Ainsleigh, Alexi and Amelia Pack work in the family’s Keizer home. The three girls have enrolled in Willamette Connections Academy for the 2020-21 school year after a mixed experience with online classes in the spring (Courtesy/Pack family)
Ainsleigh Pack said her final months at Whitaker Middle School were a mixed bag. The 14-year-old from Keizer was nearly done with eighth grade when school closed in March, then moved online.
“Some of my teachers did really well and they were able to use Google Classroom in a productive way in order to have us learn and grow,” she said.
Others fared less well. Pack said her math teacher ended up stuck in Italy, where he’d gone to help his parents, and wasn’t able to teach online for weeks.
“I didn’t have math until probably halfway through the whole coronavirus online school stuff,” she said.
Pack and her two younger sisters, Alexi, 11, and Amelia, 7, decided to enroll this fall in Willamette Connections Academy, one of Oregon’s public online charter schools hoping for more organized and stable online schooling.
Their parents, Brody and Karee Pack, said their daughters had mixed experiences with online school, which they expected given the abrupt nature of the shift.
“We understood the spring. Our biggest frustration has been … it was clear by early June there was no plan at that point for what was going to happen going forward, and they weren’t making contingency plans. And if they were, they weren’t communicating with anyone,” Brody Pack said.
Karee Pack is a nurse, and the family recognized that the coronavirus wasn’t likely to just disappear over the summer, which meant more online school was coming.
“We didn’t fall into the camp of thinking oh this will be fixed by the time the fall comes around,” said Brody Pack. “We started getting proactive in early June.”
Putting three kids in private school was too expensive, and homeschooling wasn’t an option with both parents working. An online charter fit the bill.
Willamette Connections Academy is only a year old, but enrollment has more than doubled since June. Alison Thomas, teacher and school spokeswoman, said about 300 families were enrolled when the year ended. By mid-August, that was up to 667 families, about 50 of them living in the Salem-Keizer district.
Thomas said projected enrollment could hit 1,400, triggering a wave of new teacher hires before class starts next week.
“I think they’re looking to us to provide stability,” she said of the families newly enrolling. “The districts are doing a really great job of trying to meet the needs of their families in a really crazy time.”
But some families want to be at a school that was set up from its inception to teach online, she said.
Online charter schools have a “home” school district – Willamette Connections is chartered in the Scio district – but any student in Oregon can enroll.
State education funding follows the student to the charter school – about $8,600 per student for the 2020-21 school year. When Oregon schools closed in the spring, the state also said families would not be allowed to transfer from a brick-and-mortar school to an online charter, fearing an exodus of students would deplete funding for traditional public schools.
The transfer ban was lifted April 11, but some families are still running into trouble.
Oregon law allows school districts to deny a student a transfer to an online charter school if 3% or more of the student body is already enrolled, a cap that a growing number of districts are hitting this year. Twenty-three districts have hit the limit, including North Santiam and Jefferson in Marion County, according to Oregon Department of Education spokesman Marc Siegel.
Last year, Oregon’s 20 online charter schools enrolled about 13,000 students.
Siegel said the department doesn’t have a count yet for this year, but the state is seeing a record number of appeals from families denied a request to transfer. In a typical year, the department receives about six appeals, he said. Since June, the agency has received more than 350. That’s prompted the Oregon Virtual Public Schools Alliance to call to raise the limit so more families can enroll students.
Salem-Keizer isn’t close to hitting the cap. With about 41,000 students in the district, a few hundred leaving for online charters or homeschool won’t have a significant impact on the district budget.
Spokeswoman Sylvia McDaniel said district enrollment normally stabilizes around Oct. 1. So far, the Salem system has only seen lower-than-expected enrollment for kindergarten.
About 7,000 Salem-Keizer students also signed up for the district’s new all-online program for students of all grades. EDGE was created this year to provide parents an online choice without having to leave the local system.
Brody and Karee Pack said they did the research and attended an online information session about Willamette Connections Academy as a family, but ultimately let their daughters make the choice.
Alexi Pack said her fifth-grade teacher at Clear Lake Elementary School did a great job keeping class going online. But she decided to follow her older sister to Willamette Connections.
“I had seen what my big sister’s middle school experience had been through this and I wasn’t sure if mine would be similar to that … how much effort my teachers would put into this,” she said. “I realized I would rather have teachers who had been doing this for years … rather than a teacher who just came up with a plan a few weeks ago.”
The family said they’re not sure if the switch will be permanent or if they’ll return to Salem-Keizer schools once schools open classrooms again. Ainsleigh Pack, who was to start her freshman year at McNary High School, said she worried initially about missing social experiences with her friends.
She was happy to learn Willamette Connections has opportunities for students to socialize online.
“A lot of my friends live over in the area so I can still see them and talk to them,” she said.
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Contact reporter Rachel Alexander: [email protected] or 503-575-1241.
Rachel Alexander is Salem Reporter’s managing editor. She joined Salem Reporter when it was founded in 2018 and covers city news, education, nonprofits and a little bit of everything else. She’s been a journalist in Oregon and Washington for a decade. Outside of work, she’s a skater and board member with Salem’s Cherry City Roller Derby and can often be found with her nose buried in a book.
