"I find I get to know them on a much different and often deeper level than I can talking to a classroom with 30 students at one time," Nevin said.

"Thinking's not required to answer immediately," she said. "Here, I can give them a day or two. They can write their answer and go talk about it with mom or dad and go think about it some more and change it. We can have a pretty in-depth dialogue going that way."

Miller, a homeschooler, has taken classes from the Internet Academy for three years, and e-mails Nevin regularly with assignments for her creative writing class.

"If you ever have questions, you can always invite your teacher to chat online," Miller said.

Miller's one of 39 Whatcom County students -- at least one from each school district in the county -- who take classes from the Federal Way school.

Of the school's 484 students, 72 percent live outside the Federal Way School District, said Jan Bleek, principal of the Internet Academy. Most live along the Interstate 5 corridor, Bleek said, but the student body lives in 80 school districts throughout the state. Students also come from other states: California, Idaho, Maine, Alaska and Texas.

"This year and last, we have served students in China, Sicily, Italy, Costa Rica, Finland and Romania," Bleek said.

Washington state students don't have to pay tuition to attend the Internet Academy if their home school district allows them to transfer to Federal Way. Students from outside the state, or those taking a full load of classes in their district school or summer courses, pay $140 to $275 in tuition for each course.

The students themselves are a patchwork: pupils who study exclusively from home, high school students picking up extra classes to graduate early, students too sick to attend school, kids who flunked a class and are trying again online, students whose small, rural high schools don't have enough students to offer classes in physics and calculus, let alone Shakespeare, and musicians and athletes whose practice schedule conflicts with traditional schooling.

The younger the students, the more likely they're 100 percent homeschoolers, Bleek said. The programs for kindergartners through second-graders, are all meant to help homeschooling parents, which was the original goal of the Internet Academy when it began seven years ago.

The school has grown since then and today offers 12- to 18-week courses mostly in core courses such as math and English and a few electives such as photography. They're seeing more students every year, particularly for summer school, Bleek said.

Many of the school's older students are homeschoolers, too, Bleek said.

"A lot of them are at that age where they're taking classes that are maybe getting too advanced for parents to really feel comfortable with" teaching themselves, she said.

Work at own pace

Kelsey started taking classes through the Internet Academy to supplement her homeschooling with her mother, Christy Miller. In addition to creative writing, she's taken middle school science, a visual graphics class, and photography -- she used a scanner to send the photographs to her teacher from her home near Lake Whatcom.

Students complete the work at their own pace, which makes it easier for Kelsey to work around her other classes -- she takes a French class at Squalicum High School and health, math and science courses at Zacchaeus Learning Opportunities, a small private school catering to homeschooled kids. She's also helping to raise a golden Laborador retriever puppy in training to be a guide dog for the blind.

Kelsey, who uses a password to get to her assignment information and grades online, often does her creative writing assignments on Sundays. "I'm already done with my class except for one assignment, and I'm two months ahead," she said.

That flexibility makes for a busy schedule for Nevin and other Internet Academy Teachers. School is always in session, whenever she turns on her computer. Nevin requires her 130 or so students to send her at least one e-mail every two days, or she'll mark them absent. That and the e-mails she receives from parents, means Nevin gets up to 100 e-mails a day.

She often works late at night.

"For a lot of our high school students, that seems to be when their brain kicks in," she said.

Nevin also holds regular office hours in case kids, mostly those from Federal Way, want to come talk to her. And she holds online chat sessions twice a week, but it's difficult to hold traditional class discussions online when all her students are at different places in the course, she said.

For kids, the online chats are a way to get some of the social aspects of a traditional school.

"It's a safe environment," Kelsey said. "If you chat with people online, there aren't freaky people that can come in."

But online chats are no replacement for meeting friends in person, Kelsey said. And that's why she doesn't think she could take all her classes online.

"I thrive on my friends," she said. "If I was a person who loves computers, massively, I probably wouldn't mind doing it fulltime. But I think it's more healthy if you aren't always on the computer."

Doesn't see big differences

After 10 years as a principal, including two years at the Internet Academy, Jan Bleek thinks the differences between teaching in a classroom and teaching online aren't as great as many think.

"A good teacher is a good teacher, whether in the classroom or online," Bleek said.

Good teachers establish relationships with their students, she said. "Our teachers have had to find different ways to establish those relationships than you do in the classroom. Those relationships are, nonetheless, just as important to the success of the student."

As the school has grown, teachers have worked to include more hands-on activities in their classroom assignments, knowing that kids who struggle in reading are going to have trouble with demonstrating their knowledge by e-mail. Science classes, for example, commonly have kids using their kitchens and living rooms and laboratories.

Miller remembers a science class two years ago that had her cutting out lengths of blue yarn to see how long her small intestine is.

"Twenty-three feet of yarn laid out across my living room really showed it in perspective how large it was," she said. "It couldn't really fit because it was so long."

Still, kids who learn best by listening might have trouble with online classes, said Jenny Wadsworth, a 14-year-old homeschooler taking Pacific Northwest history and keyboarding through the Internet Academy.

Wadsworth, of Everson, enjoys her classes, but wonders how well she'd do with a difficult math class.

"I think I learn better by hearing it," Wadsworth said, "hearing the teachers and just seeing them show you how to do it."

Bleek said the school tries to be upfront with families when they're considering an online course.

"We're finding that the more realistic a picture we can give of what it takes to be a successful student, it helps people make a better decision of whether this is something that may work for them, or just won't work at all," Bleek said.

For example, teachers at the Internet Academy are also finding that parents need to be even more involved in their kids' education when they're online students and there's no school bell or clock to tell kids when it's time to go to school.

Linda Widman, a home-schooling parent in rural Whatcom County who has three children who have taken classes through the Internet Academy said that's the best advice she could give other parents.

"I'm sure this happens with regular school, too, but it's far too easy to assume they're staying on track," she said. "Then you get farther down the road and you realize they're quite a ways behind."

Widman's 11-year-old daughter, Carla, said picking a class that's interesting helps her keep coming back to the computer.

"If you're not self-motivated, you'll never get it done," said Carla, who is taking a science course online. "If you just sort of feel like that day, you don't want to do it, it kind of builds up."