Ohio DL Schools

Between the five Distance Learning Ohio schools I was given, (Connections Academy, Virtual School House, ECOT,  Ohio Virtual Academy, and Virtual Community School of Ohio), I would choose ECOT for my child to attend for a few reasons. Before I explain, let me preface with the fact that I approached this assignment as if my child was a high school student.

Firstly, upon first impression, their site is very well organized, professional, and shows lots of time and effort into making it easy to navigate.

Secondly, ECOT has multiple programs inserted into their high school curriculum that are focused around college and career preparation, which is incredibly important to my future high school aged children. My child would have the option to participate in College Credit Plus (CCP), and would have great options for electives such as "Career Connections", and various other electives in Career Technical Education (CTE).

Thirdly, I like that even though the school is online and distance learning, they have the option to go on field trips and join clubs. This would give my child much needed time to interact with peers that are doing the same type of program as them. Becoming engaged with other students is something that is hard to achieve while doing DL, but is very important and I like that they have specific programs set up to help encourage students to participate.

While all of the options were good schools, my least favorite was Virtual School of Ohio. VSoO was the hardest school website to find information such as curriculum and accreditation. Their facts page was not all that helpful because most of the questions asked pertained to students already attending the school. While they did have programs for college preparation, they did not have options for student engagement like a few of the other schools did. I was also unable to see a course list of any kind with options for class and curriculum.

When it comes down to it, my main issue with the Virtual School of Ohio was availability of information. While I know a lot of what I was searching for does exist, it was not easily accessible.

Thanks for reading!
Emily Jo