Excerpt from The Advocate (Louisiana):
A couple of years ago, Macie Zoble and her son were in crisis.
The Lafayette woman had done everything in her power to keep Riley, then a kindergartner, stable enough to simply finish a traditional school day.
To combat his severe type of bipolar disorder — which mimicked attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and set teachers on edge — the round-cheeked child had been fed high doses of psychotropic drugs, only for Zoble to learn later that he metabolized them too rapidly for them to matter.
He’d been assigned a special learning plan — aimed at keeping students with such difficulties in the classroom — but with an administrator-mandated 10:30 a.m. pickup time, it barely kept him in school at all.
When nothing worked, she pulled him out of school. She quit her job.
Enter Louisiana Virtual Charter Academy.
“It changed our lives. Completely,” Zoble said, tears running down her face.
Without the online-only public charter school, Zoble said, she would have had to travel far from her home to get Riley, now a second-grader, the services he needs. Instead, she serves as his at-home learning coach while teachers behind a computer screen go over the curriculum.
Situations like Zoble’s illustrate the need for the 1,900-student virtual charter school and others like it across the state…
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