We are doing some e-school this year with DS11, 7th grade (2E, Asperger's), and aim to do a lot more in the future. Our corner of Colorado has an e-school that comes out of Jefferson County (Denver), just for our five counties. They offer a full curriculum for 6th grade up, which can be done full-time, part-time, or supplemental. He's taking Algebra 1 and Video Game Design.
It's working very well for him -- he's running at/near 100% in both classes. His other five classes are at the regular school, and he struggles so much with them -- it's all about the executive functioning, or lack thereof. The kid can't remember a piece of paper to save his life. At the end of last quarter, he had about a dozen assignments still outstanding in those classes, and ended up working on about six of them the night before end-of-quarter. The rest just went down the tubes. That managed to bring him up to A's, B's and one C, I think -- but prior to handing in those assignments it was all C's and D's.
The e-school is so easy, for that -- he gets Algebra assignments on Mondays, and they're due the following Monday. Same for Video Game, but Wednesdays. It's all right there in front of him. There is a live session for each class, each week, but he's in regular class at those times, so he doesn't attend them. He's supposed to view the recorded version later, but after the first couple didn't have anything useful on them, I don't think he does that, either. He just does the work, chats on the boards with the teacher and other students, and the only other requirement is that he has to log into each class for five minutes each day, for attendance. As is to be expected, he does forget that occasionally, generally because I forgot it right along with him.
I would not say that e-school does any good in teaching executive functioning, but it does work around a total lack of it very nicely. We're going to try for five e-classes next year. We do want him to have some time at the school, or we'd just do it full-time. If the scheduling can't be worked out for what we want, we'll do full-time e-school. He can still do cross-country and track and knowledge bowl with the school district.
