The South Carolina Virtual School Program: Opportunities for South Carolina's Students

Middle and high school students in South Carolina now have additional educational oppor-

tunities beyond attending traditional “brick and mortar” schools. The development of the South Carolina Virtual School Program (SCVSP) has provided these opportunities for South Carolina's students. This article will examine the development and purpose of the SCVSP.

Student and teacher perceptions of the program are also discussed, as well as the future of the program.

The South Carolina Department of Edu-cation (SCDE) launched a pilot program for virtual schooling in May 2006. This pilot program allowed the SCDE to determine the level of need for a virtual school program in the state, and it also presented the opportunity to test the registration and course management systems that would be used for the program. Research on other state virtual school programs was conducted and information and feedback was gathered during this time in order to continue to develop, revise, and refine the policies and procedures for the program. By partnering with local school districts and other groups, the SCDE operated the pilot program through July 2007 (South Carolina State Department of Education, 2013a).

In May 2007, one year after the launch of the pilot program, the South Carolina legislature passed Act 26, which established the South Carolina Virtual School Program at the South Carolina Department of Education. The State Board of Education was given the responsibility of developing program guidelines, which were subsequently approved in December 2007 (South Carolina State Department of Education, 2013a). The SCVSP was established with the goal of helping to improve the graduation rate in South Carolina by having a focus on graduation requirements and credit recovery. The focus of the program has shifted to encompass offering more courses that meet the needs of many different types of learners. Legislation originally restricted the number of credits that students could earn in one school year, as well as the total credits that could be earned during a student's entire high school career. In June 2013, legislation lifted the cap on the number of credits that could be earned. Students may now earn an unlimited amount of credits through the SCVSP (South Carolina State Department of Education, 2013a).

The SCVSP is just that—a program. It is supplemental in nature; therefore, diplomas are not awarded by the SCVSP. Diplomas may only be granted by the student's sponsoring institution, which may include any public, private, or home school in the state.

The vision of the SCVSP is “to become the premier provider of innovative online learning opportunities to prepare South Carolina students to lead in a global society” (South Carolina State Department of Education, 2013b, para. 1). In order to work toward this vision, the program strives to offer a variety of online options to meet students' needs. The objectives for the program are to supplement the traditional high school curriculum, to provide access to courses that may not be offered to students in traditional schools, and to provide options for students to recover credit (Lee, Sanders, Mitchell, Childs, & Zais, 2012). All of the courses offered by the SCVSP go through a quality review process to make sure that each course is aligned with state and national standards. The program and its courses are continually evaluated to ensure that students' needs are indeed being met.

The SCVSP is supervised by the SCDE's Office of Virtual Education. The director of this office oversees the operation of the SCVSP. In addition to the director, a five-person administrative team assists in the operation and implementation of the SCVSP. Positions on the administrative team include the team leader, two student services coordinators, a blended learning coordinator, and a curriculum coordinator (South Carolina State Department of Education, 2013a). Even with the growth of the SCVSP, no additional administrative positions have been added. However, according to survey results from SCVSP teachers, all agreed that the administrative team needs additional staff (Lee et al., 2012).

SCVSP has a full-time faculty of 18 teachers, six of whom were hired in the 2011-2012 school year in response to the growth of the program. In addition to the full-time teachers, 47 adjunct instructors are employed during various terms during the school year to meet enrollment needs (Lee et al., 2012).

One SCVSP teacher explained her reasons for wanting to teach with the virtual school program. She indicated that she had gotten burned out by teaching at traditional school, but was not sure if she wanted to teach from home either. After deciding to give the virtual school program a try, she loves the experience (S. Carrigan, personal communication, November 20, 2013).

SCVSP teachers must be certified to teach in the state of South Carolina and must also be considered highly qualified in the content area. In addition, teachers must have an online teaching endorsement from the state of South Carolina. Online teaching experience in place of the online teaching endorsement is acceptable. SCVSP teacher Shannon Carrigan had never taught online before being hired to teach with SCVSP. She describes the initial training as overwhelming, but she also says that she gained the most knowledge by working with other online teachers.

Not only do teachers have to go through the initial training in order to teach online, but they are also required to complete day-long, monthly professional development, either online or face-to-face. Suzette Lee (personal communication, November 18, 2013), SCVSP Team Leader and Instructional Manager, says that the professional development that is provided to SCVSP teachers is a strength of the program. Training is provided to teachers on every new technology that they are expected to use.

SCVSP offers courses only for high school credit. Courses for middle school students are not offered at this time, but seventh-or eighth-grade students may enroll in courses for high school credit with approval from the sponsoring institution.

Many initial credit and credit recovery courses are offered through the SCVSP. Six Advanced Placement (AP) courses are offered: English language and composition, English literature and composition, statistics, United States history, art history, and Latin. For rural and small school districts in the state, these AP offerings give students an opportunity to take courses that cannot be offered in those districts. In addition to the AP courses that are offered, 17 career and technology courses are offered.

Credit recovery courses make up a large part of the SCVSP course offerings. Students who have not received credit for courses they have already taken or who appear unlikely to earn credit for a current course are the students who benefit from credit recovery. In the 2011-2012 school year, SCVSP began to use a new credit recovery model. Instead of using the selfpaced program that employed the teacher as a monitor, SCVSP teachers developed their own credit recovery courses that use a feature that allows students to take unit pretests and then move on to the next unit if they pass with a score of 80 or better. After moving to this new model, the successful completion rate for credit recovery courses improved from 83.7% to 100% (Lee et al., 2012).

Credit recovery courses are also now offered by rolling enrollment. Instead of having to enroll on certain dates, students can now enroll in credit recovery courses at any time. Classes begin on Monday of each week (South Carolina State Department of Education, 2013a).

SCVSP courses are also designed by SCVSP faculty. A course development team works to outline course offerings and to help design courses. Currently, SCVSP teachers are beginning to adapt their courses to align with Common Core Standards. The SCVSP ensures the quality of its courses by reviewing courses for alignment with standards. Courses may be taught asynchronously, synchronously, or through blended learning. For new teachers, SCVSP has a bank of previously designed courses that they can use and make changes. Some school districts also contract with SCVSP directly to tailor specific courses to meet the particular district's needs or to offer a special project for students. Districts can opt to pay a $3,500 fee for an entire class to take a course from the SCVSP (Adcox, 2013).

SCVSP uses Virtual School Administrator (VSA), the same system used by Florida Virtual School, as the student information system. This system is used for registration, posting grades, accessing transcripts, and storing and accessing all other student information. For course management, the SCVSP has recently moved away from Blackboard and is now using Moodle as the learning management system. Teachers are also using a variety of delivery methods that incorporate several technology tools such as Blackboard Collaborate. Skype has been used a method of communication between students and teachers in the past, but soon a new messaging system will be used that will replace Skype.

Students are responsible for making sure that they have access to the needed tech-nology for SCVSP courses. This could include access at home and at school. Many districts provide the access to technology for students who are completing coursework during normal school hours. Students also have access to a technical support through the program's website. The 2012 program evaluation report indicates that additional staff members are needed for technical support (Lee et al., 2012).

Any public, private, or homeschooled student under the age of 21 who is a legal resident of the state of South Carolina is eligible to enroll, tuition-free, in courses with the SCVSP. Students, however, must have a connection to a diploma-granting, sponsoring institution. In order to enroll in a course, students must first create an account in VSA, and then they will be allowed to request courses. Once courses have been requested, students must then have their parent or guardian and their guidance counselor sign the course request form for approval. The student's parent or guardian and the guidance counselor must also submit an online approval for the course. Students are then responsible for logging in to VSA to check their enrollment status for requested courses. Once students have enrolled in a course, they must complete an online student orientation program before beginning the course (South Carolina State Department of Education, 2013a).

During the 2011-2012 school year, the SCVSP served 88 school districts in the state of South Carolina. The SCVSP processed 20,466 enrollment requests that same year (Lee et al., 2012) compared to 10,298 (see Figure 1) in the 2008-2009 school year (Southern Regional Education Board, 2009).

Students who enroll have a variety of reasons for enrolling. Students may need to supplement their education if desired courses are not offered at their school. They may need to work around scheduling issues with other classes or with work schedules. Some students may even be nontraditional students who have children themselves or who are adult education students. The needs of all of these learners can be met with the SCVSP (Lee et al., 2012).

Morgan (personal communication, November 18, 2013), a student in the SCVSP, is one learner who indicated that she had scheduling issues at her traditional school that did not allow her to take a particular course at school. She talked to her guidance counselor who mentioned the SCVSP as an option. Morgan decided to enroll and has had a very good experience with the SCVSP. She points out her teacher's willingness to help and her prompt feedback as pluses for the program. According to Morgan, other advantages of online learning are that there are no distractions from other students and the course is mostly self-paced. However, she also recognizes that students need to have a high level of self-discipline and maturity to successfully complete an online course with the SCVSP.

SCVSP Team Leader, Suzette Lee, reports that students enrolled in the SCVSP are consistently performing better than state averages. The course completion rate has also continued to climb since the program began. In the 2008-2009 school year, the completion rate for SCVSP courses was 68% (Southern Regional Education Board, 2009). By the end of the 20112012 school year, the completion rate for SCVSP courses was 93.3% (Lee et al., 2012) (see Figure 2).

One SCVSP teacher noted that she sees about the same amount of student interaction in the SCVSP courses as she saw in the traditional classroom. Some students perform better than average and stay in contact with the teacher, and other students have no contact or interaction until it is time for an assignment to be due. The SCVSP has found that in general, students perform better when they have more frequent contact with their teachers (Lee et al., 2012).

In order to gain feedback about the SCVSP, students, teachers, parents, and guidance counselors are surveyed each year. The surveys are used to determine how well needs are being met and for those groups to offer suggestions for improvement. While the SCVSP received an adequate number of student responses in 2012 to draw conclusions about the program, the SCVSP did not receive an adequate number of responses from parents or guidance counselors. One concern is that this lack of response and communication from these groups may hinder the enrollment process and support for some students (Lee et al., 2012).

The State Board of Education is also required, as part of Act 26 that established the SCVSP, to provide an annual report to the legislature that includes information about the program. Each year, the following information must be reported: the SCVSP course offerings, the number of districts and students participating in the SCVSP, the private schools and number of private school students participating, the number of homeschool students participating, course success rates for students, the number of students who dropped a course and the reason, budget items, and the number of students who could not enroll because of limited space.

According to the Keeping Pace report (Watson, Murin, Vashaw, Gemin, & Rapp, 2012), South Carolina ranks third nationally in growth among state funded virtual school programs. South Carolina would like to continue this trend of growth for the program. In the fall of 2014, the SCVSP will have a completely new look that includes a new website and a new name for the program. The program is seeking a new name because it has often and easily been confused with the South Carolina Virtual Charter School. This new look for the program is being referred to as a rebranding of the program. In addition to this rebranding, a request for proposal process is soon to be started for an open student information system. The VSA system that is currently used was created for the Florida Virtual School, and the SCVSP would like to have a system that is tailored to this specific program.

The course development team would also like to continue to work to have more course offerings for students. Some new courses that will be offered are math and English language arts intervention courses for sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-graders. Beginning in 2014, a keyboarding pilot program for third-through sixth-graders will be launched in anticipation of preparing those students for online standardized testing. The SCVSP would also like to explore the option of expanding online learning to the lower grades.

What began as a strategy to help improve South Carolina's graduation rate has now evolved into an opportunity to meet the educational needs of various types of learners in South Carolina. Whether students need to recover credits or want to take a course not offered at their traditional schools, the tuition-free South Carolina Virtual School Program is providing those opportunities for students. The opportunities for South Carolina's students are almost limitless; it is hoped that students will continue to take advantage of them.