Connections Academy

We enrolled our daughter half-way through her junior year because she was dealing with a lot of social anxiety at school. We thought the flexibility of Oregon Connections Academy would be beneficial for her and would allow her to work at her own pace and have some additional free time to work or volunteer. Unfortunately, our expectations were not reality. After six months, our A & B student is now receiving poor grades. She has lost motivation and doesn't really seem to care. At this point, she does the least amount required, which is essentially a lot of busy work and multiple-choice questions. Also, this is a very challenging format in which to teach or learn math. Our daughter has always done quite well in her math classes, yet she's currently failing her CA math class. My brother, who has a degree in computer science and math, attempted to assist her with her math assignments, but it didn't seem to help because she was already so far behind.

I believe the teachers are intelligent and well-intentioned; however, they are limited by the horrible interface and limitations of the online learning platform. My biggest complaint is their confusing system. I struggle to figure out what is due and when, and how she is supposed to complete her assignments. I have a graduate degree, yet it makes little sense to me. I can fully see why my daughter is struggling with this, as well. We are disappointed with her experience at Oregon Connections Academy and will be re-enrolling her at her local high school for her senior year.

On a side note, I did not find out Connection Academy is owned by Pearson Education (publishing company) until after we enrolled our daughter. All CA textbooks are from Pearson, and I recently read they've seen continued increases in revenue from these "public" schools. So, Connections Academy is essentially the K-12 equivalent of the troubled for-profit colleges.

My 10 year old daughter loves this school. She has great teachers. This is the best decision that I have made.

Location: South Carolina Connections Academy

I appreciate all the time the teachers put into my son's education. Quickly answering questions and always eager to help.

I applied for my two kiddos (3rd and 4th grade). It took almost 3 weeks. They ignored my daughters assessment that she was nonverbal and expected her to do a verbal reading lesson with the teacher. They expected her to read LA at a 4th grade level even though her assessment was clear that she has a learning disability and reads at a lower level. It is clear that no one read the assessments or IEP. Doing what they were asking would have caused a learning regression for my daughter but they didn't care or make any modifications. They also wanted me to sign something that indicated they could do hold back if their teachers recommended it. Don't the parents get a say? I'm disappointed because I wanted the program to work for us but the communication is so poor. It isn't hard to create your own curriculum to homeschool your kiddos yourself so that is what I have done. I'm also not driving two hours two different days for STAAR, thats craziness. If you even consider opt out they will drop you where at a regular PS you can opt. I'm sure the program is great for someone out there but for kiddos with special learning needs or accommodations they for mine didn't even take a minute to read the reports I sent in. If their this poor in the beginning it's likely there will be continued troubles. I tried to enroll my kiddos after the first day. It was explained to me a week after classes started that my kids would be expected to do all the work from the first day. By the time they found my kids lost assessments and enrolled them they would have been almost 2 weeks behind in work... terrible.

When I had CALLED and spoken with a LIVE AGENT I specifically asked if this was a "home studies program and I was told NO. That My child would do INDEPENDANT STUIDES so I could continue to go to my FULL TIME JOB. AFTER enrolling her I was notified that this IS HOME STUDDIES and that I AM REQUIRED TO STAY HOME WITH HER. TOTALY false advertisement. I had to take her out of this program IMMEDIATELY

The teacher's and staff have been very helpful and genuinely want my student to succeed. Great choice for us.

I enrolled my son back in 2019-2020 for online kindergarten and the whole enrollment process was a nightmare. After multiple phone calls, paperwork not uploading properly and absolutely no clear answers as to what documents were needed from me, I held off for a year. I then tried applying again for the 2020-2021 school year for kindergarten and it was again, a nightmare. I was asked to provide my marriage certificate for verification purposes that I have a name change. Why? My child's birth certificate and drivers license as well as my electricity bill should have been enough evidence… once I got my son enrolled the whole class sessions were exhausting. We had to meet the teacher 3x a week for an hour each time. The classes loaded slow, it was difficult to understand the teacher almost the entire time, and the support is minimal at best. Whenever my son would become easily distracted the teacher was clearly annoyed and bothered at the sole fact that my son simply just couldn't sit for an hour straight. Then, during his assessments the teacher would have to consistently ask my son to focus. I don't blame him, he has adhd and autism. At the time it was undiagnosed. There is an overwhelming amount of work to do, the materials feel outdated and boring. It feels like college courses but for a kindergartener. I decided to go with K12 and I am happy I chose a different route.

Location: Washington Connections Academy

Due to Covid & how our public school was handling things, we decided to switch our daughter (currently a 2nd grader) to FCA. I have seen mixed reviews but from our experience it was such a breath of fresh air compared to what her public school was offering. FCA does require you to be hands on, especially at her grade, but her teachers, especially her homeroom, were so helpful and friendly, always available to answer any questions. It allowed us to be more flexible with how we did school & it allowed her to progress at her own pace. The main cons I would say were 1) the intro on how to properly use the platform & make the most out of the school could have been way better & more hands on & 2) the obvious lack of classmates but there are plenty of parents who want to meet, you just have to find them. I could go more into detail but if you have any questions I wouldn't mind helping. My email is *******@gmail.com. Overall, I am extremely happy with our decision to switch. The curriculum is great and her teachers, especially Mrs. McGuigan, were amazing!

Learning and discipline in a safe environment. We are already in our fourth year and I do not regret choosing this program for my daughter.

Please don't put your twin's in this junk they hate kids and treat parents very bad they say next school your kids will be doing live lesson via website cam invasion of privacy if u ask me that's why I will not return there next year my kids will be doing K-12 we are leave after 2years of pure hell as specially this year was one of the worst school year for my twins these teacher will mess with your children's self confidence and self motivation I feel there job is to only tear them down when they should be lifting them up my kids the teachers they are the ones that are dumb they love giving our kids zero's for all the hard work our kids do its never enough we as learning coach's aka are the real teacher that make sure our kids are learning if u are looking for teacher support u will never get it here there's have a lot miscommunication there a lot of teachers who have very bad attitudes and can be rude at other time your kids will be treated like a college students this school will and can take over your whole life Curriculum is often too difficult often poorly presented so students can't comprehend.

We love SCCA. No better fit for my special needs son. We will be signing him up next year. I work from home and can do both things.

Location: South Carolina Connections Academy

This school has to be harder to get into than Harvard. My entire family was sick with one hospitalization from Covid, I kept giving them all the info, THEY NEVER CALL BACK! THE ABSOLUTE TERROR

The enrollment process was by far the worst experience. We had numerous issues with them rejecting items and it took weeks to get approvals. The schooling situation is by far even more hellish. The teachers do not exist. Please understand this, the parent is the teacher! Teachers are always out of office and even when they are in office they do not respond, are vague, and literally do not teach. The live lessons teach nothing about the course work and the school loads up the kids with millions of activities that the teachers fail to grade for weeks on end. My A/B honor roll students are struggling to stay above an F and they are working non-stop. If you child is capable of googling, searching and watching youtube videos of actual teachers teaching the sections on their own, they may have a chance. In addition, the school forgot to enroll my kids in all needed coursework. When we pointed this out, they bombarded my kids with full time weekend work to get them not only caught up but way ahead of the schedule. We had teachers literally emailing us asking why we had our kids doing weekend work and scheduled to finish the semester weeks in advance. I really don't even know how this is considered a school? Please look into other platforms for your child. Check with your state and stay away from Connections. If you are in OK, use EPIC or some other true "flexible" teaching environment. Sadly, my kids are starting a new online school only after two months of this hell. Those reviews that state you must work and not be lazy to succeed are lying. Lazy has nothing to do with it, the entire set up is a failure and your children are teaching themselves via google, youtube, and "sections" of online books provided. I will make sure every parent that considers this school understands that it should be shut down.

Location: Oklahoma Connections Academy

Connections Academy schools are not homeschool programs. They are all public schools that require state law attendance and the upper grades curriculum is college prep. It requires every bit as much work as a traditional school. The only difference is that work is being done at home. Teachers are all state certified, but in this setting they are facilitators. The parent is essentially the teacher and it is a full time job. Unless the student is highly motivated, and usually older, the parent can not be off at work all day hoping the child is actually doing school work. It requires a whole lot of time and energy on the parent's part. Parent and student must have a fair amount of computer and technical savvy. If not you will be frustrated, fall behind and be miserable. The same is true of your internet service. It must be high speed and reliable. If not the school will not work for you. The commercials on these schools are very misleading in the sense that there is nothing easy about these schools. Your interaction with teachers will be quite limited unless you happen to attend a field trip. Understand this is corporate run for profit education. The company is not promoting the schools out of the goodness of their hearts or out of a love of education. The schools generate huge profits and enrolling as many students as possible is the vehicle to do so. You'll have to decide if this offends your moral sensibilities or not. Bottom line is do your homework before you decide to join a Connections school. It can be a good experience or a very bad one depending on your child and family situation. Go in with eyes wide open.

My daughter has health issues but was an A student, she just had trouble with her number of absences in public school (9th grade). We thought this would be a good fit. Her regular workload was never this heavy in public school, but we could handle that if it were flexible. I don't know why they advertise it as being flexible, it's not. If she doesn't turn in 6 completed lessons a day she's counted absent for the day. We didn't know that at first and thought she could make up the hours on weekends or work more lessons on another day to make up for it, apparently you can do extra work whenever but you can't do a few hours on a week day and add the rest to the weekend and be counted present for the whole week. It doesn't matter if a lesson took more than an hour or if she turned in a portfolio or a paper assessment or was studying their resource flashcards or reading the lesson text... 6 submitted lessons a day or she's counted absent. The handbook says they have to attend 25 hours a week, but the teachers tell me anything less than 30 lessons (30 hours) is an absence and the hours the learning coach logs in apparently mean nothing because they only believe the child was working on school work if they have a completed lesson to show for it. Also she was enrolled a little late and I don't think she will ever get caught up (very discouraging to try to tackle every missed lesson on top of a full workload). On top of that making for crushingly long days, you have to learn in reverse to get caught up by doing the current lesson then fitting in the overdue ones and if the current lessons are building on the previous lessons you're lost. I am surprised at the amount of time I've had to devote to the program as well trying to sort this all out. I get at least 5 emails a day about stuff that doesn't even apply to us and it's easy to get lost. I had such high hopes and now I just have regret and worry.

My family has been with Ca since my oldest was in first grade. It was a great program and I happily recommended it to everyone I talked to. I cannot recommend it for Elementary students any longer. While the teachers are fantastic, the curriculum is not! They have changed the curriculum in Math and ELA so drastically. It no longer is helpful to the students! Math focuses on one concept for two units, teaching a multitude of methods for simple adding and subtracting. The quizzes and tests are designed to confuse a student rather than test their actual knowledge. If one method works for a student, then why should he or she learn 10 ways to do it that will just confuse him or her in the long run. The ELA focuses on videos and online practices. There is no longer an LC guide to allow the Learning Coach to teach their students. The school wants these videos and online practices to teach the student. They no longer encourage writing practice and reading comprehension skills. Stories are supposed to be listened to... I strongly suggest choosing a different program or straight homeschooling. I am not sure my family will be back next year.

Recently, after a complaint I made about the new curriculum, I felt as if I was told this is how it was going to be now and either get on board or leave... We'll definitely be leaving next school year and checking out other options for my children. This is not the only option available to us and CA needs to realize this.

Also, the lack of communication from the school and teachers this year has been astonishing. The teachers used to be very good at communicating, but not anymore.

The curriculum is AWFUL, I have never seen so many portfolios due so often as I do here. The work content and work load for Kindergarten is just entirely too much. God Forbid your Microphone doesn't work and you can't do a recording because you will fall so far behind so quickly. The program is designed for failure, plain and simple. I had a high schooler that couldn't seem to graduate with the program, B/C student in Public school and completely fell behind here. My 8th and 5th graders have been enrolled 1 week and have done every assignment and already have an average of 60%, Both A/B students in a public setting. I have Two Kindergarten students in the program and they both carry a solid 60% which I find odd because I've NEVER seen a kindergartner fail. Every assignment is turned in and on time, it must be the 3 recordings we couldn't do, those need to go. The ONLY reason my kids are in this program is because we happen to live in the worst state for Education currently. I get wanting to be competitive or even "the best" but your lessons are ridiculous, the work load is entirely too high and God forbid we take a sick day. Time to withdraw!

I'm a 9th grader at connections and iv'e gotten behind a HUGE amount almost every year, with a lot of stress and challenges whether that's in school or outside of school HOWEVER one of the great things about this school is if you work you butt off you can get your grades to A's and have no overdue's, at the beginning of this week i i had 30 overdue's because i went on a cruise with my family but when i got back i worked hard and got down to 3 by the end. Now theirs something a lot of people are misunderstanding is most of the time the students just cant get their head in the game because of stress but this can be fixed or even avoided by just talking to your teacher, i didn't to get from 30 to 3 but that's just because i didn't want to bother them and Honestly the teachers are awesome at least mine (shout out to Captain Mrs. Pyle best Teacher in the school).

The main thing you want to do is stay ahead of the game so you don't have overdue while still doing work and PAY ATTENTION TO THE MATERIAL it may be hidden but it basically has all the answer flat out on the page you just have to look... oh and one last word of advise Quick checks are Incredibly Important so dont just blast through them.

I enrolled my child in the middle of last year and at first thought it was a great alternative. Within a few weeks however I saw a massive slip in her grades and she was placed on "academic probation". Basically it's a span of span where you struggle to pull up an grade that is considered failing and as the time I think you were only allotted two or three. Regardless, she managed to pull up the grades even got a message from the adviser that they had placed her with and yet the day the probation was up one grade slipped and she was placed back on which I felt was completely unfair, but it didn't matter.

Flash forward to the current school year. We are approaching the one month mark and already I'm seeing the same slip in grades. I have seen many mentions of the workload and I can attest to the fact that it is a bit crazy. The first week of school we had a research paper due as well as two portfolios, one of which was a slide show that took us two and a half hours between looking up information and putting together.

My final straw was when I received a call on the 31st from the Algebra teacher accusing my child of cheating. She first called my child who was very upset that this woman was accusing her of copying and pasting answers from a website. Told her multiple times that she knew for a fact she had gotten them from a website then when this teacher called me told me that the accusation was do to the time it took her to complete the quiz...

In the span of Friday to Tuesday my student went from being on track to being in alarm and was placed once again on academic probation. I filled out the withdraw form yesterday.

My daughter has attended CA for 8th and into the ninth grade. She was doing okay with the Junior High class but going into high school she has really taken a turn for the worst. I am not a parent that thinks my kid can do no wrong, but in this case this school just plan sucks! My daughter was a strait A student going into this school and she is now leaving this school as an F student! This school will harass you regularly while they are up for their government funding but as soon as that all in they disappear... No joke they won't return phone calls the administrative will LIE to you and promise they will do their JOB but won't do s***! This is the worst experience I have EVER had with any educational institution! They harassed me daily to wright them a review the first month of school so I wrote them a very nice one and thats the ONLY possible way ANYONE would write them a nice review! THEY SHOULD LOSS ALL FUNDING AND BE SHUT DOWN! Nothing but a BS scam! This is a review for the Utah CA, I do not know if they are better in other states.

I'm seeing a lot of people complaining about the amount of lessons there are, to which i have to say you're all dimwitted idiots. You get one lesson per class a day, just like a normal school, and not even every single class has one everyday, only the core classes. And those little "quizzes" you guys are complaining about are actually quick checks to make sure you actually did the lesson, same as getting an assignment or homework at the end of a lesson. Y'all are just complaining because you thought you could slack off and play video games all day instead of actually learning.

It's definitely NOT for everyone. You have to be responsible and easily adapt to the work style. It's not the same as going to a normal school as far as the environment, of course, but class work is just the same, which is good because then you actually get to learn the things you need to graduate, no matter how useless they may be.

If your child is having mental breakdowns because they're not getting out of the house that's not the school's fault, its yours and your child's. You can easily take them to a park among other things, and they can easily go outside and play. You have to do physical activity for PE anyway and that course is mandatory to graduate in most states.

If you start late and you have tons of work, you need to message your teachers about getting help or skipping you ahead. It's policy for the teachers to do so, especially when you're three weeks late like I was. If you are super behind I recommend doing one class at a time, and keeping up with that class when you get caught up as you do a different class. That worked wonders for me.

Don't complain about things that you should have expected from a school. Like I said, this is exactly like a normal school where you have to actually do work.

My son is able to do school anytime he want and has more free time. He doesn't have to wake up very early and likes it.

My experience has been great. I love how the teachers are attentive and easy to reach. I just wish that TCAH was from K -12th grade.