ECOT Launches Tenth Year with Unprecedented Academic Progress

Back-to-School for State’s First Online School

COLUMBUS – On Thursday, August 27, the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT) will begin celebrating a decade of online learning progress as 9,000 students and 650 employees go back to school.

ECOT received “green light” ratings in Reading, Math and the overall Composite rating on the State Report Card’s “value-added” measurement, which tracks student academic growth from year to year.

This achievement places ECOT near the very top of Ohio school districts in improving its students. ECOT exceeded a year’s worth of growth at every grade level in Math and met or exceeded the average year’s growth in four out of five grade levels in Reading.

In addition to the value-added success, ECOT achieved its third year of Continuous Improvement on the report card.

“As we celebrate 10 years of pioneering online learning, I am extremely proud of the students and teachers for their unprecedented academic progress,” said William Lager, who founded ECOT in the fall of 2000 with a handful of staff and 2000 students eager to try online learning as an alternative. “By our 10th commencement next June, we believe ECOT will have 5,000 graduates as alumni and 10,000 students enrolled.”

ECOT was Ohio’s first statewide e-school organized under Ohio’s community school law for the 2000-2001 school year. Students and teachers work together from their homes throughout Ohio, using computers and a secure Intranet connection. Today, ECOT has the largest fulltime e-school enrollment in Ohio and the U.S. “Parents choose ECOT because it works, and our academic ratings prove that,” Mr. Lager said.

ECOT’s academic success is significant because ECOT’s statewide student population mirrors the at-risk, economically-disadvantaged population of the urban eight districts with 75 percent of families. Last year’s data from the Ohio Department of Education showed that ECOT and other online schools perform better than the Big 8 urban districts when the value-added measurement is considered.

“ECOT administrators and teachers have more online learning experience than any other Ohio e-school, and we provide our students with the best online technology and learning tools in the nation,” Mr. Lager said. ECOT educators are led by Superintendent Jeffrey Forster and Chief of Staff James Thomas of Columbus, who have more than 70 years of education experience between them.