PixelKelly

Avenues Online

https://www.avenues.org/aon/

Students are all around the world and attend virtual classrooms starting in kindergarten, so long as they have an adult at home to assist them. By third grade, they are able to get to the classroom themselves and navigate the coursework. Classes are both synchronous and asynchronous depending on timezone, and students are physically all over the world. Foreign languages start at 1st grade and have a Mandarin and Spanish option. Students are taught to be global, tech-literate citizens from the start. Teachers are located all over the world; one homeroom teacher was in Mexico, their Spanish teacher went back and forth from Peru to California, and their Mandarin teacher moves between New York and Taipei. Likewise, students come from all over the world, and are allowed to choose what they want to be called and their gender identity is respected. Teachers likewise identify their preferred pronouns in their title.

The only requirement is a computer with webcam and camera; strong internet connection, a web browser, and the only closed-source software is Zoom which is utilized in all instruction. Our children use Debian and have only ever known ThinkPads with Debian. The other downside is that the school uses a Google suite for email and office application, but that is something we learned to be okay with for not letting them be abused by the American public school system.

We relocated to a low cost of living country on the equator, so this allowed us to supplement their online education with extracurricular activities on the local economy, like personal swimming lessons, football (soccer), and we get Fridays off so that is museum day or go do a day trip to the jungle. The kids also get cultural exposure through just living in another completely foreign environment to their culture. There are individual projects every month that involve going out to the community, and the kids have a garden that they are documenting and maintaining for their semester project.

The kids have their own workspaces in the house. Imagine what a /r/battlestations setup would look like for an eight year old with legos, a chalkboard, and mechanical keyboard.

There may be other programs as well; we started in another school before moving to Avenues Online because it had more resources available, but there are other strong institutions that deliver entirely virtually. The only thing when navigating the plethora of online programs is do research and ask questions so that you don’t end up stuck in a fascist Christian program. The interview is two-way; during our kids screening, they were asking them questions to make sure that our world views aligned and that we aren’t bringing baggage to the program (I don’t remember the questions, but some involved dinosaurs and maybe evolution); likewise, during the interview, we asked pointed questions to make sure that this isn’t some kind of new-age holistic antivaxxing white supremacist program. Because they are out there; other schools answered our difficult questions with uncertainty or “that’s something we leave to the parents to decide,” while Avenues was very direct in their positions.

The universities that AON graduates attend are prestigious schools and feature predominantly on the website; this is setting up your kids to be global, tech-literate, multilingual adults; not KJV-memorized people getting into Tennessee Bible College of Jesus.