Apollo-Ridge Virtual Academy

Apollo-Ridge Virtual Academy (ARVA)

The Apollo-Ridge School District is able to provide an online option for students.  Some of the benefits of going to ARVA rather than going to another cyber-school:

• Easily transition back to brick and mortar school if desired
• Opportunity to have benefits of brick and mortar school activities
• Laptop and technology support provided
• Graduate with an Apollo-Ridge diploma

Online courses are taught through the Westmoreland Intermediate Unit (WIU) and their eAcademy. The eAcademy is taught by teachers from districts around Westmoreland County School Districts such as Kiski, Burrell, Norwin, etc.  Click here to visit the eAcademy website. When a student signs up for the eAcademy, we enroll them with a course as if they were enrolled in our district.  For example, if a child should be in Algebra I, we would enroll the child in an Algebra I eAcademy class.  The class is then taught by the teacher from the eAcademy.  Most of the courses are week to week and are asynchronous.  The course opens on a Sunday and the students have the whole week to complete the work for that course.  The next Sunday, they open the next week of the course and so on. There are synchronous courses also available.

As for equipment, a laptop is issued by the district.  A time is scheduled to pick it up and show you how to navigate the course.  Turning in work is relatively simple.  The teachers use Moodle which is a management system similar to Teams, Google classroom, etc.  There are times they need students to write things down such as with math work.  Students can simply snap a picture with a phone and then upload to the system.  All work should be submitted online so there is no paper to turn in.  All texts are within the Moodle software.  Elementary workbooks can be ordered if needed.

Finally, we do ask for a semester commitment.  The eAcademy courses are designed to be a semester long.  Since we do need to commit to a semester with the WIU, we ask students to commit to the semester as well.  If there are circumstances where it is not going well for any reason, we can discuss that.

I look forward to working with you as you take your journey in online learning.  Please contact me, the building's guidance counselor, or your building principal to get more information or enroll in ARVA.

Dr. Chris Clark
Director of Special Programs
[email protected]