In the basement of an old, warmly lit brick house near downtown Nashville, students from rural Thomasville, Ala., are discovering educational opportunities without even leaving their classrooms.
The Virtual School at Vanderbilt, an online school based on technological networking, just made the link between Nashville and Thomasville.
The school has its own staff and workplace in the Office of Community Relations, which it uses to connect kindergarten through 12th-grade students around the world through videoconferences that relate to specific educational themes. Past subjects have included career conversations, election issues and an annual unit on the Holocaust.
Patsy Partin, director of the Virtual School at Vanderbilt, believes the new partnership with the Thomasville schools is a step forward in community progress for the small Alabama town.
"Research clearly shows that poverty affects both educational aspirations and achievement," Partin said. "This is especially true in rural areas, where schools contend not only with poverty but also with the limited access to content, resources and services."
Partin said the separation between poverty and morale is the cause of many problems in public education.
"There really is a digital divide here in the United States, particularly between rural and urban schools and between states," she said.
With the new Virtual School grant, Thomasville schools will now have access to free videoconferences that offer foreign language courses, Advanced Placement curricula and expanding educational resources for teachers.
"(This) will help create programs that will address lack of educational resources and will provide ongoing support through a partnership with Vanderbilt University Virtual School," Partin said.
In addition to the partnership with the Thomasville schools, the Virtual School connects students from all around the country, hosting up to seven schools per videoconference up to four times a week.
This constant flow of interest keeps Partin busy every day drafting lesson plans and creating new curricula for her many students.
Among her most interesting viewers are students from 15 schools along the Bering Strait, where students fly in on small planes to the videoconferencing site. Students at a high school in France often coordinate their schedules to watch Partin's videoconferences on the upcoming presidential election in the United States.
To support the Virtual School's funding, Partin rents out the videoconference studio in the basement of the Community, Neighborhood and Government Relations House to the Nashville and Vanderbilt communities. The studio helps eliminate traveling expenses and saves time for those who utilize its resources.
In the future, the Virtual School hopes to re-establish a partnership with Nashville Metro schools and continue the trend toward a critically thinking style of education.
"There is an overemphasis, in my opinion, of testing," Partin said. "In life, you have to know how to critically think."
With continuing support from her staff and her students all over the globe, Partin feels the Virtual School is an expanding program.
"It's really just a face of the university, reaching out to the community," she said.
Listen to Patsy Partin, director of the Vanderbilt Virtual School, discuss the topics and reach of the school, as well as the benefits it offers to students.
