Parents, educators react to Horry County Schools possibly closing its virtual school

Stayce Herriott doesn’t see an upside for her daughter.

Should Horry County Schools officials follow through on a proposal to dissolve the K-12 virtual program, Herriott said her daughter would regress from the strides she has made during virtual learning.

“Horry County has a ‘No Child Left Behind’ policy, but my child will be left behind if she is forced back into a program where she is not comfortable speaking to her teachers in class and the curriculum is directed towards mass education,” Herriott said.

On Monday, the curriculum committee of HCS announced that the district may close the HCS K-12 Virtual program, which began in the fall of 2020 after COVID-19 forced the district to offer virtual instruction beyond the part-time Flex program.

News

Faced with high failure rate, HCS mulls closing virtual school in fall

• By Katie Powell katie.powell@myhorrynews.com

HCS Chief of Academics Boone Myrick presented data from Dec. 6 that showed 42% of students in the virtual program were failing one or more courses, including 46% of high school seniors. 

Myrick gave three options to the committee: keep the program the way it is, keep it going but with adjustments to requirements for acceptance or dissolve the program entirely beginning with the 2022-2023 school year.

HCS Superintendent Rick Maxey said Monday that his administration recommends dissolving the program, but no official decisions would be made until the next board meeting.

According to the district, the HCS numbers were pulled from Dec. 6 as “a check on student progress” in a combination with information from their grading software Powerschool and the program Genius, where K-12 HCS Virtual teachers log their grades.

The end of the semester was Jan. 13.

In comparison, the Cyber Academy of South Carolina shared data from the end of their 2020-2021 school year, showing a pass rate of more than 80% for elementary students, over an 87% passing rate for middle schoolers, and more than an 85% passing rate for high school students.

Herriott said she originally decided to keep her children in the virtual program because of the pandemic.

“My kids have flourished,” she said, noting that her older daughter has always been shy, though her virtual teacher said she has emerged as a leader in class, speaks up and actively participates. “I don’t understand how they are saying that it is failing. I don’t believe they’ve given it a chance yet.”

Herriott mentioned numerous teacher changes during the first year, which was expected as the program was new to everyone, but she said the district making such frequent changes is not helping. She is able to stay at home and help her children work out the virtual school kinks, but she realizes not everyone has that option.

Herriott’s family loved the flexibility of the program, though she said she received an email the Thursday before the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday saying the attendance rules were changing. Her daughter had a Google Meet for every class and had to attend them all in order to be counted as present, instead of previously choosing between morning or afternoon live lesson opportunities.

“They just keep changing things. Give it one more year and give it a chance,” Herriott said, suggesting maybe the district form a board of virtual parents to help them have a stronger voice in what is working in the program and what isn’t.

Ocean Bay Elementary School parent Lori Manzi’s youngest child has been in virtual school since the beginning, and the program has helped her child’s anxiety. 

“It worked in ways I never thought possible,” Manzi said. “The district needs to stop looking at this as some form of alternative school or ‘COVID school’. This is so much more than that and could be so much more.”

Manzi also said there have been many last-minute changes, but she believes with more support the program could "do amazing things."

Maxey has stressed that this decision was about students and not teachers – that the teachers should be commended for doing an exceptional job with the HCS K-12 Virtual program issues.

Manzi agrees, saying some of her daughter’s teachers really went the extra mile for their students.

Jerry Gregory’s child spent his first year of high school in virtual classes last year, during the first months of its inception.

He said it just seemed like independent study, his son would receive assignments for the week to do on his own, and be given a contact and limited office hours where he could call the teacher if he needed help.

“It became a struggle to keep up,” Gregory said, noting they were unable to move their son back to brick-and-mortar education after that first semester, so he stayed the entire school year, getting Cs, Ds and Fs when he usually was an A/B student.

Gregory said he almost felt like the district was punishing the parents that erred on the side of caution for their children with that first year of virtual.

“It was brutal. There was no way we were going to send him to year two of virtual because of the experience of year one,” Gregory said.

Gregory’s son was moved back to in-person learning this school year, and his grades have improved exponentially, he said.

Jon Bailey’s children are 14 and 10, and they began doing virtual at the recommendation of their physician due to his daughter being immunocompromised. His experience has been a bit different.

Bailey is a single dad who is able to work from home, and he said he is an active participant in his children’s virtual classes, even attending some Google Meets with them. 

His son is an academic scholar who takes some pre-International Baccalaureate (IB) classes and has always been an A student, yet he failed three classes last year even with good grades due to attendance issues.

At the beginning of the semester, one of his classes changed teachers and there was no Google Meet for the class for the first three days. His son was counted absent for those days, he said. 

Bailey said 25% of his son’s classes were changed due to staffing issues — his son got behind on attendance and was considered to have failed despite his good grades.

Bailey said he is suspicious that the district has incentive for the virtual program to fail due to the district not wanting to lose the funding they receive from the state per in-person student. 

During Monday’s curriculum meeting, Maxey said he was not concerned about losing those student dollars, he was concerned about the students’ failing grades.

Bailey’s daughter however, has had “stellar” teachers that were fantastic and engaging, and really geared toward virtual teaching.

He said he understands some teachers are not that way and that puts the burden on the school to make better hiring decisions.

“I get that the system is also responding to a circumstance it wasn’t prepared for and bureaucracy drags that out,” Bailey said. 

He said his son also was “forced into” the district’s Flex program due to a lack of virtual teachers, upsetting the high school to college path they had already discussed with guidance.

The time spent face-to-face with teachers was also an issue for Bailey, saying his younger child is now only in a virtual class for maybe an hour or hour and a half per day, and high school ages might see their teachers for 35 minutes maximum per day, in their experience.

Communication between the teachers and parents also proved to be difficult for him, saying if he didn’t already have phone numbers for some of their teachers, he would have to rely on the robocalls and trying to get through the automated phone system.

Bailey said the virtual system isn’t built to allow kids to do it on their own, and some of the burden lies with the parents.

“If you don’t have the capability of doing virtual and succeeding, you’re not doing them [the student] a service by doing virtual,” Bailey said. “[But] if the teachers are trying and the students aren’t showing up, there’s nothing you can do.”

HCS spokeswoman Lisa Bourcier said some of the strategies the district uses to support virtual students include make-up attendance opportunities.

According to the district website regarding virtual school attendance, HCS K-12 Virtual students are required to meet all of the state’s truancy requirements. Those students will be considered truant if they have three consecutive unlawful absences or five total unlawful absences, and will be put on an attendance intervention plan (AIP) for an entire calendar year.

Some educator perspectives

Cyndi Teeguarden is a virtual teacher who taught for 18 years at Myrtle Beach High School before moving to full-time virtual teaching.

Separate from teaching virtually for the HCS K-12 Virtual program, she already was working part-time before the pandemic as a virtual teacher for Virtual SC, winning Virtual SC Adjunct Teacher of the Year this year.

While many teachers have voiced opinions privately, many do not want to be named publicly in fear of their jobs and livelihoods.

Teeguarden said while she knows she is taking a risk putting her name out publicly, she feels it is important.

“I feel like somebody really needs to stand up for our teachers and our students – on the record,” Teeguarden said.

Teeguarden said the data the district used is flawed, due to it coming from Dec. 6 and not from the end of the semester on Jan. 13.

She has 109 students and as of Jan. 13, she said her failure rate stood at 11% and including attendance issues might be up to 14% at the very maximum.

“I feel for these kids. I hate they are labeling them as failures,” Teeguarden said. “The teachers were totally blindsided by this … I don’t know what the answer is, but the data is flawed.”

This semester, Teeguarden said, more brick-and-mortar teachers were hired to teach virtual classes because there weren’t enough virtual teachers.

Most of the virtual teachers are teaching four classes with no planning period, according to Teeguarden.

Tricia Jones, a teacher at Socastee High School, said there had been a lot of confusion this semester, but that most teachers are in Google Meets all day.

Jones said her English III class had less than a 5% failure rate.

As for how the district could change the program, Teeguarden said she is not sure what the answer will be.

“If a student is on an attendance improvement plan or already failing, somebody needs to take a hard look at why,” Teeguarden said.

That student should not necessarily be excluded from participating in the virtual program, she said, and noted that students like that might even do better in a virtual environment because she has seen some C and D students turn into A and B students with HCS K-12 Virtual.

“I just feel like nobody is telling their story and our story, and it breaks my heart to think that those kids are going to lose this opportunity that are just doing so well,” Teeguarden said.

Last semester, Teeguarden’s class asked her when they could get together again, saying they would miss her and each other and that they were like a family. 

“It’s a different environment, [some of the students] probably never felt like that in a brick-and-mortar class,” Teeguarden said. “They say ‘I just feel so much more relaxed than I ever felt in my high school [classroom]’ – the stress is gone.”

Despite her apprehensiveness to speak up, Teeguarden said she feels there is more value if her name is attached to her statements.

“It’s important for somebody to stand up for the students and teachers that work so hard, and are made to look like failures. Some of them telling me ‘You’re so brave,’” Teeguarden said. "I’m just trying to do what’s right by my kids."