles

could be compromised before people even realize it.” ■

RESEARCH BRIEF

42 nwrel.org/nwedu
NORTHWEST EDUCATION / WINTER 2004 43

teacher has little chance to get to know students outside their

writing or observe their behavior, it is extremely difficult to

separate skill in the use of forms and conventions from

mindlessly absorbed conventionality, or experience-based

content from the array of secondhand ideas and images that

swirl around us. The problem is exacerbated if the teacher

uses pre-packaged software that offers the same exercises and

instruction to all students.

Teaching writing in an era of technology-induced mimicry

and mediation is not impossible, simply more difficult. We

have to fight the systemizing tendency of technology and pay

more attention to, perhaps even praise, the idiosyncrasies we

are prone to call “mistakes”—the tortured syntax and odd

word choices, for example, offered by my Texas man. We

have to take out the magnifying glass and examine our students’ mental maps minutely, looking for the faintly traced

paths that might lead to unexpected fields if drawn more

skillfully and boldly.

We might lack the time to make cartographers of everyone,

but if we, as teachers, don’t help students see and create something new from who they are, we condemn them to a life of

borrowed and/or tangled thoughts, diminishing the chance

that they will put together meaningful, creative lives. ■

Copyright © 2004, Michael McGregor, Portland, Oregon.

Michael McGregor is an assistant professor of English at Portland

State University where he teaches literary nonfiction writing. He is

writing a biography of the minimalist poet Robert Lax.

REFERENCES

Any Time, Any Place, Any Path, Any Pace: Taking the Lead on e-Learning Policy (National Association of State Boards of Education, 2001)

www.nasbe.org/organization_information/e_learning.pdf

The Effects of Distance Education on K–12 Student Outcomes: 

A Meta-Analysis (Learning Point Associates, 2004)

www.setda.org/resources/k12distance.pdf

Preserving Principles of Public Education in an Online World: What

Policymakers Should Be Asking About Virtual Schools (Center 

on Education Policy, 2002)

www.cep-dc.org/topics/democracypublicschools/

The Promise and the Power of Distance Learning in Rural Education

(Rural School and Community Trust, 2004)

www.ruraledu.org/docs/distancelearning.html

Tech Tonic: Towards a New Literacy of Technology 

(Alliance for Childhood, 2004)

www.allianceforchildhood.org

Virtual Schools Across America: Trends in K–12 Online Education 2002

(PEAK Group, 2002)

www.peakgroup.net/educationoutlook/virtualschools.html

U.S. Department of Education Web Sites

Enhancing Education Through Technology Program (E2T2)

www.ed.gov/programs/edtech/index.html

Increasing Options Through e-Learning Summit

This site includes papers on how e-learning can help schools

address NCLB requirements.

www.nclbtechsummits.org/summit2/s2-presentations.asp

National Education Technology Plan

www.NationalEdTechPlan.org

No Child Left Behind

www.nclb.org

Office of Educational Technology

www.ed.gov/Technology

Preparing America’s Future High School Initiative

www.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ovae/pi/hs/index.html

Voices Continued from Page 39
44 nwrel.org/nwedu

REGION AT A GLANCE

If a school fails to make adequate yearly progress for a third

year, students from low-income families in the school must

be given the option to use Title I funds to obtain supplemental educational services from a public- or private-sector

provider, including faith-based organizations, selected from a

list of providers approved by the state.

—U.S. Department of Education, No Child Left Behind: 

A Desktop Reference 2002

The No Child Left Behind Act has created a substantial

opportunity for e-learning providers to increase their role in

public schools across the country. NCLB provides that

schools must allow parents to select “supplemental educational services” (SES) for their children from a list of stateapproved providers if their school does not meet

performance goals for three years in a row. The amount of

federal funds provided per student to pay for these services

varies from less than $500 to more than $2,000 but is generally close to $1,000. Many of the state-approved providers in

the Northwest and nationally are e-learning organizations.

This year, less than 1 percent of Northwest public school

students are eligible for supplemental educational services

under No Child Left Behind. They are low-income students

attending schools that are funded under the federal government’s Title I program and have not met goals for “adequate

yearly progress” for three years. The proportion of students

who are eligible for SES is likely to expand over the next few

years, though. Almost one in four Northwest public school

students are low-income students in Title I schools (see Chart 1).

Spotlight on Online Supplementary Services by Richard Greenough

451,861

22% 1,160,244

55%

Students 

NOT 

attending 

Title I–funded 

schools

485,586

23%

Students NOT eligible for 

free or reduced-price lunch 

and attending Title I–funded schools

Students eligible for 

free or reduced-price lunch 

and attending Title I–funded schools

Chart 1: Percent of Low-Income Students in Title I Schools

In Washington state, for example, only 17 schools are

required to provide SES to low-income students this year,

but another 18 schools could be added to this list if they do

not meet AYP goals next spring. Forty-five more schools are

two years away from SES sanctions and 89 are three years

away if they continue to miss AYP targets (see Chart 2).

States are required to identify and maintain a list of

approved supplemental educational service providers. Many

of the approved providers are commercial e-learning companies and nonprofit organizations using e-learning packages.

This table shows e-learning providers on the Northwest

states’ SES lists:

Sources: Chart 1—Based on data from National Center for Education

Statistics, Common Core of Data; Chart 2—Based on data from the

Washington Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction;

Table—State education agencies

451,861

22%

1,160,244

55% 485,586

23%

89 NOT meeting AYP

45 in 1st year of improvement

18 in 2nd year of improvement

17 in 3rd year of improvement

Chart 2: Number of Washington Title I Schools 

by School Improvement Status 2004–2005 School Year

957 

meeting 

AYP

Provider AK ID MT OR WA

Acadamia.net X

Babbage Net School X X

Baker Language and Learning Center X

Brainfuse

Education 2020 X

Education Station X

Elluminate X

Failure Free Reading X

JRL Enterprises X

K12 Inc X X

Kaplan K12 Learning Services X

Plato (including Lightspan) X

Skillstutor (Achievement Tech) X
NORTHWEST EDUCATION / WINTER 2004 45

END NOTE

Online in the Early Days

When remote computer terminals first hit the marketplace in the early 1970s, the Laboratory purchased

one, keeping step as it always has with technological advancements. In this photo, shot in the board room

of the Lindsay Building in downtown Portland, fascinated board members watch a demonstration of a 

teletype remote terminal. The terminal could exchange data and run programs through a commercial 

timesharing system operated over the phone lines.

Do you remember working on one of these old teletype terminals? Do you recognize anyone in the 

photograph? If you do, we’d love to hear from you—drop us a note at nwedufeedback@nwrel.org.
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