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PODCAST | “Freedom to Learn:” Florida Virtual School’s Origin Story

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Julie Young on Getting Virtual Education, Performance-based Funding, & Education Leadership Right

Julie Young, founding president of the Florida Virtual School (FLVS), turned a two-page concept paper for a “web school” into the first statewide online public school. During her 17 years at the helm, Julie grew FLVS from a small local pilot serving 77 high school students in 1997 into a national leader that currently offers over 200 courses and educates over 250,000 part-time and full-time Florida elementary and secondary students annually. Julie joined Freedom to Learn to share how she navigated opposition, won over legislators, secured performance-based funding, created FLVS district franchises, and trained educators, while ensuring students received high-quality online education. Julie also delves into the differences between the emergency “Zoom schools” of the COVID era and well-designed virtual programs.

Julie Young is the co-editor of Virtual Schools, Actual Learning: Digital Education in America and author of the upcoming book Say Yes, How Virtual Became a Reality.

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This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

You’re often called a pioneer in education innovation, and you refer to yourself as an “edu-preneur.” I’d love to hear what those terms mean to you.

Julie Young: When I think about the word pioneer, I think about forging forward. You’re in a situation where the future is unknown, the next step is unknown. When we started Florida Virtual School, I was handed a two-page concept paper for a web school and a $200,000 Florida Department of Education “Break the Mold” grant. I was new to Orange County. I had moved there from Lee County, and I had a lot of Ed Tech experience. When I got the call to come downtown to talk about this grant, I called my boss, and he said, “You’ve got all this experience with Ed Tech. They probably just want you to collaborate on the grant proposal.” About 20 minutes into that conversation, I realized I was in an interview for a web school. I asked, “Is this an interview?” And Dr. Bob Williams said, “It is.” And I said, “The only thing I know about high school is what I can remember.” I was elementary trained, an elementary administrator. And he said, “That’s exactly why we would like to have you for this position. We want somebody to come at this with fresh eyes and with student eyes and for the students who are not all about the pep rallies.” My comment was, “Okay, as long as I know I have your support, then I’ll do it.”

So when I think about the pioneer part of it, that always comes to my mind because it was a classic case of going home, telling my husband, and him looking at me like I was a green alien, going, “You took the job?” And I said, “I’m going to.” And he said, “How do you think you’re going to develop software?” And I said, “I don’t know. I’m going to call my friends at IBM (because I had been working with them through the school system) and get in a room and see if we can’t figure this out.”

There really was no roadmap. There was not an example to point to. And the greatest thing was Frank Brogan, the commissioner [of education] at the time, looked at me when we first met, and said, “Julie, nobody knows how to do this. Use your best judgment. Go make it up and come back and tell us how to do it.” And then he said, “You don’t have to follow any of the rules. Just don’t hurt anybody.” So it was just a blue ocean, a blank slate.

Julie, I want to remind our listeners what technology was like at this period, because we’re talking 1996 with a launch in 1997. I graduated from an Orange County high school in the early 90s, and education technology was the computer lab down the hall (to be honest, I long for those days). Why a web school? Who were you trying to serve with this school?

Julie Young: The two-page concept paper was written by a teacher, a computer science teacher. We were at a time in Orange County Public Schools where the schools were very overcrowded, and computer science teachers were a needle in a haystack. She actually went to Dr. Williams and said, “If I could teach this over the internet, I could teach kids in other schools, and we could give kids more opportunities for computer science courses.”

And so that really was the impetus. We have overcrowded schools, we have students who cannot avail themselves to high quality courses. And in Dr. Williams’ mind, he was very focused on what he would call the disenfranchised students. That could be students who don’t like the pep rallies, representing the students [where] school is just not their thing.

But it was also for the students who had left the system and become homeschooled.

[Plus], Alachua County was a very rural district, and many of their schools did not have AP courses or honors courses because they could not attract the teachers. They just did not have the teachers to teach those courses.

Alachua County, isn’t that where Gainesville is? You would think that the University of Florida would have helped with that.

Julie Young: It just wasn’t the case at the time. Bob Muni was our first advisory board chair, and he was in Alachua County, and he had homeschooled all [his] kids. He went to the leadership in Alachua County and said, “We could do this really cool thing that could serve homeschool kids.” And they said, “Well, we also need help with these Advanced Placement courses.”

It was a conglomeration of ideas: the students who were not the mainstream students where school worked for; the homeschool movement; and the need for high-quality courses and high-quality teachers for every student, regardless of their zip code. And we led the nation in that for sure.

Florida Virtual School is referred to as the nation’s first fully online public school, but what you’re describing would be courses that are offered to students, rather than full enrollment in the Florida Virtual School.

Julie Young: Initially, when the grant was awarded, there was a brief moment of, ” We’re just going to do Advanced Placement and honors courses.” When we started developing, that’s how we mapped our development schedule. We started to find that homeschool students were very interested. In addition, we started thinking about [how] this could be a school. The difference was that we were also in a situation where — even though we were not a threat at the time because we were a line item in the budget, so we were not taking money for the students that we served from the school districts — the school districts were fearful of Florida Virtual School. They were not only fearful, they were also skeptical. How could you really teach kids in an online environment? And why would anybody in their right mind want to do this with their children?

So we took the tack that we’re not going to be a school right off the bat. Maybe we’ll never be a school because we didn’t want to compete with the school districts, because we were really working on this relationship building, so they would allow their students to take the courses. It was not until 2008 or -09 that we actually became a full-blown school where a student could actually graduate with a diploma.

People outside of Florida and other arenas where you’ve operated might not realize what a force of nature you were and just how well-known you were in this era as the Florida Virtual School grew and built into what it became. You weren’t just operating within Orange County. You weren’t just talking to other school districts. You were very active in Tallahassee convincing state legislators what was going on. When did that start? You went from being an elementary education teacher to being recruited to launch this web school to becoming an incredible force for change in the state capital. How did you realize, “I’m going to have to engage state legislators in this process?”

Julie Young: I did not have a career map. I started as an elementary school teacher. I had no designs on being a superintendent. I just wanted to go to work every day and teach my kids. I loved my work. I would forget to bring my paychecks home. My husband would go, “This is not a volunteer job.” I just loved the work.

But I did take the approach of saying “yes” when opportunity arose. So that was how I ended up in this space, by saying yes when an opportunity arose, and then trying to surround myself with people who would help me. I’m very aware of my capabilities and my gifts, and I’m also very aware of the fact that no one does these things alone. I surrounded myself with people who believed in this mission and could be helpful.

When we started with the initial $200,000 “Break the Mold” grant between two districts, there wasn’t this idea that we were going to be going to the Capitol and asking for more money. We were part of these two districts, we had gotten this grant, and we had started this program. It was very quickly that we learned that this does not have to be contained between Alachua County and Orange County. This could serve students all over the state. So, just as we’re trying to fill the void of Advanced Placement or computer science in our districts, there are needs all over the state.

Then comes Governor [Jeb] Bush, and many times he’s been referred to as the “Education Governor.” It was an incredibly well-deserved title. And he was incredibly interested in this project, in this program. He was determined that every student in the state of Florida should have a high-quality teacher and course offering in order to graduate with a high-quality education from Florida. And this could be the vehicle that could enable all students in the state of Florida to have that quality education.

So it was probably a year before my time in Tallahassee became frequent. Initially, it was really about talking to legislators about the fact that this really could work and that we could restructure teaching and learning in such a way that every student would, in my words, have a “front row seat” and an individualized teacher and an academic program.

Those first six years, [we were] not going to take money from the districts. We were going to fund it through the state so that we had the opportunity to design the program, fail fast, restart, figure out what this thing should look like. Then, once it had been established as an authentic way of learning, if need be, we would figure out how to fund it through the Florida FEFP [Florida Education Finance Program].

And lo and behold, the Class Size Amendment passed [in 2002], and everything zero budgeted that were line items. And we were faced with the question of, ” How are we going to fund this thing?”

When we say the Florida Virtual School started with 77 students, and it grew and grew and grew, that didn’t just happen. You were working closely with the Commissioner of Education, the governor, and you had leadership in Tallahassee understanding and supporting this mission. Eventually, the legislators as well. What was the growth trajectory? It’s huge now. And now every student in Florida has to take a Florida Virtual School course. Is that right?

Julie Young: That component of the law was abolished last year. I think that was about the fact that digital education, virtual education, is so immersed in Florida education that it is no longer required. I actually consider that one of my greatest accomplishments: back in 2011, when the law was passed, every student would need to take a virtual course to graduate from the state of Florida. The reason for that is very personal. My kids were not interested in taking one of their mother’s courses, so they graduated from high school having not taken a Florida Virtual School course. Off they went to UCF [University of Central Florida], a very large university. And both of them, three years apart from each other, as freshmen, were placed in online courses because the other courses were full.

And as most universities do, they make sure their seniors have what they need to graduate, and then it works its way down to those new freshmen students. And so they were placed in courses, unbeknownst to them, that were online. They had no clue how to take an online course, and they failed, both of them.

They both graduated beautifully in the end, but it was really about the fact that they didn’t know how to take that course. So we really put forth the argument that every student should understand how to take a course. It didn’t matter whether it was chemistry, algebra, or outdoor living, we would create courses that were of high interest to students for electives, and our students would take those courses so that they would learn how to learn in an online course. And that was really the basis for that law initially passing.

When we talk about district opposition or this requirement that was in place for a while, there were district franchises, too, right? Was that born out of trying to get the districts on board, or did they come asking for this?

Julie Young: A little bit of both. When we first started, as I mentioned earlier, it was super important to us that we create this relationship with the districts in order to serve the districts. I called it a “co-op-petition” model. We were doing everything we possibly could to serve the districts. At the same time, we were obviously having to focus on our own survival. And so, what would that look like?

Broward County jumped in really early. There was a woman by the name of Mary Ann Butler-Pearson who was responsible for their Ed Tech effort in the district. There was a school down there that was really interested in Florida Virtual School, and they were having difficulty finding world history teachers. It was a big school, so we provided their world history program at the school.

A year later, I said to Mary Ann, “Our mission is not to save you money and provide the education experience for your entire world history program. We’re here to serve the students who are underserved, the schools that can’t find teachers.” And so she said, “Well, what if you taught us how to do what you do? And what if we partnered and set up our own little mini Florida Virtual School here in Broward County?” And that’s really how it got started.

We sat in a room and designed what is now known as the Florida Virtual School Franchise Program, designed in such a way that we trained every single teacher, every single leader. We did not do a “training the trainer” model. We did that free of charge. We would bring them to our offices in Orlando. If, for some reason, they couldn’t travel, we would go to them, and we would ensure that they were being trained in the exact same way that our teachers were being trained. And it was very low-cost. It was a cost recovery model. We charged $50 a student per semester. To put that in perspective, when we started offering courses outside the state of Florida, that number was more like $300-350 initially per student per semester. So it was totally done in a cooperative, collaborative manner with the districts.

When we started to hire teachers outside of Orange County, my goal was to have a teacher in every district. That program we designed was set up and modeled after how I worked in Lee County with the school district and IBM. Back in the ‘80s, I became a trainer for them with the courseware that we had used in our school for a couple of years. I was on loan, and in that model, IBM paid my salary, and the school district continued to pay my benefits. And so we did the same thing for three or four years with the districts. We paid their benefits, and the school district maintained their salary because their salaries were all different. We had a teacher in almost every district, and those were the districts that started first with the franchises.

Where are we right now when we’re talking about the growth of the franchises and the timeline? What year was this?

Julie Young: The franchise, actually, we started playing with that in 1999-2000. And one fun fact, Mary Ann’s son had started to teach with us, and so she had really a bird’s eye view of what this actually looked like in real time. So she was a real believer.

We’ve talked about how Florida Virtual Schools supports students, but educators can benefit as well. I want to make sure we land the funding conversation. Ultimately, the Florida Virtual School did move under the FEFP.

Julie Young: Back to your question about Tallahassee, the $200,000 was for the first year. So, year two was like, “Gosh, we have to go back and ask for more money.” Mind you, Orange County and Alachua County were kicking in dollars. We could not have run the program on $200,000. Every year, we would go back to the legislature and ask for money. We would set goals, we would go back, we would testify, we would demonstrate and show, here’s the money we had [and] this is what we did with it, and here are our outcomes. Early on, from probably the first year, we made sure that we had students and parents also come with us to talk to the legislators to testify, if necessary, about their experiences. That went on for six years.

Initially, that first batch of money came after the $200,000 grant. I think it was called “Project Orange” in legislation. Dan Webster was a key legislator representing Orange County. His grandchildren were all being homeschooled. He was a huge believer and a huge advocate for students. So he became an early advocate and friend to the program. But again, this went on for six years, and it was a different funding level every year. We didn’t know what we were going to get, so we had to plan around that.

In 2003, all the line items were basically zero-budgeted because of the Class Size Amendment. And at that point, it was like, what are we going to do? Mark Maxwell was the governor’s budget director, and John Wynn was the governor’s policy director. I had not met them, but I received this phone call from the two of them, and they’re like, “Hi, Julie, this is Mark and John, we work in the governor’s office. We need to come up with a funding plan for Florida Virtual School.”

The big question was seat time. We had designed this program around students. We had asked all the “what if” questions, if we did things differently, what would change, and everything changed. But the biggest thing that we were super proud of was the fact that we were able to teach students individually. They did not have to start on the same day, end on the same day. They didn’t have to fail because we could give them more time. They could advance when they were ready. That was a key component of the program. And we knew if we went to a seat time model, which is how all the districts were served, that we would lose that. And so that was my big thing, figuring out how we do this so we can maintain this model and not be forced into a seat time model.

Lo and behold, the performance-based funding model appeared. And what that means, in plain terms, is if our students were successful, we were funded. If they were not, we were not. They asked the question, “Are you willing to do this? It would be groundbreaking. It could serve as a model for education nationwide. And do you believe in the program and the work you’re doing enough to actually take this risk?”

How do you say no to that question? You just kind of go, “Uh-huh.” And then you go back and [say], “I’ve got to figure out how to do this.” It was the most groundbreaking, important piece of change that occurred within the program because it changed every adult’s attitude. And we were still small at that time, we gathered people together and said, “Here’s the deal, guys, we have a choice of seat time, or we have a choice of performance-based funding, where if our students achieve, we achieve.” And every single one of them was like, “We want the performance-based funding model.”

There are some things I would tweak today. We had students who moved out of town, and we had taught them for eight months. We didn’t get any funding for them because they didn’t finish. We had students who were ill and passed away in the middle of their experience. We didn’t get any funding for those students. So, I would tweak it a little bit today to make sure that we had some funding to support the startup of a class. But I have so much belief in that model and was super hopeful that other virtual schools would latch on to it because it was the right thing to do. It was hard, and it did not catch on outside of Florida, but Florida maintained.

Could you address the differences between the Covid-era “Zoom schools” and the Florida Virtual School vision and model?

Julie Young: What has become known as “Zoom school,” I think has turned into a blessing and a curse. Obviously, we all know the curse. A well-designed virtual school would never put a student in front of a screen for eight hours a day, for six hours a day, for five hours a day.

When we designed the FLVS program, depending on the age of the student, there was a percentage of time that they should be offline and online. And I would always say to our staff, our development team, it’s super important that our courses push students away from the screen.

When COVID hit, I had a very, very experienced staff [at ASU Prep Academy and ASU Prep Digital School]. And our team was like, “We can scale like no one else can scale, we know how to do this.” We dug in very quickly. We were part of a network of charter schools, and there were about 11 schools at the time, between all of us. We moved all our schools into the digital program within a few days, [and] within the first week they were working. So our brick-and-mortar schools were able to capitalize on the knowledge and expertise of our digital school. And we were able to transfer that knowledge, and we were able to use similar techniques. We had decent success with our brick-and-mortar schools. We had good success, 95-96% attendance.

The rest of the country — we were so incredibly disappointed that every state at the time, almost every state at the time, had a successful virtual school of some sort that they could point to — and almost none of the states capitalized on that expertise. I was very disappointed in the leadership because I felt like the [state] leadership should have gone to these schools, gathered them on Zoom immediately, and said, “Okay, let’s put our heads together. You are a state asset. How can you help us help them so that these students do not lose their academic time to COVID?” And that just didn’t happen.

What did happen is many of the students and the families that were in high-quality programs, or had joined high-quality programs because of COVID, had pretty good experiences. And there were parents who never planned to have their kids home learning, who were actually able to observe the learning process, and they liked it. There were also many parents who did not have high-quality programs who were observing a very poor, low-quality education experience with their students. We all know what happened — there are 1.5 million students who have left our public education system since COVID. We can’t find them all. There was such a focus on the platform and not the pedagogy.

It was so unfortunate because it was treated like, and it was, emergency education, instead of designing it as a legitimate long-term model [and] seizing the moment to create a high-quality program for the district. I think I had hoped also that we would learn that lesson, and I don’t think that we have learned that lesson as a country.

You have co-edited a book, Virtual Schools, Actual Learning: Digital Education in America, that addresses a lot of what we’ve talked about today. It provides a roadmap of “Don’t do it like you did during the COVID era. Here, legislators and policymakers, here’s a roadmap. Here’s a better approach.” What are you hoping that they take away from this?

Julie Young: I think that’s a great descriptor. I think an understanding that this didn’t happen because someone just flipped a switch. There were 30 years of people who were putting their heads down and designing what virtual program, what digital education should look like.

I think the other thing that’s really important is, if you look at our schools, 9 out of 10 presentations you see at a conference have the picture of the school building in 1920.

We are guilty in many of our schools, not all of our schools, but still in many of our schools of doing things the same way we’ve always done them and getting the same results we’ve always gotten.

What was really important to me, being a pioneer, was being given the opportunity by incredible leadership in the state of Florida to [try new things.] We would say to our parents, “We’re trying something new. You have got to let us know if it’s working or not.” But we had the opportunity to change things, and as we scaled, which was a hockey stick scale after year two, for the entire 17 years that I was there. When you’re dealing with 800 students, and then you’re all of a sudden dealing with 4,000 students overnight, you have to change things.

The book really does go through how the sausage was made. And I think it’s good for leaders to know, this wasn’t just somebody woke up one day and went, “Let’s do it. Let’s do it this way.” There was a lot of research that was done. I would always tell our team, “We’re going to invite the outside in, and we want all the eyes we can have on what we’re doing and all the feedback that we can gain.”

That, again, goes back to the leadership in Florida, having the confidence and giving us the ability to make mistakes and quickly remedy, pivot, and refocus. So, it’s a great book in terms of really understanding what went into this industry that we all have in our life today.

So again, that book is Virtual Schools, Actual Learning, Digital Education in America. You’ve also written a book, Say Yes, I believe, that tells the story as well.

Julie Young: That book is coming out, hopefully, in the spring. Say Yes is based on my philosophy of taking risks and saying yes to opportunity—how virtual became reality. And it really is my story. This book is the story of industry.

I can’t wait to read it. Well, so how can people follow your work and be notified when this book comes out?

Julie Young: I’m easily found on LinkedIn, and my website is julieyoungeducation.com.

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