With COVID numbers going down, the Wake schools Virtual Academy is going away
The Wake County school system is ending the Virtual Academy program that was created to provide additional options for families during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The school district emailed Wake families on Tuesday that the Virtual Academy will close at the end of the 2021-22 school year. Students will attend their assigned schools in person beginning with the 2022-23 school year.
Wake created the program in 2020 to comply with a now-expired state COVID-19 requirement to provide online options for students not comfortable with attending schools in-person. At its height, more than 80,000 students — the majority of the district— attended the virtual academy last school year.
But enrollment in the Virtual Academy has dropped to 10,000 students this school year.
Wake operated the academy as a program within individual schools. But Wake says that’s no longer possible because a state law passed in August requires any virtual program to be operated as a separate school beyond June 30, 2022.
“Opening the Academy as a separate school would require students to leave the school in which they are currently enrolled,” Wake explained.
Wake is leaving open the possibility of bringing back a virtual program in a new format.
“The Virtual Academy was designed and implemented as an emergency response to the pandemic,” Wake said. “We will now begin to explore what the future of an effective and sustainable virtual programming model might look like in the future, but implementation would not begin before the 2023-24 school year.”
This story was originally published March 1, 2022 at 7:35 PM.
