East Oregon News

A high school in Baker City has been using Acellus for many years and loves what it has to offer.

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.

Baker High School Principal Greg Mitchell said his school has been using Acellus since before he came to the school five years ago. He said that with COVID-19, they've turned to online learning for the school year so far.

"You know, we have not met COVID metrics, where we're at specifically, to have in-person instruction — we have limited in-person instruction," Mitchell said in an interview with East Oregon News. "But, it has forced us to shift our strategy to being an online platform."

Mitchell said previously, Acellus was mostly used for credit recovery.

"So, it wasn't really hard for us to pivot to using Acellus and just getting a site license and open that up to our entire student body," Mitchell said.

Mitchell said before COVID-19 hit, they were primarily using Acellus as credit recovery at the high school.

"However, we did have some kids that opted to accelerate," Mitchell said. "Oftentimes we'll put a kid in a semester worth of credit recovery and they'll knock that course out in a month and a half."

Mitchell said when that happens they encourage the students to do another course. He said he's even seen students do summer school just to accelerate.

"So, it's a blend between original credit and credit recovery," Mitchell said. "However, now we're primarily, we're still doing credit recovery for kids that got incompletes last fall or last spring I should say. But we really are utilizing it primarily for original credit now."

Mitchell said Acellus really serves the school well.

"It provides the ability to differentiate talking about building a custom schedule for a student's particular proficiency levels and different content areas," Mitchell said. "It also provides a great deal of flexibility and I say that for the staff as well as the students."

Mitchell said if a teacher is ill or has to quarantine, that teacher is still able to work from home and does not have to stop working.

Mitchell said Acellus works well for the school.

"It's nice to be able to know that this is a vetted curriculum, its standards based in alignment with our state content standards as well as national curriculum standards so that really allows us to proceed with integrity," Mitchell said.