One Week Left For Putnam Virtual Learning Survey

Putnam County families still have one week to respond to a school system survey gauging interest in virtual learning going forward.

Sam Brooks is the Putnam County School System Supervisor for Personalized Learning. Brooks said this survey for VITAL is about getting the numbers together from students at each school so it can be staffed effectively.

“Around April 15 when all of our other schools are doing their registration, what we’d like to do is allow them to register through the school they’re connected with now,” Brooks said. “And then if they decide to take the VITAL option going into next year it would just be a transfer from one of those physical buildings into the VITAL school.”

Brooks said expanding the VITAL program to grades 3-12 will require principals and counselors to help identify the best candidates. Brooks said he anticipates about 900 students being interested. He said that would require about 20 to 30 teachers to be transferred to VITAL.

“The key to all of this is if you hire a teacher that’s an effective teacher that’s good at relationships with students,” Brooks said. “Then most everything is going to take care of itself. So that’s going to be our goal is to be able to find those teachers that are interested in something like this, dependent upon the populations of students that come from our individual schools.”

Brooks said they’ve received about 500 responses in the first week, with 20 percent showing interest so far. Brooks said the system wants to take its time engaging parents, since this option will be new for grades 3-6.

“I feel like we’re in a good position, it’s going to be a work in progress,” Brooks said. “We’ve learned on the way that I guess the toughest thing is getting the information out and slowly releasing it in a way that our parents can question and understand it as we go through the Spring.”

The Putnam County School System virtual learning survey will be open for parents until March 12. The system has been using the VITAL program since 2012 for grades 7-12.