It is Monday afternoon at the Bingham house, and the school day has just started.
Caleb, 7, begins to solve problems on his math worksheet, while his brother Micah, 6, works on the Raz Kids program on the computer. Melinda Bingham, their learning coach and mother, keeps track of what the boys are doing. After a while, the boys switch tasks; Caleb works on the computer and Micah tackles math.
Caleb and Micah are two of the 91 Lawrence Virtual School students in Shawnee County. The school, which was established in August 2004, is the largest virtual school in Kansas, currently serving 1,024 students.
Caleb, who is in his second year at LVS, was enrolled at a typical academic setting for only a short time. He attended three weeks of kindergarten at a Topeka school, but he had just started a new medication for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and it wasn’t going well for him.
So Melinda and her husband, Rodney, who had been thinking about home schooling their children, started doing Internet searches for virtual schools that included special education programs.
Lawrence Virtual School popped up.
“Just a random search brought me here,” Melinda said. “And I’m so glad that it did.”
Micah has autism, and the Binghams knew they were going to need special education services.
“For Micah, this environment is much more conducive to him learning,” his mother said. “Crowded rooms with lots of people are a little bit much for him.”
Both parents work in education. Rodney is a teacher, and Melinda is a social worker in a local school district. Melinda works in the morning and is home with the boys in the afternoon to act as their learning coach.
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