Texas counselor says school choice helps students thrive outside traditional classrooms 

A counselor at a virtual school in Texas says there are five main reasons parents opt their children out of traditional schools, reinforcing arguments made by school choice advocates.

Jina Fuller, who works at Texas Virtual Academy at Hallsville, wrote in the Tyler Morning Telegraph that anxiety is the biggest reason “by a wide margin.”

“Not the kind that goes away with a good morning routine, but the kind that builds in a child’s stomach every Sunday night until they cannot fall asleep,” she wrote Friday, adding that some elementary students were missing 30 or more days per year.

But once students enter a safe environment, they make friends and begin to thrive.

“Parents tell me, sometimes through tears, that they have their child back,” Fuller wrote.

Bullying is another major factor, Fuller said, noting the problem is not limited to one type of school. Some parents switch schools after exhausting other options to stop the abuse.

Some families choose virtual school because a child has a health condition that makes attending a traditional brick-and-mortar school difficult.

Others want flexible pacing, such as the ability to move ahead in math or receive extra help when students fall behind.

The fifth reason Fuller identified is access.

“I have students in rural East Texas who couldn’t find the advanced courses they needed nearby,” she wrote. “I also have students in Tyler whose families require a schedule that accommodates competitive athletics, dance, or a parent’s work commitments. For these families, school choice is concrete, and it’s what makes the difference between their child receiving necessary education and going without.”

As Texas rolls out its new $1 billion school choice program, which will serve nearly 100,000 students in its first year, Fuller and others are highlighting why families seek alternatives to traditional public schools.

“I’m not claiming traditional schools are broken,” Fuller wrote, adding she has many friends who work in them. “What I am suggesting is a quieter, perhaps more difficult point to hear: no single setting has ever suited every child, and pretending it does has caused many students to lose valuable years.”

She encouraged parents to ask questions about how their children are doing academically and emotionally in their current school environment.

“The question I find myself asking parents most: when you watch your child get ready for school in the morning, what do you see on their face?” Fuller wrote.

“You know your child. You know whether the year that just ended worked for them. The good news is that for the first time in a long time, Texas families have more than one real, accredited, public-school answer to the question of what comes next.”

School choice exists in 35 states and serves more than 1.5 million students nationwide.