PA Distance Learning Blog

For the second consecutive year, Central Penn Parent Magazine readers have voted PA Distance Learning as the best Charter School in the state of Pennsylvania, and runner-up for best Cyber School!

Pennsylvania Distance Learning Charter School will have a new home for the 2020-2021 school year. Developer, J.J. Herbert & Sons, broke ground on a new, state-of-the-art and energy efficient building at its Nicholson Road Herbert Campus in Sewickley on Monday, April 15.

Mary Ann Calderone has been an invaluable member of PA Distance Learning Charter School since 2016 as the PIMS Coordinator. PIMS (The Pennsylvania Information Management System) is an online database of individual student and teacher data collected by the Pennsylvania Department of Education as a better way to track students and view their progress.

As part of their 2018-2019 professional learning goals at PA Distance Learning Charter School, school counselors, Ms. Morgan Jasin and Ms. Katie Griffith organized and led a School Counselor Best Practices for Student Engagement symposium.

During the 2016-17 school year, PA Distance Learning Charter School launched our first literary magazine club, Bridging the Distance with Ms. Hannah Lewis at the helm.

This year Dr. Ellen Cavanaugh, founder of Grow a Generation teamed up with PA Distance Learning Charter School to create an Odyssey Fellowship program.  An Odyssey Fellowship is a ongoing opportunity for students to dedicate time each week to move through an odyssey into a fascinating topic of their choice. Fellows (students in grades 3-12) partner with mentors from around the globe and venture deep into a topic from the cutting edge of science and technology. The Odyssey takes them through four stages where students identify a specific passion in new science and technology, find the businesses and colleges that are doing work with it, tell stories from the field working alongside professional mentors, and begin to develop their own unique identity as a leading spokesperson in the field.

What is CEW and how do we bring it to life in a cyber school setting?

Today our staff is spending an entire day devoted to professional development, and there’s a common thread throughout this year’s “Ed Camp.”

Being a school in today’s ever-changing world means we have to adapt. We believe it is education’s responsibility to adapt as the world changes, so we can best prepare students to thrive.

There’s one thing, however, that must remain consistent within our education: empathy.

Today, PA Distance students had the opportunity to hear from a Magda Brown, a Holocaust Survivor.

Education is about bettering the future: from a 6th-grader whose learning transforms how she sees herself to a graduate who starts as a first-generation college student. Improving individual futures, however, is only one part of education’s power.

We cannot forget another part of education’s power, especially as we are faced with the mass shooting at one of Pittsburgh’s synagogues this weekend.