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Students at St. Pius High School in Albuquerque can now claim classmates from across the country, even from as far away as Dubai in the Middle East.
It’s part of a fledgling, online learning experience the Catholic school on the West Side is offering its students.
Administrators for several years had been looking for a way to offer some advanced instruction for classes in which not enough students register.
“I like giving the kids the option of online, because it extends their learning,” said St. Pius principal Barbara Rothweiler.
Online learning provides many options for the school and better prepares students for future learning experiences, she said.
“They’re going to have to do this in college,” Rothweiler said. “It’s going to be a college requirement somewhere along the line. We can also use it for classes that maybe don’t have enough students to be in a class, but we still want to give them an opportunity to increase their learning, enhance their learning so we can choose from other classes.”
In addition, she said, “if there are some students who need to do some remedial work, we can do it that way. If gives us lots of options to extend learning.”
So, this school year, St. Pius partnered with The Virtual High School Collaborative out of Maynard, Mass., to offer advanced placement statistics and advanced placement computer science courses.
The Virtual High School Collaborative “is a nonprofit organization that has literally changed the face of online and blended learning in high schools and middle schools across the country and around the world,” according to a news release from the group. “Since 1996, we have brought art to the cornfields, math to the deserts, and science to the delta. The education students thought they couldn’t receive, and administrators thought they couldn’t afford, has been delivered via the Web by The VHS Collaborative.”
St. Pius teacher Diana Perea will teach the computer science class, with a handful of Sartans along with students from across the globe.
“I think it’s a good opportunity because that’s the wave of the future,” Perea said. “There’s a lot of college classes taken online. So this is a good prep for the kids to start doing this.”
Perea has also taught the AP statistics class so she will be able to help the St. Pius students as they progress through that class.
— This article appeared on page C1 of the Albuquerque Journal
