ROCKY VIEW COUNTY— Rocky View Schools has taken the final steps necessary to formally create two new online schools at the board of trustees meeting on Thursday (June 17).
The new learning options will be available to students next fall for the 2021-22 school year.
Luterbach said the process to create the online schools started in May when he got a positive response from families in the school district regarding the continuation of online programming offered through Rocky View Schools.
“Back on May 20, I provided a public update regarding our online school offerings. We were at that time in the registration process where families needed to indicate if they were going to register for that program and stay with that program all year,” said superintendent Greg Luterbach. “We had about 430 students register for the Grade 1-9 online offerings across Rocky view Schools and we had about 175 students in Grade 10-12 register for our online offerings. Both of those programs are going to proceed with those numbers.”
Luterbach said homerooms and a preliminary timetable for the online schools have been created for the digital schools.
“These are going to be separate schools. They’re each going to have their own principal, their own staff, their own Alberta Education school ID, their own culture, their own name and their own student body,” Luterbach said.
The online high school will be using the repurposed name of RVS Online for the 2021-22 school year, Luterbach said. He added he hopes to engage the community to determine a permanent name for the school in the future.
“We’re going to encourage them over the next school year to engage in a process with their community, which are families and students and staff, to bring forward for the board’s consideration any potential new name for use in 2022 and beyond,” he said.
Alberta Education still needs to approve the creation of the Grade 1-9 online school, and requires a name on the application in order to make the approval and issue a new school code, Luterbach explained.
He asked the board to approve the temporary name “RVS Elementary/Middle Online” for the new virtual school, subject to approval from Alberta Education.
Over the next school year, the community of the new Grade 1-9 online school will be asked to submit ideas for a new name in a similar process the high school will be engaging in.
There will be a physical location for students engaging in online schooling to go should the need arise.
The principal and administration of RVS Online and RVS Elementary/Middle Online will work from a modular wing area at C.W. Perry School in Airdrie, which will also be used if any students or families require in-person appointments.
“That is a school that we have identified that has some capacity currently,” Luterbach said. “There are six modular classrooms at one end of the school that we are looking at as office space for RVO and RVS EMO, two classrooms with dropdowns for staff to be able to work out of there because we know some staff will work from home, others are going to want to be at a school location, others are going to go back and forth. We’re going to have kind of a student support room in there, and the last one is going to be a little microlearning commons and meeting room area.”
Luterbach said the creation of these schools is reflective of the school board’s continued efforts at adapting to the ever-changing needs of families and students within Rocky View Schools.
“We’ll really be building on a legacy of over 100 staff members’ work this past year, wrapping up in a very short amount of time, a program that served over 3,300 students,” he said. “What we’ll try to do is continue to build on that and making sure that we’re looking at what research is telling us about effective practices, and that we’re listening to what our clients need and how we make that successful.”
The board approved the creation of Rocky View Schools Online and approved sending the plans for Rocky View Schools Elementary/Middle Online to Alberta Education for approval.
