Like the vast majority of Vermont school districts, Barre promised a virtual learning option for families concerned about sending their children back to school.
Billi Quittner was among thousands of parents who planned to keep their children at home, because she and her partner have underlying health conditions that put them in high-risk categories for the coronavirus. But the district is telling Quittner that – at least for now – there isn’t room left for her middle-school-aged son.
“It just kind of feels like we’ve been pushed into a corner where people that are uncomfortable with sending their kids in, you know, we get to choose health and safety, or we get to choose education,” she said.
Barre school superintendent David Wells said about 18 percent of the district’s K-8 students, 259 in total, have enrolled in the district’s all-online option. Approximately 20 are on a waitlist.
The district is contracting with the Vermont Virtual Learning Cooperative, which has dramatically expanded its operations to meet pandemic-era demand, to provide its online classes in the elementary and middle school grades.
As of last week, the cooperative was supporting 22 districts and more than 43 schools, said Agency of Education spokesperson Ted Fisher.
Jeff Renard, the cooperative’s director, said he didn’t know if other partner districts had also had to create waitlists. But he said it had been difficult for schools to accurately gauge how many families would ultimately choose remote learning.
And overall demand for virtual learning has been enormously high, he added.
“It’s just absolutely nuts. We’re frantically trying to get everybody enrolled. It’s just a huge task. It’s kind of monumental,” he said.
Education Secretary Dan French described the situation as a “logjam,” adding that he was confident that any family that requested remote learning would eventually find a suitable arrangement, though not necessarily through the Vermont Virtual Learning Cooperative.
“What happened is we had a large number of requests come in at the last minute,” he said, adding “we had districts exceeding our contracted numbers at the last minute as well so it created a bit of a logjam, but we are working through it.”
French said the state could potentially increase the slots in VTVLC, but added that other “opportunities and systems” were also available to districts, putting them “in a pretty good place in terms of resources.”
Wells said schools, which must contribute teachers to the cooperative in exchange for slots for their students, had in some cases struggled to find teachers to staff the effort.
“VTVLC has a mountain of registrations to complete. But schools in general in Vermont are really pretty tapped out as far as having enough teachers to teach all of their subjects,” he said.
It’s unclear how widespread waitlists are in Vermont, although Montpelier-Roxbury superintendent Libby Bonesteel also said her district had five students whose requests to go all remote couldn’t be immediately accommodated.
Officials with the associations representing principals and superintendents said Thursday they hadn’t yet heard about schools struggling to keep up with demand.
The virtual learning cooperative is housed out of the River Valley Technical Center in Springfield, and has been offering virtual classes to Vermont students for a little over a decade. In April, the state invested an additional $2 million into VTVLC to dramatically scale up and support local districts offering a variety of remote learning opportunities because of the pandemic.
As part of its expanded partnership with the state, the cooperative is providing K-12 schools access to its online learning platform, curriculum catalogue, and teacher training. Through its new “Collaborative School Option,” the VTVLC has also created a pool of teachers willing to work entirely remotely to educate students who want to attend school online.
Fisher, the agency of ed spokesman, said it’s no surprise that districts may not have accurately forecasted demand, especially as families changed their own plans in a fluid situation. “The pandemic is not a static phenomenon,” he wrote in an email.
“VTVLC has extended deadlines and has been incredibly accommodating but their focus now needs to be on ensuring effective online learning environments for the current participating districts,” he added.
It’s unknown at this point how many students in Vermont have opted into fully remote learning. The state will not begin collecting enrollment information until later this month, according to Fisher.
Renard said the cooperative, for its part, was overwhelmed just processing registrations and didn’t yet have an accurate headcount.
Even in school districts reopening for in-person instruction, demand for online learning has skyrocketed nationwide.
In New York City, nearly 40 percent of public school students are expected to opt into all-online learning, the New York Times reported last week. And Colorado’s state-sponsored online school closed its registration just days after opening following a late surge in enrollments.
