Amy Owen is the Senior Director, Digital and Teacher Policy at ExcelinEd.
Florida Virtual School (FLVS) was founded in 1997 as the first statewide, Internet-based public high school in the United States. It started out, 25 years ago, as a state-funded pilot program in two Florida school districts with 77 students and five course offerings. FLVS was soon recognized as its own school district in 2000 and now serves K-12 students in multiple ways: as a Florida school district, as a virtual course provider for other Florida districts and as a content provider nationwide for both in-person and virtual instruction through its FlexPoint program.
FLVS has gained accreditation from respected regional accrediting agencies, including the North Central Association Commission on Accreditation and School Improvement (NCA CASI), Northwest Accreditation Commission (NWAC) and the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Council on Accreditation and School Improvement (SACS CASI), a division of Cognia. Its core courses are also approved by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA ).
To learn more about FLVS’s history, its successes, challenges and vision moving forward, ExcelinEd interviewed Dr. Louis Algaze, President and CEO of FLVS. Yesterday, we spoke with John Winn, who formerly held roles as an education policy advisor to Governor Jeb Bush and Commissioner of Education in Florida.
It is our 25th year anniversary. We’ve been doing this for awhile and I consider us an incubator. We’re a living incubator in that we create curriculum. And because we are actually a school district, we deploy that content with our teachers. We train our teachers and get feedback, so we’re able to improve upon what we’ve done. Every iteration of what we do is an improvement in order to try to improve student success. That’s been our focus all the time. What we have and how we do it has been refined over many, many years.
When the pandemic came, we really didn’t have to do a big switch. What we were doing was very effective, and it just became effective for more people. As you can imagine, there was a huge need throughout the nation, as well as here in Florida, so some of the school and district partners that we already worked with were able to ramp up pretty quickly to support more students online. We also helped more than 160 new schools and districts around the nation launch their first online learning program during the pandemic.
We also had to hire hundreds of additional teachers. We had to ramp up our IT capacity, communications, everything—it had to be ramped up quickly and nimbly. We’re very proud of our team and the way they responded in Florida and throughout the nation.
In the 2020-21 school year, we experienced tremendous growth, in part due to the influx of families and school districts looking for an online education option during the pandemic. But what is really exciting is that many of the students who came to us for the first time during 2020 decided to stay with us due to their positive experience.
That being said, we have seen a slight dip in enrollment for both our FLVS Flex and FLVS Full Time options, but our enrollment is still significantly higher than in the 2019-20 school year (pre-pandemic).
I think the word “slapdash” describes it perfectly. We don’t do anything slapdash. It’ll take us a year to do a quality course and make sure that we’re creating something that’s going to meet standards, revising and refining it.
In short: true online learning has been around for more than two decades and focuses on teacher training and support; personalized learning for students; digital curriculum specifically created for asynchronous learning; and constant communication between teachers and families. Emergency remote learning was a quick solution to ensure students kept learning during COVID-19, and therefore these key pillars of online learning were not necessarily in place.
Our curriculum is made with enough interactive components and assessments within it to ensure that the student is progressing and being successful with each part of the lesson. And if they hit a snag, then that’s when the teacher comes in and helps them get over that obstacle. We have several different digital methods for students to connect with a teacher, whatever the student feels most comfortable with. It’s more personalized. Each student is being helped with what they need individually.
We also expanded FlexPoint, our national arm, where we support schools and districts across the nation. We do so by providing them with comprehensive and engaging digital curriculum, teacher training and unparalleled customer support, so they can launch or elevate their own online, hybrid or blended learning programs.
We’re a school district, and we have an accountability system here in Florida, so we make sure that we’re looking at state test data, a standard-by-standard review to see what where there might be areas that we can improve upon. We look at our curriculum to see if there’s anything that can be refined, clearer for students or something that can be more interactive. We also have student and teacher focus groups we meet with to talk about the courses in order to improve upon them. We look at our internal data of our assessments within the course in addition to the state data and feedback from students and teachers.
Virtual schooling serves a variety of purposes. We have students who want to get ahead; we have students who fell behind and want to catch up. We have students who are really involved in sports or music or dance or some other endeavor, for whom a good chunk of their day is spent working on something that they’re gifted in and have a passion for. Online learning allows them to work on their own time whenever it’s convenient for them.
We also have a large exceptional student population. There’s a subset of students who seem to be accommodated better with this form of teaching since they can take their time. They don’t have to be rushed through the courses. They don’t have to keep up with their peers necessarily, or they don’t have to wait for their peers to catch up to them. It’s a lot more flexible for students, a lot more personalized.
It depends if they’re one of our own district’s students or students of a partner district. For students of a partner district, if their home district can’t help them, we will try to do so through the philanthropic arm called the FLVS Foundation. Our Foundation has a laptop program to provide students with laptops and with hotspots and connectivity, if needed. The majority of interested families today have some sort of access, even if it is through a smart phone. But if they don’t, and they can’t afford it, we are able to help them remove that obstacle.
We’ve seen some states that are more embracing of virtual options. Others are not, specifically having seen pandemic learning and deciding no, we don’t want to do that. What I would say to them is that we have plenty of data to show how effective we are. We have skin in the game. We are a school district, and we are held accountable to the state just like every other brick-and-mortar school district in the state. We’re always trying to improve and do better.
Statewide, we can offer so many different options for students. For example, last year, through our FLVS Flex program, which allows students to enroll year-round, work at their own pace and incorporate one or more courses as part of their education plan, we served more than 225,000 students, with funding through the state. In Florida’s education funding program, we’re not funded based on seat time. The student must successfully complete their courses in order for us to receive funding. That’s one thing for schools and districts to look at, a competency-based funding model to ensure that you’re paying for success.
States don’t need to be afraid to embrace virtual courses. They can offer that option to parents, because when students go to college, they’re going to have to be taking virtual courses as well. Many colleges are running their courses online, more and more every year. The future’s here. And it’s better to embrace it and do it right than try to push it away.
Finally, schools and districts will want to reflect on their purpose before they start an online or virtual program. They must think about why they want to start the program. Focusing on that will help them get to that next level, and we have resources available to support them.
We’ve learned that personalization is really where the success comes in and helps each student to succeed. We’re working on creating personalized learning engines that help individual students learn in a way that’s best for their interest to help keep them engaged. That’s our long-term goal, creating our curriculum to be able to do that.
Florida families who are interested in enrolling in Florida Virtual School can visit www.flvs.net. Schools and districts looking for support when starting their own online, blended or hybrid learning program can visit www.FlexPointEducation.com. The FlexPoint website also has a resources section that provides education leadership with tools and tips when starting their own program: https://www.flexpointeducation.com/resources. Current students or prospective students in Florida can find more information on FLVS’s blog: https://blog.flvs.net/.
