Many South Carolina K-12 virtual public school programs are suffering from high failure rates.
The problems have grown so acute that Horry County School District, the third-largest school district in the state, announced during a Jan. 25 board meeting that it’s considering ending its virtual curriculum after approximately half of its students failed at least one class.
And the high failure rates in virtual programs are not isolated to that single district. A Post and Courier review of virtual programs for the 10 largest school districts found most were plagued by poor academic performance.
Only 2 percent of students in South Carolina are in virtual public K-12 programs, according to data provided by S.C. Department of Education spokesman Ryan Brown. But those students are often some of the most vulnerable. Low Country Virtual, a full-time virtual program created as part of a collaboration between eight districts, including those in the tri-county, reported that almost 10 percent of its students have disabilities and 60 percent are Black or Latino.
High failure rates in these programs jeopardize the futures of these children. But where many of the largest school districts’ online programs are struggling, Aiken County has managed to keep its pass rate high and may have a way to run a successful full-time virtual curriculum.
Going virtual
Virtual learning was normalized during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic as many students had to learn remotely because of health concerns. They were instructed by teachers who taught live classes over video platforms like Zoom whenever the pandemic threw students into virtual learning.
The virtual programs established by the 10 largest school districts are more structured than they were at the start of the pandemic. They are designed so students can enroll in the program full time and often have a combination of live and asynchronous classes. A teacher monitors their coursework, grades their assignments and can help students if they have problems.
Aiken’s potential solutions
Like the other largest districts, the number of students in Aiken County School District’s virtual program rose during the 2020-21 school year to 6,490 students, or 27.8 percent of its total student body, according to data provided by Kate Olin, director of the district’s Office of Accountability & Assessment. By the end of the first semester of that school year, 40 percent of middle and high school virtual students were failing mathematics and approximately 45 percent were failing their English language arts course.
“Academically, the majority of students participating in the virtual program performed lower and demonstrated lower rates of academic growth compared to those in the face-to-face modality,” said Olin.
The district turned that around this school year. At the end of the first semester, only 2.2 percent of virtual students were failing mathematics and 7.6 percent were failing their ELA course.
Jeanie Glover, the district’s chief officer of instruction, said this is because the district screened students to make sure they could handle being in a full-time virtual learning environment; students who enrolled couldn’t have failed a course last year in the district’s virtual or face-to-face classes.
“You can have students login and be counted as present in a class, but if they don’t do the work that’s counterproductive,” she said. “We want to make sure the students who can handle the work are the ones in the program.”
Something else Glover felt also ensured the program’s success was that all the virtual teachers instructed students from a single location. They were not teaching at homes throughout the district, but from the same building.
“If a student is showing up for a live class with one teacher and not another, the teachers can have conversations,” she said.
Additionally, the virtual program has two administrators whose job it is to reach out to contact parents if their children miss a class or are performing poorly on homework.