The Holly Area schools are located in rural Michigan where the district spans hundreds of miles and students face hour-long commutes. The neighboring district’s schools are often much closer than the Holly Area schools students travel to attend. Michigan, like many states is moving in the direction of consumer choice. While not all schools will freely accept students outside their district, many will, which means the competition for students can be fierce.
“We have high school students on a bus for 45-60 minutes to come to our school when one to two miles down the street [from the student’s house] is the high school from a neighboring district,” explains Charlie Gragg, AP teacher at Holly High School.
“We don’t have any seriously deficit schools in the area so what would you as a parent or as a student do? How do you keep a family interested in staying with you?”
Online Learning
The answer to Gragg’s question is that you have to provide something the other schools don’t and in an age of shrinking educational budgets that’s far easier said than done. Holly High School began to look more seriously at online learning as a solution after an AP student completed an online course to satisfy an interest in European history, a class not offered at Holly High. The school, and Gragg in particular, saw online education as a way to attract and retain new students by offering interesting classes outside the traditional curriculum. What began as a way to accommodate one student has now morphed into a popular blending learning alternative pioneered by Gragg.
In the 2012-2013 school year, Holly High School students took over 60 different online classes and the district now plans to offer the same model at the middle school level. It is important to note that online education does not replace the traditional education model at Holly High School, but rather supplements it.
“It’s not so much that it’s online so kids can work from home,” says Gragg. “It’s [so] that you can offer this huge diversity of subject matter to match the diversity of interests in your student body.”
The high school has offered classes in screenwriting, criminology, sociology and engineering, all topics a rural district with a diminishing budget would likely find difficult to provide on its own. The courses have the added benefit of providing students with a glimpse into what a future career in those fields might look like. They can try out the subject now before committing to one path of study in college.
“It helps kids refine what they’re really interested in as opposed to what just sounds good to them,” says Gragg. “That makes it more attractive to the parents too.”
Indentifying an Effective Online Course
Online learning has taken many forms at the school since that 2008 semester history class. At first, it was reserved for AP students. Holly High School only offered five or six AP classes, but students had a range of interests in other topics. There weren’t enough students to warrant creating new courses, but online education allowed individual students to take a kind of independent study. As the classes grew in popularity they were expanded and improved upon. Gragg was looking for more than the traditional online course and he experimented with different online learning vendors. He wasn’t impressed with the model of the AP European history class his former student had taken.
“”It was pretty much read this. Test to follow. Not the best learning in the world I didn’t think,” says Gragg. “I started to realize there is a lot more to online learning than just read this and take a test. That’s just not a very iterative or very productive education environment.”
The school experimented with a number of options including state subsidized online schools like the Michigan Virtual Academy and Virginia Virtual Academy as well as courses offered by colleges like Northwestern University. Holly High even recruited retired AP teachers to be online instructors. Eventually, Gragg discovered Virtual High School Collaborative (VHS) and the high school has been using the company’s platform as their main online education offering ever since.
“When I saw what Virtual High School was doing it was like [comparing] Chevrolet to Cadillac. Their approach to learning is heavily teacher led,” says Gragg. “They require these
