Our Year With Florida Virtual School

The past few months have been crazy as far as not knowing what to expect and just having so much anxiety when thinking about Covid. But, the one thing we held onto was knowing that Olivia would be returning to virtual school through FLVS. As most of you know, Olivia has a suppressed immune system. I won't go into all the details right now, but when she does get sick, her immune system kicks into overdrive. So, she takes meds and gets monthly infusions that suppress her immune system. She can catch things faster and much harder than other kids her age.

Last year was her first year with FLVS. There's two different paths you can choose when enrolling; Full-time or Flex. We chose flex because it was flexible for us and fit with what we needed. When we first spoke to her doctors about school they mentioned homebound, which was still through a local brick and mortar school. But, that didn't quite fit what we needed with doctor visits and days missed. Then, we looked into full-time FLVS. We thought we had made a decision because we knew she'd need a 504 plan in the event she had a hospital admission. But, then we spoke to one of her counselors and got all of the specifics of flex. That was it right there! There's a set pace as far as when assignments are due, but it's absolutely doable and most of the time they'll be working ahead. Olivia took Language Arts, Math, Science, Social Studies, and Intro to Spanish. Twice a week she did live class-times with other students. We loved her Kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Ally. She was the sweetest and always emailed or texted me back when I had the silliest of questions.

This year she's taking the same 4 core classes, but we are adding Spanish 1 and Art as her electives. She's super excited about art because that's basically all she does at home. She can draw and color all day. I've looked into a few other things to supplement with because she also loves nature and all things plant and animals. We also LOVE the library, so we'll continue our 1-2 week library trips.

If you're wondering how our first year went using FLVS and working from home. Some days were disasters and others flew by. You have to figure out what works best for your family. Some days I still don't know what works for us because everyday is different and littles don't always wake up feeling the same as the day before. My only advice would be to plan ahead and just know that it's not going to be perfect. Find out if mornings or afternoons work better. Obviously, you'll have to work around any appointments out of the house. We tried taking schoolwork to some of her infusions last year, but it was hard for her to stay focused while nurses were coming in and out. So, we now know to just skip those days and pick-up the day after.

When she started school I thought she would be doing school work all day because that's what I was used to when I went to a public school. But, that just doesn't work for them at home and it's hard to keep a 6 year old sitting down for 5-6 hours a day. So, also take that into account. Split up your days with school work, chores, outings, play, lunch, and lots of snack breaks. The beauty in it all is that you can pick all of this! I still struggle with this and feel like everything needs to be planned and followed through, but that rarely ever happens.

If anyone is interested in some must-have items, I would definitely say a good internet connection if your choosing FLVS. As long as you have good wifi, you can do school work anywhere. Some other things would be a printer, a planner, some binders to keep things organized with LOTS of dividers. Then, just lots of craft supplies. You don't have to have the most expensive school supplies. Most of the stuff we purchased were form the dollar tree because she goes through crayons and paper so fast it's just crazy expensive to buy those elsewhere.

We are extremely thankful for FLVS and the opportunity to have something to fall back on when we had no other options for Olivia. She loves the content and with me not knowing whether or not I would be able to actually teach her, it made it easy. Not only is she learning, but I'm relearning along side of her. <3