JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Florida Virtual School is seeing more enrollments now than the same time last year.
FLVS is a free online school for Florida students. In 2018-2019, FLVS has 215,505 students. FLVS offers two different types of programs for how students want to take classes.
The first is the Full-Time program where students can enroll for all their classes at FLVS. This means that students have to follow the pace of the teacher and cannot enroll in a separate school. Classes start at 8:30 a.m. and can end around 4:30 p.m. Classes start on August 19 and ends June 3.
The Flex program is geared for homeschool and public school students. They can take how many courses they want and complete it at their own pace (with a minimum amount of assignments due each week). This program works best if you need to supplement other education with a few courses from FLVS. Flex is available all year-round and standardized exams are not required.
The Senior Director of Instruction at FLVS, Jason Schultz, says there’s been a lot of interest from elementary school parents and in the flex program.
“Well, even just in the last couple of weeks and through the first week of July, Florida Virtual School has seen roughly a 70 percent increase in our flex applications and about a 50 percent increase in our applications for a full time program.”
When the COVID-19 pandemic started back in March, FLVS wasn’t impacted. They were able to continue operations as normal as everything was already virtual. However, with the increase of people interested in registering for classes, they have had to increase server capacity and hire more teachers.
“With the increase in applications that we’ve seen recently though, we are looking to expand and hire more teachers than we typically would this time of year. That’s a tremendous growth right now that we’re seeing for people that are interested in us as an option. So we are working proactively to make sure that we have the teachers on board to serve all the students who want to come our way,” Schultz said.
The deadline for FLVS’s Full-Time program is July 31.