East Oregon News

Elgin School District has been using Acellus for the last 10 years for many different types of students.

Acellus works with multiple organizations that validate and recognize quality in educational programs. Acellus courses adhere to high standards for learning and are in use by over 10,000 accredited schools throughout the United States, and in over 42 countries.

Elgin School District Superintendent and Elgin High School Principal Dianne Greif said the school district began using it 10 years ago, but they weren't using it in the same capacity as they currently are.

"A long time," Greif said in an interview with East Oregon News. "Not to the capacity that we're using it this year, but, we've had it as an option for some alternative ed kids and homeschool families for probably a decade."

Greif said her school district because it's very small, has been granted an exception to the rules when it comes to COVID-19.

"So, we have been on campus K-12 and we started out with an environment of an intentional plan of teaching kids how they would function if we had to resort to an online delivery only," Greif said. "And so we've had a lot of focus on utilizing different platforms to be prepared for that."

Greif said so far, that has worked out really well.

"If we have kids that have directions from doctors or restrictions from us for quarantine, we can keep them going in the classroom through the practices that we've instilled in the classroom," Greif said. "We too had to buy our own site license because I had so many kids decide to do instruction at home."

Greif said she has 32 students from kindergarten through sixth grade that are online 100% with Acellus and 46 seventh through 12th graders online. She said 108 students are using Acellus in some capacity.

Greif said since COVID-19, they've still used Acellus for credit recovery and other options, but they've expanded it for the kids who are not coming to school in person.

Greif said without Acellus, she likely would've lost dozens of students.

"Since we've upped our game with Acellus, the people in our community are happy to stay in our district if we can offer them the choices that they're looking for," she said.