K12 (Georgia/GCA)

[jtcarter14]

I have searched the forums here and read probably a majority of negative responses about K12. Didn't see much at all specific to Georgia. So basically, I'm looking for some positive responses about K12 (to find out if there are many) and any info specific to GCA.

 

Aside from that, questions I have are:

Is there homework?

What percent of work is on the computer?

How high is the parent time/involvement?

What happens if we try it and decide to bail out mid year? Do we have to pay anything? Send the books back?

Do we have to go by the school calendar in our county? Or just get 180 days in?

How do you choose which activities to not do? (That sounds time intensive for the parent.)

 

We have used MFW and SOS and have most recently been using books/curricula that I pieced together. I'm wondering how this compares to MFW in parent involvement and how it compares to both MFW and SOS as far as how challenging it is. MFW was easy for my kids, and SOS was way beyond easy for them. They need more of a challenge. I also wasn't crazy about them doing their work on the computer with SOS.

 

There are a lot of things though that do sound good about K12. What do you like about it?

 

Thanks!

[TracyR]

I did like K12 when I used it. There's nothing wrong with the curriculum. Its just when you add it to a cyberschool is when it really takes away from the curriculum if that makes any sense. I don't live in Georgia but was with a K12 cyberschool for a few years here in PA. Your questions are pretty general so I can answer them.

 

Is there homework?

Yes, there is. Depending on how the cyberschool is set up. Most have 'extra' assignments that are due once a month to the teacher. Some cybers may have them do the 'extra' work online by assigning extra classes. Either way. There is homework.

 

What percent of work is on the computer?

Depends on the grade level. The higher up you are the more your going to spend on the computer. K and 1st have the least amount of computer time. Most of it is off line. 2-6th has maybe half of the work( could be a little less) online. Plus with grades 3 and above you have to count in the time they spend doing Scantron testing, state test prep etc.

 

How high is the parent time/involvement?

For the elementary grades, VERY HIGH. If your looking for something independent or even semi independent this is NOT the curriculum for you. I can't speak for high school because we didn't get that far. I have used grades K,1,4, and 6 with K12. Your responsible for all of the teaching, making sure your student logs in for the day , logging in attendance each day , making sure your child(ren) are logged in for any mandatory classes set by the teacher. etc. Do know they do take logging in attendance every day very seriously. At first I thought, ah, that isn't a problem. It does become a problem when life gets in the way. You can be smacked with truancy very quickly. They don't mess around with it.

 

 

What happens if we try it and decide to bail out mid year? Do we have to pay anything? Send the books back?

 

Nothing happens. You notify them that you are not going to continue and you send your stuff , including books, and computers back. They don't care whether you send any of the consumables back though. Those are yours to keep. Actually they only thing they truly care about procuring is their computers and printers. They don't really care if they get the books back. LOL

 

Do we have to go by the school calendar in our county? Or just get 180 days in?

You will go by the cyberschool's school calendar. It may or maynot be the same as your school district. Ours was similar but not the same. There were days my girls had school and the kids in the schools here didn't have it. But you have to follow their calendar.

 

How do you choose which activities to not do? (That sounds time intensive for the parent.)

 

Umm, you don't. LOL YOu do what is given to you. Sometimes some subjects will have something that is optional and it will state on the schedule, but the higher up you go the less that is likely to happen.

You do what is on the schedule, you don't get to chose. See, that's where the freedom kind of goes out the door.

Cyberschools generally want you to schedule 5hrs a day. Meaning you can include phys ed, any field trips set by the school, or yourself ( which you have to notify them that your doing. You can't just do it. They will want to know why you didn't log any work done for the day. You can count any educational games you play and so forth into those 5hrs a day. Which in all honesty its not hard to do if that's what you do already.

 

I'm not trying to scare you away from cyberschooling. Just giving you the low down of what its basically like. Either you will comply with it or you don't. I'm a tell you the truth kind of gal. That in a nut shell is the truthful answers to your questions.

I don't have anything against cyberschooling. I think its a good option if this is what you want and what you need. It doen't hurt to try anything. But I will tell you if your used to doing your own thing. Like to pick and chose what you like to do, then you really need to think hard if you want to pursue this option. YOu can supplement if you need to but the higher the level the harder it is to do because they have so much work thrusted upon them by the curriculum itself. If your against state testing , then this isn't a good option either. When we first started cyberschooling I didn't think one way or another about it. Now that we've been with a couple cyberschools totaling 5yrs of our homeschooling experience. The test prep just killed the love of schooling for my girls. The cyberschools depend on good test scores and they drill and kill to get it. If they don't get those good test scores then the cyberschool can close.

I will say though if you have kids that test really well , then it won't be to much of a worry for you. But my children for some reason haven't figured out the testing game. So its a struggle for them.

So much so they made me promise I wouldn't put them back in one this year. LOL

 

As for the K12, I think its a great curriculum. I found some of my creativity spark when we used the K curriculum. I had fun making lapbooks and such for some of the topics for history in K and 1st. I will say though that the more children you have the more time consuming it is. They can work a little bit more independently once they hit 5th and 6th grade but you have to really be on top of them to get it done.

Really , in the end its up to you want you want to do. If you think it will work for your family. Some families feel they need all that I mentioned up above and that's fine too. Only you know what will work for your family.

 

As for us we'll be sticking with traditional homeschooling for a little while. I don't know if we'll ever go back to cyberschooling or not. But at least I know its there if I need it.

Edited July 23, 2011 by TracyR

[jtcarter14]

Anyone else?

[Ellie]

Negative reactions are not usually to K12 itself; they're usually reactions to government-funded virtual schools (in Calif they are charter schools, which may not be the case in other states). So your question and poll will get mixed responses depening on how you ask the question. Do you want to know about enrolling in a government-funded charter/cyber school? Or are you asking about K12? Because they are not the same thing, and answers will vary depending on what you want to know.

 

Most of the time I read good reviews from people who bought K12 on their own; it's when they enrolled in a government-funded charter/cyber school that the replies tend to be more negative overall.

[jtcarter14]

It's the Georgia Virtual Academy.

[DragonFaerie]

We used K12 with the GA Virtual Academy (not sure what it's called now) when my DD was in 1st grade. I liked the curriculum okay (particular the videos and such on the computer) but I did not like the virtual school aspect of it. I didn't like having to count hours, log in every day, etc. Most importantly, I did not like the state testing every year. We quit after a few months of it.

[jtcarter14]

How much time would you say you spent per day on counting hours and logging in?

[mom2koh]

We looked into it for this upcoming year and decided against it quickly. For us is was not a good fit as we like flexible scheduling. The GCA had us sticking to the school year. The rep I talked to even told me that since my vacation was planned during "school time" I would have to still log into the computer so DD could register her hours for the week. Ummm. No thanks!

 

We were also told we could not accelerate dd. The books for reading they were going to send were a joke (dd's 7 and reading at a 6th + grade level).

 

However, I know several people using it and several more using it this year. They are all thrilled. One of my friends just got her computer from the GCA and it was a mac!

 

From my understanding of it after talking to a bunch of current GCA users, new users and reps I'll try to answer your questions:

 

Is there homework? Sometimes. Depends on grade level.

 

What percent of work is on the computer? Computer time increases as grade increases but you must log on and log work daily!

 

How high is the parent time/involvement? Intensive in the younger years and diminishing as the kids get older. Also, for the GCA you do have mandatory field trips with your "group". You also will have times to "conference" with your child's teacher.

 

What happens if we try it and decide to bail out mid year? Do we have to pay anything? Send the books back? You have send all back except consumables. If you continue homeschooling you will have to submit a DOI. With the GCA you are not a "homeschooler" you are public schooled so no DOI is needed.

 

Do we have to go by the school calendar in our county? YES!!!! Or just get 180 days in? You can ask for time off but it's all up to your teacher!!!

 

How do you choose which activities to not do? (That sounds time intensive for the parent.) You don't choose. It's school so all activities must be checked off. It's public school at home so you loose some of the flexibility of the homeschool aspect.

 

Hope this helps. Were you able to attend an open house?

[DragonFaerie]

That's kind of the weird part. The way our "teacher" explained it is that each lesson is "valued" at a certain amount of time (usually 60 minutes). Each day you, as the parent, will log in and mark each lesson that your child has completed. When you do this, 60 minutes automatically pops up into the field. The teacher said to leave the 60 minutes, even if the student took less time to do the assignment. However, if the lesson took longer, she said to put in the longer amount of time.

 

One thing that was a real pain for me was when DD wanted to work ahead. Sometimes she likes to get the week's work done early so she can have "days off." However, GVA does not count the days like that. So, if she finished all of her assignments for the week by Wednesday, say, I would still need to go in on Thursday and Friday to log assignments. Otherwise, she wouldn't get "credit" for doing school on those days, even though she had done the work.

[jtcarter14]

I did not get to attend an open house. I heard there was a meet & greet, but it had already occurred. I'm going to a friend's house in the morning to see her materials, but she will be doing it for the first time this year.

 

My kids will be in 4th & 5th this year, btw.

 

The thing that appeals the most to me is that the curriculum looks so very comprehensive. I.e. language arts includes things I hadn't even realized were missing from what we do - literature (though my kids read a lot), comprehension, composition... I know you can do K12 without the virtual school, but we can't afford that this year if ever.

 

Do any of you know of any other curriculum that is that comprehensive that maybe doesn't cost as much?

 

We also are thinking ahead to when the kids are in advanced classes like calculus that having another teacher in addition to me will be immensely helpful. I remember seeing that Abeka has some sort of online school. Are there any others? We really aren't into using the computer, but it seems that is what's offered.

 

Thanks!

[Pamela H in Texas]

My son used it for 7th and part of 8th. I think it was a great program for us. We needed something different at that time due to various circumstances in our family. We homeschooled independently for years prior to using it and then went back to homeschooling independently. TX's VA actually tried to discourage me from using them because I was a veteran homeschooler. They said they had had issues with homeschoolers trying to get free curriculum (and a great curriculum) but who didn't want to do the public school aspect.

 

Now, I know nothing about Georgia, but....I can tell you that though there *are* hoops to jump through for the state, it isn't (or at least wasn't) that confining:

 

****You have bench mark testing a couple times per year and of course the state testing.

****We also had to send in some paperwork he had completed (we got to choose what within the subject) each grading period.

****There was a weekly "chat" the kids had to attend or watch the session recording of. There were a couple questions based on that.

****They also had to do a brain teaser each day for attendance (they didn't have to get it right).

 

Seriously, that comes out to what? Less an an hour per week plus a couple test days?

 

We did have an hourly amount we were supposed to meet (it was per year and worked out to 6 hours per day) and I wasn't comfortable with just keeping the amount listed for how long it might take as someone mentioned above. Instead, we had a white board and my son, each day, wrote down the times he did each class (beginning and end). Twice a week, I inputted the information into the k12 program. However, all sorts of things counted as school so we didn't have any issue with the hours. We did have to sign in each day for attendance, but we could do school how it worked for us. We would school through school breaks (as we don't do holidays) and take off at times important to us. We just emailed our teacher to let her know what we were doing. We also changed the calendar on K12's program.

 

Most of the work for 7th and 8th grades was the student's responsibility. My son had some interventions (precursors to special ed which he never qualified for) that did require more of my time, but it was much easier going than homeschooling traditionally.

 

We did "bail" midyear without any issue. We had to send written notification. They sent shipping labels for the materials and computer and such.

[Mommy22alyns]

PBI, Tracy, thanks for your detailed response! There's a VA starting up in our state now and I wasn't interested in it. Now I'm really not interested! ;)

[EKS]

I like K12 for certain things (history, literature, and science), but only if I can use it my way. I would not be able to function using a VA because of this. I generally will eliminate all worksheets and most activities and only use the input (book or computer) and the tests. I have my son do written work that I assign instead of what K12 suggests.

[mom2koh]

Are you in the Atl. area. There are many outlets here where the kiddos can do classes like calc. and physics with a real teacher when they get to that age. We are in something called Timothy Ministry near where we live. It meets once a week and the kiddos take classes. All of the high school classes are pretty intensive and cover what the need to know. Plus they have all the appropriate lab stuff! My kiddos are 4 and 7 y.o. and already in the program. If it's the upper levels that are concerning you I wouldn't stress too much. There are resources you can use to have your kids taught by people who are strong in the areas where you may be afraid! :-)

[jtcarter14]

We don't live near Atlanta. There is a private school here that offers a la carte classes, but of course, that is expensive. Thanks!

[ehommel]

This has been so helpful, thanks for all the information. We're not in GA, but will be trying K12 for the first time this year. These are the exact questions I've been having. I don't know how we will do with all the requirements from the state, but we'll see.

[twogirlsmommy]

My kids are enrolled in ORVA for the fall. This is our first year, however, when I talked to the rep. at an info meeting she said you could log hours for school that were not curriculum based. Cooking projects, PE times, field trips. So even though you should have a certain amount of days they do not all need to be curriculum days, as long as the child is progressing. For us I am looking forward to the structure.

 

Also, there are many, many optional activities for the kids. You do not need to do them.