University View Academy, the largest school in Louisiana, is getting into the learning pod business, making it the third charter school operator to publicly sign on to this new way of expanding public schools to families who live far away from a school’s physical campus.
Learning pods educate children in smaller, more personalized settings via a mix of online and in-person instruction. Charter schools in Louisiana have begun to embrace the approach as a way to expand their reach well beyond the geographic boundaries of their physical campuses.
As a result, learning pods are blurring the lines between a brick-and-mortar charter school and a virtual charter school.
University View Academy, or UVA, has led the way in online instruction in Louisiana since it opened in 2011.
The virtual charter school educates 3,720 children in kindergarten through 12th grade. That’s six times the size the school was when it opened.
UVA has 835 students more than the next-largest school in the state, a charter school near Lafayette. East Carroll Parish is alone among the state’s 64 parishes in not having a student currently on UVA’s roll.
And UVA has permission from the state to expand to as many as 4,000 students.
The school is looking this fall to start pods that will specialize in things that parents in a given locality want but which UVA either does not offer or provides only in a limited way.
“We need to be responsive to the needs of our students and our community,” said Quentina Timoll, University View’s superintendent.
UVA offers some in-person services now, particularly at its main office in Baton Rouge, and it pays for a variety of student field trips. Its state charter contract allows it to offer a mix of online and in-person instruction in what is known as blended, or hybrid, learning.
Virtual charter schools, however, can keep only 90% of their public funding. The assumption is virtual schooling costs less since such schools lack many of the fixed costs that apply to brick and mortar schools.
Students in learning pods, by contrast, receive 100% of their public funding.
Timoll said the added pod funding is part of the reason that UVA is going the pod route.
“We know that an additional cost with securing a (pod) location will come into play,” said Timoll, a veteran school administrator who previously held high posts with East Baton Rouge Parish and the state Department of Education.
Fort Lauderdale-based Charter Schools USA, the largest charter school network in Louisiana, pioneered the pod concept. It helped pass a 2021 state law sanctioning pods, which the company had been operating since 2018 without notifying state regulators.
In December 2022, after lengthy negotiations, Charter Schools USA persuaded state education leaders to adopt relaxed rules for learning pods.
The company’s under-the-radar pod venture, however, sparked the state Department of Education to commission a critical audit by the nonprofit group TenSquare.
In August 2023, the Louisiana Legislative Auditor’s Office released its own report on lerning pods, known as a performance audit. The document offered 11 recommendations of ways the state could improve learning pod laws and rules.
The performance audit deeply probed Charter School USA practice of transferring pod students from one campus to another to avoid triggering a vote to amend its charter agreement. The audit also found that one of its pods, the privately run Red Stick Academy in Baton Rouge, served to “artificially improve” the academic performance of the much lower-performing South Baton Rouge Charter Academy, information that was not shared with the general public.
Gina Brown, a manager in the performance audit division of the state Auditor’s Office, said her agency’s investigative auditing team is still exploring other issues highlighted in the TenSquare audit, including the legality of the pods receiving state public funding while having their parents pay fees for some educational services — TenSquare auditors described those fees as tuition.
Charter Schools USA continues to operate a handful of pods across south Louisiana, primarily through its Iberville Charter Academy campus in Plaquemine. On Friday, the Louisiana Department of Education said 40 of the company’s pod students are enrolled at another one of its campuses, Lafayette Renaissance Charter Academy.
Kenner-based Discovery Schools is the first charter group to join Charter Schools USA in experimenting with pods.
Last fall, Discovery Schools notified state regulators of its plans to start a pod, which it is calling Discovery Fusion, at its new Baton Rouge campus. It aims to enroll as many as 280 students in middle school grades and expand over time to grades one to 12.
University View Academy is one of two virtual charter schools in Louisiana with statewide reach. It was called Louisiana Connections Academy during its first five years, but in 2016 it severed its ties to Connections Academy, which is based in Baltimore, and changed names.
The other statewide virtual charter, Louisiana Virtual Charter Academy, educates 1,920 students in grades kindergarten to 12. LAVCA, as it’s known, also opened in 2011. It is part of the Baton Rouge-based CSAL Inc. charter network but it employs Herndon, Va.-based Stride K12 Inc. — formerly K12 Inc. — for the bulk of its LAVCA operations.
In August, CSAL Inc. is launching a new charter school, Louisiana Rebirth Blended Learning Academy, to educate high school-age adjudicated youth and students put out of their home schools due to disciplinary issues. It is looking to educate 450 students next year, with plans to grow after that.
Timoll said University View Academy’s planned move into pods started with a request from a small group of parents in St. Tammany Parish whose children are finishing eighth-grade at a local private school that lacks a high school.
“They wanted them to all be together,” Timoll said.
Since then, the charter school has been holding focus groups of parents, students and teachers to identify what kinds of specialized offerings the school might add, Timoll said. The charter group is now considering setting up separate pods that focus on aquaponics, music as well as literacy and numeracy in younger students.
UVA has yet to formally notify the state of its pod plans, which Timoll said are not finalized.
Timoll said the inspiration for these plans began a few years ago when UVA opened an activity center in Baton Rouge.
“Students started coming in and started having these face-to-face experiences,” Timoll said. “Our parents said that we would like to do this more and do it in more places.”
Timoll described the new pods as a “pilot” that will help UVA fine-tune its expansion plans as it prepares to seek a renewal of its state charter in the near future.
She also pointed to increased online competition from the new public learning pods but also competition that could emerge from the potential legislative approval of education savings accounts. These universal vouchers would provide ample public money for Louisiana families of all income levels to spend on private school tuition, including potentially online private schools.
Timoll said the growing competition means online charter schools have to “really maintain true innovation.”
“I don’t think that (being strictly) online is as innovative now as it was when UVA was opening 13 years ago,” she said.
