A friend from the school (a parent) kindly asked me by personal email in what capacity I wrote the parent comment here. I should make clear that I was (and am) writing in my individual capacity as one parent among a few hundred in a start-up school community. My opinions are my own, and are surely not shared by all other parents of students at the school. I see from the several typos in the parent post that I was in vent mode, typing rapidly to express disagreement with the article that opened the thread.

That said, I have been puzzled by the lack of pan-school online community for the parents and for the students at the EPGY Online High School, because there are numerous examples of thriving communities of that kind elsewhere in cyberspace. Evidently (according to personal accounts I have heard from other students and news reports I have read) it is quite routine at most online high schools to subscribe all students to a pan-school online community as soon as they enroll. The asynchronous online community allows students with varied schedules to make friends and share interests--just as Hacker News does. An asynchronous online community is an especially important social help for a school in which school classes are conducted by synchronous video links just a few hours per week, and all the more so if the school has students from all over the world living in every which time zone.

I am a big proponent of online interaction even for communities who regularly interact face-to-face. For example, I am a Yahoo Groups listowner for groups that link my local homeschooling support group since 2003 (more than 100 members) and our statewide gifted education parent advocacy group since 2005 (about 500 members). The online groups massively increase the helpfulness of the face-to-face interaction the families in each organization have, and of course tend to promote more face-to-face meet-ups as opportunities arise. They facilitate sharing information and encouragement and guarantee that official communications from each group will be understood and mutually discussed right away.

Similarly, my son is in dual-enrollment classes at our state flagship university, and thus inherently meets some classmates face-to-face each day (especially in his foreign language classes). Yet the overall dual-enrollment program makes mandatory for students and optional (highly encouraged) for parents to sign up for an email list through which to receive official program announcements. Most of my son's individual classes also make very effective use of email and announcements posted on websites (our state flagship university has numerous ongoing human-computer interaction studies) and some of his hardest classes make formal use of web forums for student discussion of the content of the class. This deepens both the intellectual life and community spirit of those classes. I need not mention here that HN is fun even for hackers who know one another in person in offline life. I expected such a vital online community when we signed up for the founding class of the online high school we know from its inception, but that community has yet to be formed.

I suppose most parents make most such comparisons based on locally available resources. Certainly other parents think that EPGY Online High School is their best current bundle of trade-offs for their children's education. I think my town has both better homeschooling support groups and better public and private high schools than most places in the United States--better by test, as can be confirmed in quite a few cases. College admission for homeschoolers is a solved problem,

http://learninfreedom.org/colleges_4_hmsc.html

as I have known since my oldest son was an infant, so I was never the least bit worried about college admission prospects for a "purist" homeschooled child. We sought out the new online high school from Stanford because of previous good experiences using à la carte distance learning courses

http://epgy.stanford.edu/courses/

to supplement his homeschooling, and because he and I both have a spirit of risk-taking and a willingness to try something new with little track record. But with the benefit of hindsight, for us in our local environment, it would have better to have him enrolled at Brand X local high school through our state's open enrollment statute, and to continue to do just one or two distance learning classes on the side, before going full-time for university dual-enrollment for eleventh and twelfth grade. Reasonable minds can differ, because different families live in different communities, but my disagreement with the author of the interesting submitted article is that I don't think all online high schools have yet figured out how to be significantly better (in social aspects as well as intellectual aspects) than locally available public or private schools in most parts of the United States. I like to support the school that my family participates in by urging it to be the best that it can be.