As valedictorian of his senior high school class, Jed Michal was naturally expected to give the commencement speech during the graduation ceremonies of his East Colorado high school. Though stuck in a Texas hospital a week out from a bone marrow transplant for leukemia–a disease that had robbed him of his entire junior year at Flagler High School in Flagler, CO–he was able to deliver that once-in-a-lifetime address thanks to videoconferencing technology implemented by his district’s regional co-op.

Michal’s alma mater is in one of the most sparsely populated areas of the United States. The East Central Board of Cooperative Educational Services (EC BOCES) governs 15,000 square miles with 21 K-12 school districts, most with only a few hundred students total. Vast geography and declining populations were perilous to many smaller schools and presented challenges for the responsible co-op.

Keeping Schools Alive and Meeting College Requirements
“These are very small districts, and only a couple of them actually have more than one building,” said Emma Richardson, distance learning coordinator for EC BOCES. Leaders there eventually determined that videoconferencing was the only way to keep delivering a variety of quality classes to all the schools in need. The resulting initiative, the Video Networking Educational Technology System (VNETS), connected 17 participating districts with each other and with world at large via videoconferencing technologies.

For the rest of the article, go to Virtual Learning to the Rescue