At the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, Newport-Mesa Unified School District (NMUSD) crafted a reopening plan to segue students from remote learning into brick-and-mortar schools in either a hybrid or fully in-person model, based on transmission rates of the coronavirus.
Many families lauded the plan. But others, fearing the risk of sending at-risk kids back to campuses where they might be exposed to the virus or bring it back to a compromised family member, sought a 100 percent virtual learning option.
District officials complied, and the TK-12 Cloud Campus was born. Teachers were reassigned and coursework retooled to accommodate a format where kids learned together on Zoom part of the school day and worked independently on assignments the rest of the time.
The virtual school gave families the flexibility to travel without interrupting instruction and ensured students could continue learning online without the disruption of shifting from hybrid to in-person learning, and potentially back again, as coronavirus infections ebbed and flowed.
Newport Beach resident Missy FitzSimons enrolled son Owen and daughter Zoe in the Cloud in the fall of 2020 after finding they’d done well at distance learning the previous semester.
“We wanted more consistency and also a safer environment at that time,” she said Friday. “We got them organized on a schedule at home. They were able to work without distractions and be done by noon — they loved it.”
Cloud Campus enrollment reached a peak of 1,800 students during the 2020-2021 school year, according to district figures. But now that in-person learning across NMUSD campuses has fully returned to pre-pandemic levels, participation in virtual classes has, consequently, shrunk.
In 2021-2022, Newport-Mesa Unified recorded 415 students in grades K-12 attended the online school, while so far, about 336 students have committed for the upcoming school year, which begins Monday.
Instead of scrapping the online learning model, school and district officials are rebranding Cloud Campus as an option for families who may not have the same health and safety concerns they had at the peak of the pandemic but whose children may still benefit from online learning.
“Virtual school is the new way of doing independent study,” Principal Racquel Stephens said of the online delivery model. “It serves a very unique population of parents who would like to educate their children in the home environment but who also want a connection to the district.”
Stephens on Wednesday led an online information session for families who might still be interested in enrolling students in the Cloud Campus this fall. Unlike previous school years, students are not required to commit to an entire semester and have the flexibility of moving between virtual and in-person learning.
She emphasized the many clubs and electives offered through the school — from cooking and astronomy to book clubs and computer coding — and said parents often organize optional in-person field trips and get-togethers. In June, students participated in in-person graduation and promotion events.
Cloud students additionally benefit from the technology they learn and use in the classroom, which could potentially put them at an advantage in college and the workplace, Stephens told parents.
FitzSimons said while her family initially decided to enroll for health and safety reasons, she was surprised at the unintended benefits the Cloud Campus brought with it.
To operate a fully online K-12 learning model cost just over $4.3 million during the 2021-2022 school year, with about 95 percent paid for by state and federal sources, including COVID-19 relief funds, according to figures provided by the district.
More than $4.7 million has been budgeted for the 2022-2023 school year so far. But even if federal and state pandemic assistance recedes, NMUSD is likely to continue developing the Cloud Campus into a new tool for students and families.
“Most of the districts in Orange County have a fully virtual option, so in establishing a virtual school at Newport-Mesa, we are going with the times,” Stephens said in an interview Thursday. “Online learning isn’t going away — it’s just about how are we going to use it and how are we going to position ourselves?”
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