Renee P.

We switched to Connections Academy in Washington State a few months ago. My kids are in 6th, 4th and 3rd. My kids love it and I love that they are home with me all day. It is a school so you do have to spend a good amount of time learning and doing assignments. People post that there is too much work but it's really not. My kids spend less time doing school work with WACA then they spend at their public school. But we do spend at least 4 to 5 hours plus reading each day doing school work. It's not laying around and being lazy kind of deal that I think some people are expecting online school might be. It's real school work that has to be done each day... Yes it is flexible... If you have something going on on Monday you can skip doing your school work that day and do extra work the other days or finish it up on the weekend. But you can't just push off the work to do when you feel like it or you will quickly get behind... That is not a good feeling. I feel like my kids can learn more doing online school. If they have a question when we are going over a lesson or want more info we can stop and look up the info or watch a video to get more details or we can simply just talk about what we are learning. This is something they can not do at public school because they have to quickly move on to the next lesson or activity. I have also read about people complaining about needing to track hours. It's very simple... you put in 6 hours each day M-F into the computer systems... It's super simple. You don't actually have a stop watch counting your time spent learning. The teachers are nice. My kids have one live lesson everyday M-F. They are required to go to at least one a week to get their teacher contact in. My kids go to all their live lessons... It's school and I want them to learn as much as possible. It's also another way to interact with the other kids. Some teachers allow more of it than others. I think the only negative for me is my daughter misses seeing her friends at school. The social part of it. We do plan on signing up for field trips next school year to get more involved with the school and meet other families. Since there are so many negative comments I just wanted to give my feedback. Connections Academy is a great school if you have the time to help your children go through the lessons and you are ready to do some work. It's not something you sign your kids up for and have them figure it out on their own...