FORKS — The Quillayute Valley School District has a pebble in its sling for fighting goliath enrollment declines that threaten its finances.
The pebble is the Insight School of Washington, which is expected to bring almost $80,000 to the district next year.
The new online high school will enroll students from across the state, and Quillayute Valley gets to keep 6 percent of the revenue through its contract with Insight.
Insight Schools is a for-profit online learning company based in Oregon, and thanks to a bill passed by the state Legislature in 2005, it’s opening up shop in Washington.
Public-private contract
Insight Schools’ contract with Quillayute Valley is similar in structure to contracts between tribal schools and public school districts.
It allows for private entities to access state funds by enrolling students through a public school district.
Quillayute Valley and Insight reached an agreement on their contract in March, and now the two are sketching out the logistics of how it will work.
The School Board received the operations manual Tuesday night, and will review it at a May 23 meeting with representatives from Insight Schools, including state Sen. Bill Finkbeiner, R-Kirkland.
Finkbeiner, Senate minority leader who announced in April that he won’t seek re-election in the fall, was appointed executive director for Insight School of Washington.
Finkbeiner, 37, was elected to the House of Representatives in 1992, and elected to the Senate in 1994.
Making the move from politics to online education feels like a natural transition, Finkbeiner said, because he’s always been interested in the link between technology and educational opportunities.
He and others, including Keith Oelrich, Insight Schools’ founder and chief executive officer, and former Gov. Gary Locke, who shepherded the digital learning bill through the Legislature, rolled out Insight for the news media in Seattle earlier this week.
It will be the first fully online high school in the state — a place where students anywhere in Washington could take classes via computer and earn a diploma.
It also may be the first Washington school in which a private, for-profit firm hires the teachers and manages the day-to-day operations of a public school with oversight from the district and school board.
