Connections Academy

Immunization records for online school is ludicrous. This stupidity is a complete turn-away!

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...

I have been attending California Connections Academy for 5 years now. As you read most of these comments, you can obviously see that there are a lot of bad ones, but that's because only the really pissed off people feel the need to come on here and trash the school, so take those with a grain of salt. When it comes to communicating with teachers, all my teachers over the years have been great at getting back to me very quickly. You got to remember that the teachers are not the ones creating our academic content, so no need to blame them for the amount of lessons. There are higher up people that do the software and create the material, our teachers are really just there to grade and answer questionsnothing bad about that at all, that's just their job. My counselors over the years have been fantastic and I cannot thank them enough. I also have an IEP and most of my teachers have been very accommodating. The only teacher that I had a problem was the AP US History teacher, who couldn't understand why I had an IEP and asked me if I was faking it. That has been my only bad situation with any teachers at this school. Ms. Finkelstein, who I had for Algebra 2, was a great teacher and probably one of my most favorite teachers out of the 5 years that I have attended this school. My 11th grade counselor, Yvonne Hernandez, was such a great counselor and so helpful! The receptionist that works at the front desk in the Capistrano Office was so nice and great to talk too! I forget her name, but she is blonde and the main one you talk if you ever go into the Capistrano office. The in-person biology lab teacher, Ms. Solomon was such a great teacher and the one that did my letters of recommendations for college. I just got accepted into UCLA and USC. I only have about 2 more months until I graduate and I am really going to miss this school!