Racine Unified School District - Changes To Virtual School Options

Kelly Pochop has been hired as virtual learning administrator for the Racine Unified School District. This new position was created to facilitate the exploration of various virtual learning opportunities.

Pochop most recently served as the online learning facilitator for Madison Metropolitan School District for five years. In this position, he and his colleagues designed and implemented all aspects of the Madison Virtual Campus (MVC) for students in grades K-12 from the ground up. His duties included providing support services to students, parents and professional school staff in virtual school operations and practices including implementation of enrollment, curriculum selection and procurement, budgeting, grant writing and presenting the program to the community.

Prior to his work with virtual schools, Pochop was a smaller learning communities grant coordinator at James Madison Memorial High School in Madison. He also taught students with learning disabilities for James Madison and Milwaukee Public Schools. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Northwestern College in Watertown and received his teaching certificate from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.

Virtual learning courses look and feel much like college online courses; students watch lectures online, do homework, submit homework via the web and blog with their fellow classmates. Many schools join a virtual learning network in which they can share materials and teachers and consequently the costs of offering virtual learning. It is still a free public education, and students continue to take state standardized tests. The home school works to ensure that each virtual learning student has access to a computer and the Internet.

In many cases, this unique type of learning can combine the best of traditional instruction with online instruction.

“We are very interested in exploring this new set of services for our students and Pochop’s expertise will help guide us along the way,” said Alan Harris, Racine Unified deputy superintendent. “This is another tool to help us reach the North Star. By giving students more options, we allow them to personalize their learning experience so we can best meet their needs and prepare them to be career and/or college ready by graduation.”

The District is currently researching virtual learning opportunities and determining the best way to add them to the current course offerings.

Source: http://www.racine.k12.wi.us/?do=main.news&mode=details&newsID=1215