J: So, is there anything else you think I should know about Cyber School?
H: Let me have a little think about some of the more sparkly things about PA Cyber.
If you have a student who has a giant problem going on in their life, it’s perfectly possible to have a meeting with about six or seven different staff members, just at the click of a button. Emails will go around and then you’ll be phoned up by whoever you need to talk to, and stuff will happen, and it happens really really fast. You don’t have the business of making appointments with people that much and having to wait to see this person and that person. It just goes around to all people who need to give the attention and then you get it right away. If you need special help or tutoring, then that can be set up in a couple of days.
There is a huge amount of special needs students in PA Cyber. Because that’s where they can get the service they need to have a meaningful education.
I’ll tell you one other thing. It’s not just the students that are medically compromised people, and people with special challenges; it’s also some of the teaching staff. My daughter had the privilege of being taught by an English teacher who was actually on life-support while she was teaching. She loved her job so much, that she worked for PA Cyber for a number of years before she became seriously ill. She had some kind of lung condition or something. She was an English teacher who absolutely loved her job and she was teaching her children whilst she was on life-support. It went on for about half of the school year and then sadly she passed away, which was a lot of trauma for her students. But what an awesome thing that a teacher can continue to do her job until practically her last breath and be supported in that and paid to do that. You know she really left an impact on those students and she was passionate. She was such a passionate teacher as well.
The teachers come from all walks of life. You can teach from anywhere. Some of them have taught from the other side of the country. There was a teacher who was from PA and then she moved to CA and she just continued teaching at PA Cyber. They didn’t know any difference other than she had to get up really early because of the time zones. She was complaining about the time difference.
Basically, with a full-service Cyber School like PAcyber they do pretty much everything brick and mortar schools do. They do it differently. We do field trips, or we used to do field trips before the pandemic, now we do virtual field trips. The field trips organized by PAcyber.
And for a lot of them we were allowed to invite other people, so we would just invite other people from our homeschooling group, and they would come too if they wanted to. And we would do things like snow tubing and go to various outings.
They do stuff like trips to the Crayola Factory; they go to the Franklin Institute and the Academy of the Natural Sciences is a good one they liked to go to.
We would mostly meet up with our group of Cyber Schoolers or if it wasn’t that many people showing up you would just go and take yourself on the trip. They would have a coordinator, so you tended to meet up with the staff member and have a get-together with school people.
We got to know a few other Cyber Schooling students. We didn’t do that many school trips last year, but in previous years we have done that and if you show up quite often you usually get to know a few people at least for the year and sometimes more than that.
J: I guess I need to be careful because not all charter cybers are going to have the same stories.
H: No. PA Cyber is one of the biggest and the most established too.
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