Bartholomew Consolidated School Corp. has created a new position to oversee online instruction.
BCSC school board members have approved the position of K-12 virtual pathway director.
Following the approval on Monday, Assistant Superintendent of Human Resources Teresa Heiny announced that the role would be filled by Josh Giebel, who is a counselor at Columbus Signature Academy New Tech.
Giebel’s new position will involve “keeping track of students” and whether or not they’re staying “caught up with where they should be along the pathway,” Heiny said.
“We have teachers that will teach those courses, but this is like the principal over the whole K-12 pathway,” she said. “So it’s the monitoring, it’s helping with assessment. We still have to give these kids the state test. … Just everything a principal does.”
Many people have been involved in organizing virtual instruction throughout the 2020-21 school year, said Superintendent Jim Roberts.
“Coming out of spring break, at least by our current count, we’ll have approximately 1,500 students still participating in an eLearning option during quarter four,” he said. At one point, the school corporation had nearly 3,200 students online, he said.
About 300 students, including both elementary and secondary, might choose to enroll in a virtual option next year, he said. Based on possible enrollment, the state may require BCSC to recognize the virtual pathway as a “new school” within the school corporation.
According to a July memo on instructional time and attendance from the Indiana Department of Education, a virtual public school is defined as “a school in which the lesser of at least 100 students enrolled in a school corporation or 30 percent of the total number of students enrolled in the school corporation” receive virtual instruction.
“Virtual public schools exist as independent schools within a school corporation and receive a separate and distinct school identification number,” state officials said.
Roberts said he’s not sure if the state will still require BCSC to create a new school. However, as the school corporation thought about the virtual pathway as a school, it felt the need for an administrator who could manage recruitment, curriculum, hiring and placing teachers. He said that these duties, now included in Giebel’s new position, were shared by different people this past year.
Board member Nicole Wheeldon said that the position is also important because eLearning will help prepare students for real life, as at least a portion of them may end up working from home at some point in their lives.
Giebel, who has been at CSA New Tech for the past 11 years, thanked the school board for giving him “the opportunity to lead this initiative and lead this pathway.”
While he knows it will be difficult to continue building enrollment and maintain sustainability, he’s passionate about seeing what BCSC can do with the pathway as it continues to “personalize learning for all of our students,” he said.
“I really see this as an opportunity to grow from an experience that maybe we weren’t all expecting a year ago and use that to kind of leverage some changes that can be lasting and ultimately revolutionize the way that we look at education,” Giebel said.
Giebel will start in his new position in early summer.
Roberts said that the school corporation wants to make sure it has the pathways and choices people want.
“We know that people are looking for online options and that we have a high-quality one, with excellent teachers involved, and then we’re confident in Josh’s ability to lead that pathway forward,” he said.
BCSC continues to develop online learning, the Edgenuity platform used in Columbus Virtual Pathway will continue to be a “key piece” of their virtual pathway curriculum, Roberts said.
“We’re looking at more of the CVP piece to begin with, from a management standpoint, and then we’ll evolve as we need to from there,” Roberts said.
Communications coordinator Josh Burnett indicated that BRIDGE — a more short-term virtual enrollment option offered during the 2020-21 school year — will no longer be offered next year.
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The role of K-12 virtual pathway director (also listed as "virtual education director") is a new position at BCSC. Duties will include keeping track of students’ progress in the pathway, helping with assessments, acting as a principal over virtual education, managing recruitment, hiring and placing teachers and managing curriculum.
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