Thomas Gentzel's recent op-ed in the Harrisburg Patriot-News is unfair

Thomas Gentzel's recent op-ed in the Harrisburg Patriot-News is unfair. Cyber School cuts in funding are a huge mistake. Cutting the pioneering initiatives of cyber school innovation could easily be compared to short circuiting the life cycle of a new software product. The preliminary expense in getting to this point is extremely costly if development is prematurely stopped. The greatest educational benefit for the money happens when the system enters the maintenance stage. In my opinion, we are still at the integration and testing stage. Teams of educators, administrators, parents and students are collaborating together to check for errors and inoperability. This stage is followed by the acceptance stage. It is in the next stage of maintenance that the real benefits of change are experienced.

The first Cyber School was only introduced in March of 2001. The On-line synchronous and asynchronous schooling platform is new. Every year there are new techniques and strategies that are introduced to increase teaching effectiveness. Karen Beyer’s HB 446 will cut cyber funding by 1/3 in most Cyber Charter Schools in the State. This cut in funding could reduce the innovation of Cyber Schools into a correspondence school model. If this was the answer, then correspondence schools would have met the needs of students like those appearing in the list below 50 years ago.

Taxpayers understand that cybers account for far less than 1 percent of all public school spending. However, there is a growing niche of student groups carved out of the traditional educational platform that will suffer from funding cuts to Cyber School.

• Students who want to be on the cutting edge of technology
• Athletes and Performers with demanding schedules
• Students with mental health issues like autism
• Students who have been bullied and are now looking for a safe environment
• Students who wish to incorporate work or service learning into their educational setting
• Teen age mothers
• Students who wear religious garments that open them to student criticism
• Immigrant students whose parents embrace a different culture
• Students who have appearance or behavioral idiosyncrasies that open them to student criticism

The increasing diversity of the student population in traditional education is driving costs up. It would be ironic to cut the very changes that are facilitating these groups.

Regards,

Pat Parris (Cyber Teacher)

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Limited only by imagination!