Classroom Technology

Counseling Is a Virtual Experience for Students at Online Schools

By Benjamin Herold — November 12, 2013 6 min read
Kim Rogusky, right, the coordinator of college and career counseling for Commonwealth Connections Academy, the third-largest full-time online school in Pennsylvania, confers with co-worker Mary Cote, an advisory assistant, at the school's counseling offices in Harrisburg. Amid struggles with academic performance and student retention, online schools are striving to more holistically support students they rarely see in person.
  • Save to favorites
  • Print

Kim Rogusky spends her days helping high school seniors plan for life after graduation, responding to teens’ occasional crises, and plowing through endless administrative tasks—the typical work of a school guidance counselor.

But Ms. Rogusky, who works for the 8,000-student Commonwealth Connections Academy, the third-largest full-time online school in Pennsylvania, does nearly all of her work in cyberspace, interacting with students across the state primarily from her small cubicle in an office building in Harrisburg.

“It’s definitely a challenge to my counseling skills,” Ms. Rogusky said. “It’s hard when [students] can’t see that I’m smiling at them.”

Nationwide, an estimated 310,000 students in 30 states now attend “multi-district, fully online” schools such as Commonwealth Connections, according to the Evergreen Education Group, a consulting firm based in Durango, Colo. As the sector grows, those running the schools—usually states or charter school boards, both of which often contract with private companies for management services—are wrestling with how to better support the academic, social, and emotional needs of students they rarely see in person.

“The challenge is to make sure [full-time online schools] are really providing a comprehensive school counseling program to students,” said H. Eric Sparks, the assistant director of the American School Counselors Association, or ASCA, based in Alexandria, Va. “It’s very much a developing field.”

Maurice E. Flurie III, the CEO of Commonwealth Connections Academy, in his Harrisburg, Pa., office, said his school recently hired four new counselors.

Proponents say that virtual school counseling has its advantages, particularly for students more comfortable interacting online than in person. And some of the counseling practices utilized in full-time online schools are now being taken up by traditional schools seeking to catch up with their tech-savvy students.

But how to best respond to at-risk children who may be located hundreds of miles away and how to ensure the confidentiality of sensitive student information disclosed online remain challenges.

Cost is also an issue: Watchdogs maintain that, given their generally poor academic performance and high student turnover, full-time online schools—particularly independent cyber charter schools run by for-profit management companies—need to be more transparent about how much they invest in support services.

“We have to be able to compare them to traditional brick-and-mortar schools so policymakers can make good decisions about how we’re going to fund these schools,” said Gary J. Miron, an education professor at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo.

Emotional Support

The Stanford University Online High School in Stanford, Calif., which charges $16,600 a year in tuition and serves exceptionally motivated students, isn’t the typical full-time online school. But it does embody a trend in virtual guidance counseling.

In 2010, Stanford University Online High had one counselor for its 500 students, twice ASCA’s recommended student-to-counselor ratio of 250:1.

Three years later, the school employs two full-time counselors, who focus primarily on students’ social and emotional needs and offer help with issues such as anxiety, depression, and eating disorders; two academic advisers, who make sure students are enrolling in the right courses; and two full-time college counselors. Roughly 10 percent of the school’s full-time online students receive short-term virtual counseling from the school’s staff, who will refer the students to local professionals for more in-depth treatment when appropriate.

“We realized that full-time online students have the same needs as any adolescent,” said Tracy Steele, the school’s director of counseling. “So we became more of a school and less a set of online courses.”

Publicly funded, full-time online schools are starting to embrace a similar approach, said Mr. Sparks of ASCA. But the challenge, he said, is figuring out how to effectively deliver well-rounded services online while safely storing and limiting access to confidential information that is disclosed via email or an online chat.

“Not having face-to-face interaction can make it more difficult to assess what’s happening with students,” Mr. Sparks said. “Distance can also be a problem—if there’s some type of emergency, the counselor may not even know where the student is.”

Ms. Steele said a nascent network of virtual school counselors has begun exploring protocols for such situations, as well as guidelines for online counseling caseloads and use of specific technologies. But “the best practices are still being developed,” she said.

College Preparation

Maurice E. Flurie III, the CEO of Commonwealth Connections Academy, said his school recently hired four new counselors, to bring its total to 12. It also launched a new online career-planning course, part of a larger shift from making sure students accumulate the credits needed to graduate to helping them prepare for college and careers.

“It all meshes together pretty well,” said Ms. Rogusky, now in her second year at the school. “The time spent with career planning, that’s bringing to the surface more of the social and personal concerns students have.”

Mr. Flurie touted the new approach as beneficial to Commonwealth Connection’s students. The school’s most recently published four-year cohort graduation rate, for the 2010-11 school year, is 83.1 percent, slightly above the statewide rate of 82.6 percent for all schools and second-highest among the dozen cyber charters in operation at that time.

But like many full-time online schools in Pennsylvania and across the country, Commonwealth Connections has struggled with student retention and academic performance. In its most recent annual report filed with the Pennsylvania Department of Education, the school indicated that 1,622 students—roughly 1 in 3—withdrew during the 2011-12 school year. And like the rest of the state’s cyber charters, Commonwealth Connections failed to make adequate yearly progress towards its federally mandated academic performance targets that year, the most recent for which data is available.

Mr. Miron of Western Michigan University said that type of student churn and poor academic performance likely has something to do with the scope and quality of the counseling being provided to students. But he said many such schools—especially those managed in part by for-profit companies, including Commonwealth Connections, which contracts with Connections Education, a division of education publishing giant Pearson—publicly report very little information about what they spend on supportive services.

“When we try to look at these schools’ expenditures, it’s hard to tell how that money is being used,” Mr. Miron said.

Mr. Flurie said his school spends an average of approximately $10,400 per student but has not broken out how much of that goes to counseling services.

Despite the questions, many are excited about the potential for virtual counseling to help further personalize each child’s school experience—in both online and traditional brick-and-mortar schools.

Ms. Steele of Stanford University Online High said that shift is already underway: In a recent survey of ASCA members, she and her colleagues found that more than one-fourth of counselors are already using technology to remotely deliver services to their students, and that almost half believe that online communication can be an effective counseling technique.

“I think there is an opportunity for this model to serve a wider range of students,” she said. “This is just the start.”

Coverage of entrepreneurship and innovation in education and school design is supported in part by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Education Week retains sole editorial control over the content of this coverage.
A version of this article appeared in the November 13, 2013 edition of Education Week as Counseling Is Virtual Experience at E-Schools

Events

Jobs Virtual Career Fair for Teachers and K-12 Staff
Find teaching jobs and other jobs in K-12 education at the EdWeek Top School Jobs virtual career fair.
Ed-Tech Policy Webinar Artificial Intelligence in Practice: Building a Roadmap for AI Use in Schools
AI in education: game-changer or classroom chaos? Join our webinar & learn how to navigate this evolving tech responsibly.
Education Webinar Developing and Executing Impactful Research Campaigns to Fuel Your Ed Marketing Strategy 
Develop impactful research campaigns to fuel your marketing. Join the EdWeek Research Center for a webinar with actionable take-aways for companies who sell to K-12 districts.

EdWeek Top School Jobs

Teacher Jobs
Search over ten thousand teaching jobs nationwide — elementary, middle, high school and more.
View Jobs
Principal Jobs
Find hundreds of jobs for principals, assistant principals, and other school leadership roles.
View Jobs
Administrator Jobs
Over a thousand district-level jobs: superintendents, directors, more.
View Jobs
Support Staff Jobs
Search thousands of jobs, from paraprofessionals to counselors and more.
View Jobs

Read Next

Classroom Technology Don't Have Time to Try AI? 3 Simple Tips to Help Teachers Get Started
Nearly a third of teachers who are not using AI say they plan to start using the tech in the classroom either this year or in the future.
3 min read
Vector illustration of a robot teacher and students. Robot teacher is standing on a cellphone with a chat bubble above its head a math equations and graphs projected in the air behind him.
iStock/Getty
Classroom Technology What Kids Say They Need to Understand How AI Works
A National 4-H Council survey explores kids’ knowledge and use of artificial intelligence.
4 min read
Photo illustration of student with laptop.
Anderson Piza/iStock/Getty
Classroom Technology From Our Research Center How Young Is Too Young to Teach Students About AI? Survey Reveals Differing Opinions
Educators overwhelmingly agree that students need to learn how AI works, but at what age, exactly, is a source of debate.
4 min read
A young kid using a tablet building robot game with a chat bot notification face icon pop up
iStock/Getty Images