As my wonderful and diligent colleague Mary Ann Zehr reported in her Learning the Language blog, ASPIRA of Pennsylvania, an affiliate of the national Latino youth advocacy association of the same name, has launched a bilingual online charter school that so far has a principal, four teachers, and 31 students in grades 8-12.
The school, which is modeled after the organization’s brick-and-mortar bilingual charters in Philadelphia, only offers Spanish as a second language so far, in part because the school began operations during the middle of the academic year, but plans to offer core courses starting from kindergarten in English and Spanish beginning next fall.
We’ve written and blogged about the potential benefits of online and blended learning for language studies, but this perhaps is a new angle. The school is the first of its kind for sure in Pennsylvania, and possibly nationwide. (Let us know if you know of others.)