WE Magazine Federal Way's Internet Academy - Connecting to students one at a time.

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Federal Way's Internet Academy: Connecting to students one at a time

As a teacher, Darlene Chalker got the chance to know Apolo Ohno, chatting between lessons with the gold-medal speed skater as he was training in Colorado for the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City.

But Chalker, who taught Ohno courses in history and math, never came face-to-face with the Seattle athlete.

"I talked to him all the time on e-mail, but I never met him," she recalls.

That's true for many of the students taught by Chalker and a dozen other instructors at Federal Way School District's Internet Academy. At IA, lessons are online. Conversations are more personal -- and often more penetrating than in a bricks-and-mortar classroom.

"I get to really know my kids, and they get to know me," Chalker says. "But I might not even know what they look like -- unless they send me a picture."

The Internet Academy, an online public school open to students since 1996, offers rigorous courses centered on Washington state's Essential Academic Learning Requirements. Classes are led by WEA members who are certificated teachers. Students can complete their courses without the distractions of typical high schools, where classmates -- or even teachers -- might make assumptions based on their age, appearance or other factors.

Most of all, the Internet Academy offers flexibility and individualized, one-on-one instruction.

"Every single student gets my attention," Chalker says. "Every student who sends an e-mail gets an answer. It's as if every single student in the classroom who ever raised their hand would always get called on."

The Internet Academy offers coursework from kindergarten through high school. While older students have similar curriculum choices to regular high schools, the younger, primary grades focus more on helping parents teach their children at home.

Attracting home-schoolers back to public schools was, in fact, the Academy's initial mandate. But in the years since, home-schoolers have become a minority within a student body that includes athletes, such as Ohno, with their harried training schedules, children of parents who work for overseas companies, local students whose parents suddenly landed in Iraq, medically frail children needing ongoing treatment, even students who are uneasy at their home high school because of bullying, teasing, harassment or just plain shyness.

In cyberspace, the teacher doesn't even know your hair is green.

One student is training as a gymnast. Another is a working TV actor. Another enrolled this fall as he's competing to join the professional motorcycle circuit.

"One kid works with his dad as a trucker," Chalker says. "He's working and making money and getting his high school degree at he same time."

For all its advantages, there are tradeoffs. The Internet Academy doesn't offer sports teams, marching bands, school dances, or even diplomas. (Students apply their online credits toward their home district's requirements to graduate). Because students work at their own pace, bright students can complete courses faster than the entire semester allotted to earn a credit at their home high school. Transfer students can enroll mid-semester and still catch up. But that means that it's also difficult to have students work together collaboratively on, say, a Civil War project, because students in the same class are working on different units at the same time.

Lowell Schaefer, who teaches drawing, visual communications, photography, and Web design, says he showed up at the district's first organizational meeting a decade ago to criticize the program -- "a disgruntled teacher saying, ‘Hey, what are you doing taking teachers out of the classroom?'"

Schaefer initially thought the Academy would be just one more way to depersonalize education. But as he listened to the possibilities, he became a convert. Now, as an Internet Academy teacher, he not only talks more individually with students, he says he also talks much more with their parents.

As a result, his online workdays are often several hours longer than in his traditional classroom, and typically at least six days a week. The flip side is that his hours are flexible and, like other Academy teachers, he works several days a week from home.

"I teach exactly the same way here that I do in the classroom," Schaefer says. "In a lot of ways, I think I'm doing more with it because I'm able to spend more time with each student."

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