irtual High School has passed the milestone of 200 actively participating schools, and is beginning the process of admitting an additional 150. How much has this increase in VHS participation affected smaller high schools in America? Is VHS reaching schools that could benefit from online education? And why have they chosen VHS?

Kalida High School in Ohio is a case in point. Kalida has 372 students. According to Principal Dale Nienberg, "I can't say enough about what VHS has done for our students." VHS allowed him to expand the number of courses, increase scheduling flexibility, and add honors and advanced placement offerings to the school's curriculum. Small schools such as Kalida have to make hard choices when it comes to expanding curriculum. If they try to do it on their own, the pricetag is prohibitive. VHS offers a cost-effective way to expand curriculum with quality courses, as well as offer teachers effective professional development. But is Kalida's experience unique? Are small schools really taking advantage of VHS?

Statistics show that over 80% of the schools participating in VHS have enrollments of fewer than 1,500 students. Half of those schools have fewer than 800 students. As VHS has developed, some of these small schools have come up with creative ways to get involved in VHS. And VHS has supported them in order to make their participation possible. In some cases, whole districts and geographic regions have organized into "sub-cooperatives," pooling their local resources to take advantage of VHS courses. For instance, four very small schools decided to join together to support the training of one teacher who will offer one VHS NetCourse next year. According to the reciprocal VHS formula, they will then distribute the 20 available student seats in VHS among the four schools. Elsewhere, a regional education center is acting as the agent for area schools, coordinating the training of teachers and the distribution of student seats.

The bottom line is that instead of schools finding an expensive solution, or no solution at all, to the challenges that many schools face, they are able to work with VHS to develop creative solutions that satisfy them beyond their expectations. All without adding a new building or hiring new staff.

There is a lesson to be learned here about the necessity of sometimes outsourcing -- focusing on what one does well while seeking out experts who can contribute in other areas. Here at VHS we learned that lesson the hard way. In our first year of operation we imagined that we could do everything, including maintain the servers, manage connectivity, and handle all the other technical issues that arise from owning a lot of "heavy metal." The result was frequent down times online and a lot of frustrated teachers and students. We learned our lesson. There are people whose job it is to do technical maintenance. So now our school offices are in Massachusetts, but the technical services are handled by Interliant in Houston, Texas, where enormous servers are housed in a bomb-proof building with 24-hour security -- something we never could have done ourselves. As a result, our technical services are much more reliable and we can concentrate on creating the best NetCourses possible.

We learned the lesson of outsourcing. Schools and districts are learning this same lesson when it comes to online course instruction and training. How else could a school so quickly and cost effectively add 200 high-quality courses taught by content experts? What professional development opportunity could have such a lasting and satisfying effect on teachers? How many courses could stimulate students to participate and excel beyond their own expectations? Being able to join a large collaboration of schools such as VHS has allowed schools to pool their efforts and come up with not just a solution, but a leap forward in the educational goals of schools, teachers and students alike.

Next year VHS will be in the fifth and final year of its original Department of Education grant. As we continue to grow into the future, VHS will continue to be a not-for-profit organization that reaches out to all the small, rural and low-wealth schools in the country, offering them the chance to "level the playing field." We hope you will take this journey with us. The possibilities are virtually endless.

Bruce Droste is director of the
Virtual High School.
bruce@concord.org

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