Has Anyone Worked For California Virtual Academies? A Parent’s Inside Look
Last winter, I stood at my kitchen counter wiping spaghetti sauce off a paper plate while my son Jake slouched against the fridge, staring at his D on an algebra quiz. “I just don’t get it when the teacher repeats the same thing three times and still won’t slow down for people like me,” he mumbled. We’d already talked about switching him to California Virtual Academies, an online public charter school that a lot of other parents in our local homeschool Facebook group were raving about. But I still had a million questions, the biggest one being: has anyone actually worked for CVA, and what’s it really like from the inside? Turns out, my cousin Mara had just quit her job teaching 4th grade at a brick-and-mortar elementary in Sacramento to take a position teaching high school English at CVA, so I got a front row seat to what the job is actually like for teachers, and what that means for kids and parents.
Mara would come over for Sunday brunch every other week, and we’d talk CVA over burnt pancakes and too much coffee. The first thing that surprised me was that it wasn’t the easy, low-work job she expected when she applied. She works about the same 40 hours a week she worked at her old school, just on a more flexible schedule. She does lesson planning after her own two kids go to bed at night, and takes midday walks when her office hours are slow. But the caseload is big: she has 147 students across five sections of English. That’s more than twice the number of kids she had in a year at brick-and-mortar.
The biggest upside, she says, is that she can actually give kids one-on-one help that she never had time for before. Last month, a 10th grader popped into her chat while we were eating, asking for an extra day to finish his essay on To Kill a Mockingbird because his mom was in the hospital. Mara granted the extension right there, and even offered to jump on a 10 minute call to talk through his outline if he needed it. “At my old school, that kid would have gotten a zero and I’d never have known why,” she said, wiping syrup off her keyboard. “Here, I can meet him where he is.”
But there are big downsides too, she’s honest about that. A lot of parents sign up for CVA thinking it’s “homeschool lite” – they think the school will handle everything, so they step back. That’s a mistake, she says. She had three students fail her class first semester because their parents didn’t check in once, and the kids just stopped turning in assignments. She can’t force a kid to log on, and she can’t see the distracted scrolling or the missing homework that a teacher in a classroom would pick up on right away. It’s also harder to spot red flags: she had a quiet 9th grader who she didn’t realize was homeless and bouncing between friends’ couches until three months into the school year, because he never turned his camera on during class. At a regular school, she would have noticed he was wearing the same clothes every day or that he never had lunch, but online that all stays hidden.
After a couple months of listening to Mara talk, we decided to enroll Jake for 8th grade. He’s had social anxiety for years, and the chaos of a traditional middle school was just too much for him. The first month was a mess. I’d read all the enrollment materials that said parent involvement was optional, so I left him to his own devices. By the end of the month, he’d missed six assignments and failed a vocabulary quiz. I called Mara that night, and she reminded me of what she’d been saying all along: CVA isn’t a set it and forget it school, even for older kids.
That night, I made a few small changes that have made all the difference. I started doing a 10 minute check-in with Jake every night after dinner. We pull up his assignment calendar together, check off what he finished, and flag anything that’s due the next day. I set up our router to block social media during school hours, so he can’t scroll TikTok while he’s supposed to be in live class. We moved his desk out of his bedroom and into the corner of the dining room, so he’s not isolated and I can pop in to check on him without hovering.
Eight months in, it’s working. Jake brought his algebra grade up from a D to a B, and he hasn’t had a panic attack about school in three months. He even joined the CVA robotics club, which meets once a month in person at our local community center. Mara just finished her first full year working at CVA, and she’s coming back next fall. She says there are good days and bad days, same as any teaching job. She still struggles with kids who don’t turn their cameras on, and parents who expect her to do all the work. But she also loves that she can adjust her schedule to be there for her own kids, and that she can actually help kids who don’t fit in the traditional system.
It’s not a perfect solution for every family. If your kid thrives on in-person interaction and lots of daily peer time, CVA probably isn’t for you. If you work full time and don’t have 10 minutes a day to check in, it’s going to be a struggle. But for us, it’s been the right fit. I’m just glad I got to hear the unvarnished truth from someone who actually works there before we jumped in. There’s still a lot we’re figuring out, and some months are harder than others. But right now, it’s working for Jake, and that’s what matters most.
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