In 2009, Colorado District 49 began looking for ways to provide more flexible learning opportunities. We wanted to include as many students as possible, both to alleviate overcrowding in our brick-and-mortar schools and to attract students for whom a virtual model was the only way to keep them in the district.

Our mentality toward virtual learning in those early days was to just jump in and try it. The result was Falcon Virtual Academy, a multidistrict online K-12 school. Our district in Colorado Springs serves more than 20,000 students in 25 schools, but we decided to venture into the world of virtual education with just one school under the principle of “nail it before you scale it” and that Falcon Virtual Academy would serve as the pilot in order to make adjustments before expanding the model.

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