KINGWOOD — A total of 700 Preston County students have signed up for virtual school this fall, most of them in the elementary grades.
Another 62 students are on the waiting list for virtual school.
The large response for the state’s requirement that every county offer a 100% online schooling is causing some changes in personnel assignments as well, Preston Superintendent Steve Wotring told the board of education Monday.
“I don’t think any of us thought we’d get 700 applications in a week,” Wotring said.
Also changed is how long parents and students must agree to do virtual education. Originally Preston planned to allow parents to change back to in person education at the end of the first semester. Now they must agree to it for the entire year.
That goes back to the personnel changes, Wotring said. About 14 virtual teachers will be needed to meet the demand. Seven of those teachers will be moved from classroom positions that will not be needed now with so many students going virtual.
If some virtual students came back to school classrooms at the end of the first semester, there’s no way to foresee if they will all be in one grade at one school and what teachers will be needed to accommodate them.
“That means in January we would have to hire another person to teach the rest of the year because we’ve already got this person teaching virtual,” Wotring said. “So now, I might have to hire the number of teachers to match the number of students coming back into our system.”
People will complain this only looks at dollars, he said. “Absolutely I’m looking at dollars. Because if we’re not careful, we’ll break the bank.”
Students enrolled in virtual school will get a school-issued laptop or iPad, and the curriculum will be provided free by the county to the student. But parents will have to set their child’s schedule and guide them through the curriculum.
“The only difference between virtual school and home school is we provide the curriculum free of charge,” Wotring said. “In home school, they have to get their own curriculum.”
Virtual school differs from remote learning days, which are days students who attend school in classrooms work at home. All snow days, for example, are now remote learning days.
Every parent who signed up his or her child for virtual learning will be contacted, Wotring said.
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