A Case Study of Attrition at a Virtual Charter School
Authors:   , Marsh Jon D. , Grant Allen C. 
Published: July 2021

Online learning at the secondary level is predicted to continue growing at an astonishing pace for the foreseeable future; however, a significant number of students enroll in an online learning environment only to withdraw or decide not to return the following year. It is imperative for educational leaders of online schools to gain a deeper understanding of student persistence to prevent a disruption in their learning. The purpose of this descriptive case study was to describe the phenomena of learners' persistence and non-persistence during their first academic year over a five-year period. Quantitative historical data was collected and coded from the school's Student Information System to analyze and describe these phenomena. The researcher examined the data using descriptive statistics to gain an understanding of the five identified variables associated with persistence and non-persistence. The five independent variables were gender, the grade when enrolling at the school, the presence of any identified special needs, the time of year the student enrolled at the school, and finally, the volume of engagement with teachers and staff at the school. In the second phase of this case study, over 1,500 pre-existing exit interviews conducted by the school were analyzed to identify any themes that may exist. Over the five years of this study, the number of students that enrolled and withdrew during their first year totaled 710, or 28% of all students. Female students made up 60% of the total enrollment and were 6% more likely to remain enrolled at the school than male students. Students with special needs made up 13% of all students and were 9% less persistent than the general population. The ninth grade made up the largest class, and they were 12% more likely to withdraw during their first year than their 6th and 12th grade schoolmates. Students that enrolled before the school year started, or just before the second semester were over 10% more persistent than students that enrolled throughout the school year. To be innovative, this cyber extended the school day by 29%, or four hours a day with the goal of providing more teacher access to students. Based on the engagement analysis the extended time resulted in less than 11% more engagements during those hours. The one variable that aligned more engagements with more student persistence was synchronous engagement in the virtual office or classroom. Finally, to remove a reliance on seat time to track attendance in a school that had curriculum available to students 24-hours a day, the school developed a system to use points submitted to count attendance. The data denoted nearly a third (31%) of the students that withdrew during their first year were identified as having attendance issues. The school in this study had an elaborate Student Information System that tracked and reported traditional school data and much more. This study showed that gathering the data is not enough. Before this study, most, if not all of these finding were not known which indicates more should have been asked of the system. The results in this research remind leaders to examine and challenge their own long-held beliefs that guide the operations of the organization such as ways of tracking student progress and attendance, innovative approaches to hours of operations, and the quantity and quality of the data entered into the system by staff.