From vaping, the cost of school supplies to cellphone policies, the WTOP team is studying up on hot-button topics in education across the D.C. region. Follow on air and online in our series “WTOP Goes Back to School” this August and September.
Families whose children had been in a specialized virtual academy in Montgomery County Public Schools have been spending the summer weighing their options, and some don’t like what they see in terms of programming for the new school year.
The Board of Education voted to end the Montgomery Virtual Academy in the spring after determining the FY2025 school budget couldn’t support the service for nearly 800 families.
Since then, Sterling High and Courtney Evans, the parents of a rising fifth grader who attended MVA, had been waiting to see what alternatives might be available.
When asked how their summer was going, High told WTOP in an interview: “Completely terrible to be honest, it feels like we haven’t had a summer.”
That’s because he said his family had been investigating solutions, including possible “legal recourse” since the elimination of the academy.
In a letter to the school community released Aug. 8, MCPS Superintendent Thomas Taylor described a new program, saying: “To address the expanded need of some medically fragile students, which will serve many MVA families, I am pleased to announce our intention to expand offerings to include a hybrid virtual learning opportunity in addition to Home and Hospital Teaching.”
Taylor made it clear that the new hybrid would be limited to those students with medical needs and that it might not be appropriate to all students who had attended the Virtual Academy.
When he introduced the option for families, Taylor wrote in a letter to parents, “Before you get too excited, there are still several logistical hoops to jump through on my end.”
Approval from the Board of Education would be needed, schedules and staffing would have to be worked out, and then, families would have to apply for placement in the program.
Taylor told parents that the plan is to have the program up and running at the end of the second marking period and wrote in his letter: “A more detailed timeline will be shared by the end of August.”
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Evans said her son Ethan will be going into fifth grade and her daughter, Milly, will be going into first grade.
Until the hybrid option is available, they’ll sign their children up for the Home and Hospital Teaching option still available on a short-term basis, Evans said. That program was previously known as the Interim Instructional Service, or IIS.
But she said IIS falls far short of what Ethan had with the MVA program. “He was in advanced math and advanced reading, neither of those will be available to him” in the Home and Hospital program, she said. He also had access to music instruction, which Evans said won’t be available to him either.
According to MCPS, the hybrid program will offer virtual instruction in real time, as well as “periods of asynchronous work throughout the school week.”
Evans says while they wait to see more details on the plans for the hybrid education model, she’s not giving up on restoration of a fully virtual program. She even says she’ll be outside of the school board’s offices on the first day of school.
Because, Evans said, “Anything that is short of a fully comprehensive, fully synchronous daily program is not enough. It’s not an equivalent and it’s not an appropriate replacement for these kids.”
The first day of school for Montgomery County students is Aug. 26.
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