Talk:California Virtual Academies

This page was inspired by new user User:Corinne Adams who introduced herself on Wikipedia:New user log as being in the CAVA program. -- Fplay 14:06, 30 December 2005 (UTC)

It seems that Corinne was only with us for a few days... -- Pinktulip 12:37, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

The section entitled "Fiction" makes no sense to me. This needs to be cleaned up to be more clear to the uninformed reader. As it stands now, its relevancy is unclear. --Revised 04:46, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

Public/Private?

Their literature and the article make it sound like CAVA is a public program. I'm getting the impression that it's a private company that was set up to sell curriculum manufactured by k12 (their sister or parent company) to public schools. This is supported by that www.caliva.org is a permanent web-redirect to http://www.k12.com/cava/ and that CAVA does not have a "home page" on either of the main state of California web sites (ca.us and ca.gov). Marc Kupper (talk) (contribs) 20:04, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

Do you know what a charter school is? Maybe you should look it up. Cava is a charter school. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.155.39.138 (talk) 04:57, 7 October 2009 (UTC)

No, they never say they are a charter school. CAVA a private publisher of material that they sell to charter schools. It's paid for out of public school district funds. --Marc Kupper|talk 09:32, 7 October 2009 (UTC)

CAVA is the name of a number of schools run in the state of California. Each individual school is named California Virtual Acadamies @ City/County name. Each school belongs to a Unified School District. Children from multiple counties can attend one school. For instance, CAVA @ San Mateo in San Mateo County enrolls students from Santa Clara and Santa Cruz counties in addition to San Mateo County. You can look them up on the California Department of Education website, but you will have to do it by school name not by searching for CAVA. A search for California Virtual will show the schools in the state. They are charter schools that are publicly funded. -- Anyatha L (talk) 11:26, 24 February 2010 (UTC)

I should add that not only is there no tuition (cost of enrollment), but there are no fees for the school materials such as textbooks, workbooks, art supplies, science equipment, etc. I realize that tuition often includes those types of things, but I think this could be a little clearer. There is absolutely no fee associated with CAVA. Even internet service cost is reimbursed (dial up, ~$10 a month, although you are responsible for the connection yourself and so can use any other type of connection such as DSL.) -- Anyatha L (talk) 11:37, 24 February 2010 (UTC)

There is a fee for CAVA. It's paid through our taxes. CAVA is a company that publishes a curriculum and sells it to districts. I don't think they do it for all schools but CAVA can also manage the schools and provide teachers meaning they charge the district for the materials and personnel. I have not looked hard for it but we should be able to find out how much CAVA is charging. It'll be in the district budget and thus public record. I suspect the charges are high as very few districts have bought the program. --Marc Kupper|talk 06:01, 25 February 2010 (UTC)

When I said that there was no fee for attending a California Virtual Academy, I meant a direct fee charged to the families of the children enrolled - i.e. public schools. We don't consider public brick and mortar schools fee based schools. They are considered government run, paid for by taxes, exactly like CAVA. k12 is a private company that provides the material and access to the online school to CAVA. CAVA and k12 are partnered, not sister or parent/child companies. Just as public schools buy educational materials from various publishing companies, CAVA uses k12 for their needs. They also use other publishers when the need arises. -- Anyatha L (talk) 20:06, 25 February 2010 (UTC)

If you go to www.caliva.org it redirects to www.k12.com/cava/. K12 is listed as the owner of the caliva.org domain name. There's no evidence of "partnering" but rather that k12 has set up the CAVA program and controls it. The CAVA web site states they use K12 for their materials. There's no mention of using educational materials from other publishers on the CAVA web site nor to they mention purchase of materials from other publishers in K12's SEC filings.

I understood there's no fee charged to the parents. I brought up the cost as much of the CAVA marketing makes it sound like the program is entirely "free." I'm trying develop an accurate description of the CAVA program for the Wikipedia article. I believe there are three audiences. 1) School districts interested in CAVA, 2) Organizations such as school site councils, SPAs, etc. with an interest in asking that their district sponsor CAVA, 3) Parents interested in what the CAVA experience would be for them and their child. Unfortunately, there's very little material available about CAVA from independent and reliable sources. --Marc Kupper|talk 07:38, 1 March 2010 (UTC)

I've been using the program for a few years. Almost all of the information on the internet is biased (homeschoolers who don't like the government enticing people into using their program or users who ignore the things that need improving) or wrong (parents who leap to conclusions based on the opinions of others who are not a part of the school.) www.caliva.org is a redirect to k12/cava now, but they do still have their site up which should help make it a little clearer for you. http://www.caliva.org/dg/dg_ca.html?se=Google&campaign=CA_National_SN_Job_K120928&adgroup=CA_Nat_Virtual&kw=california%20virtual%20academy&gclid=CLrqgKPAmKACFRYoawodzjjfdQ I have no idea why they make it so difficult to get to that page. The math textbook that we use has not ever been a k12 book that I can recall. This one is published by McDougal Littell. As far as I know, there is no immediate connection between K12 and McDougal Littell. Our English book is published by Perfection Learning which has been around since 1926. There are many other materials we receive that are not from a corporation with an immediate relationship to K12. I assume that these are K12 partners as a k12 school does have to use their selected materials. However, materials can vary from school to school and state to state.-- Anyatha L (talk) 22:14, 1 March 2010 (UTC)

That hard to get at page seems to be the only page on the site that's not a straight redirect. It exists as CAVA must have bought advertising and had it pointed at that page. They can't redirect the page as they would then loose the extra information that the advertising link sends. With the link you used it's

• se=Google
• campaign=CA_National_SN_Job_K120928
• adgroup=CA_Nat_Virtual
• kw=california%20virtual%20academy
• gclid=CLrqgKPAmKACFRYoawodzjjfdQ

I'm pretty sure "se" is "search engine" and "kw" is "keywords." I believe www.caliva.org/dg/dg_ca.html is the only page on the site that does not redirect.

Part of the information challenge for Wikipedia is that it needs to be from reliable secondary sources that are independent of the primary subject. In this case it would be people that have studied the CAVA program and then written an article about it. It's possible someone at a school district has written about CAVA at their district. That would not be about the overall program but still is better than nothing. --Marc Kupper|talk 07:39, 2 March 2010 (UTC)

Regardless of whether or not the link generally redirects, the page still exists. It is clearly stated on that page that they are a public school. As a side, it's not difficult to decipher links. I am aware that I did a search for the school to get there. I was going to explain that, but with "Google" in the link, I didn't think it necessary.

The issue of this particular question - public or private - can be answered by looking each school up on the California Department of Education website where each school is classified as a public charter school with direct government funding.

This news report by CBS also refers to CAVA as "fully accredited charter public schools." http://cbs5.com/video/?id=47295@kpix.dayport.com

While CAVA now redirects to the K12 website, I think they have made it clear enough that they are a public school. The "How it Works" page lets us know that CAVA schools are public. http://www.k12.com/cava/how_it_works/index/ The FAQ's page also does http://www.k12.com/cava/faqs/enrollment__attendance/

There certainly is a lot of heated discussion and jumbled information out there about the schools, but I think the issue or public or private is answered well enough. Anyatha L (talk) 21:32, 2 March 2010 (UTC)

The schools themselves are public - that's never been a question. The available evidence shows that CAVA itself is a private company or rather is part of K12 which is a publicly traded for-profit corporation. This article is both about CAVA the company and the CAVA schools. --Marc Kupper|talk 08:04, 3 March 2010 (UTC)

Ok, I think I am understanding the confusion now. K12 is a private company that approaches school districts throughout the United States and tries to sell the curriculum to states and/or counties. If the counties and/or states purchase the program, they do so by opening up a virtual school. These virtual schools are run by the government using the K12 curriculum. The first school to open up in California was CAVA @ Kern. CAVA was the name of the school and they partnered with K12 Inc. to use their curriculum. When the program proved successful, other counties in the state decided to buy the program as well. Rather than create a number of completely separate schools, the California Virtual Academy network of schools was created. Their main offices are in Simi Valley. K12 is the publishing company. CAVA is the network of schools that can be found throughout California. This has always been my impression and I am waiting on a response from the school regarding this. Anyatha 21:18, 3 March 2010 (UTC)

I would like to just clarify the issue here. We know that K12 Inc is a publishing company and that they offer an online school to a variety of different organizations and people. CAVA is a network of public charter schools throughout the state of California. Each individual school is run by various counties within the state. What is unclear at this point is whether the overall network of schools is public or private. Does that sum the issue up? Anyatha 23:11, 3 March 2010 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Anyatha L (talk • contribs)

Actually, it seems that CAVA (K12) runs the schools. The district's only role is paying the bill and referring any interested people on to CAVA. It's interesting as the parents and students only interact with CAVA people. Hence public/private is muddy. I believe there are some CAVA sites where district employees operate the program though using material from K12. Those would be public schools operated by public employees. The rest are public schools operated by private employees.

There's no evidence that CAVA was ever independent of K12. The caliva.org domain name was created 15-Apr-2002 (do whois lookup). On May 24, 2002 K12 announced the formation of CAVA.^[1] Hence CAVA has been part of K12 from the beginning and they started with Santa Cruz, Kern, Fresno, and San Diego. This December 2002 article calls CAVA "K12's charter schools" and that K12 needs to keep attendance records otherwise they don't get paid.^[2]

Anyatha, you can sign talk messages using ~~~~ at the end of the message. It'll insert the name/date stuff at that spot when you save the edit. I need to jump back to another project and so will be off line for a while. --Marc Kupper|talk 00:21, 4 March 2010 (UTC)

School sites

CAVA has a list here plus I looked over the STAR test results for schools with virtual in the name.

Note that the names of the schools are inconsistent and so searches will need to be done for

• California Virtual Academy
• Calif. Virtual Academy
• CA Virtual Academy

For each of those there may be an "@", "/", or "at" and then the school name.

The school name column links to the school profile on the California department of education web site. The full web site links have not been noted down for most schools.

School name	County	School District	Address	Web site and comments (see note2 below)
CAVA Jamestown	Tuolumne	Jamestown Elementary	CAVA, see note1	www.jamestown.k12.ca.us (Web site has 27 pages per Google that mention CAVA)
CAVA Kern	Kern	Maricopa Unified	CAVA, see note1	www.maricopaschools.org (web site does not contain any information about CAVA)
CAVA Kings	Kings	Armona Union Elementary	CAVA, see note1	www.auesd.com (web site does not contain any information about CAVA)
CAVA LA	Los Angeles	West Covina Unified	CAVA, see note1	www.wcusd.org (web site does not contain any information about CAVA)
Ravendale-Termo Charter	Lassen	Ravendale-Termo Elementary	709-855 Termo Grasshopper Rd. Termo, CA 96123 (530) 234-2010	www.juniperridge.org (home page mentions CAVA and directs people to the CAVA office/site for more information.)
CAVA San Diego	San Diego	Spencer Valley Elementary	CAVA, see note1	www.sdcoe.k12.ca.us/districts/spencer (This is the CAVA page but they refer people to the CAVA office/site for more information.)
CAVA San Joaquin	San Joaquin	Stockton Unified	CAVA, see note1	www.stockton.k12.ca.us (There is no mention of CAVA on the site. Google finds something called "Moses Rogers Virtual Academy" on this web site but that page is down and it's not known if this is CAVA. Moses Rodgers has a Wikipedia article.)
CAVA San Mateo	San Mateo	Jefferson Elementary	CAVA, see note1	www.jsd.k12.ca.us (web site does not contain any information about CAVA)
CAVA Sonoma	Sonoma	Liberty Elementary	170 Liberty School Rd. Petaluma, CA 94952-1074 (805) 581-0202	www.libertysd.org (note that the phone number for this school is the one used for the CAVA office. CAVA started here in the 2004-2005 school year. The district directs people to the CAVA office/site for more information.)
CAVA Sutter	Sutter	Nuestro Elementary	CAVA, see note1	www.nuestroschool.org (web site does not contain any information about CAVA)

• note1 - Nearly all of the schools use a street address of 2360 Shasta Way, Unit B, Simi Valley, CA 93065, (805) 581-0202.
• note2 - The district/school sites were scanned for information about CAVA using a search like this for www.jamestown.k12.ca.us

There are two other schools:

• Los Angeles also has LAVA but which says "Online courses are available through a partnership with the California Virtual Campus, a program offered through the California Community Colleges Chancellor's Office at no charge to the students or the District." It's not clear if this is the same as CAVA LA.
• Riverside Virtual School, Riverside county. This is not listed on the CAVA web site. The school's web site is www.rusdtech.net or this and does not seem to be CAVA. --Marc Kupper|talk 08:15, 2 March 2010 (UTC)
• One of Anyatha's edits lead me to this search page on the California Department of Education web site. Searching for "virtual" in the school name finds nine of the CAVA schools. There were three other schools listed
  • "Virtual" Pre School I could not find this school on the district's site using both Google and their built in search.
  • Riverside Virtual already mentioned above.
  • Golden Valley Virtual Charter covers grades 6-12 and appears to be operated directly by the district. --Marc Kupper|talk 08:12, 4 March 2010 (UTC)
• Of the ten CAVA schools Ravendale-Termo is the only one that's funded locally.^[3] The rest get money directly from the state based on ADA.^{Using this search for virtual and look at the Charter Funding Type type field} CAVA's accreditation page says "The California Virtual Academies, with the exception of the newly approved CAVA@Ravendale-Termo program, have been fully accredited by the Accrediting Commission for Schools (ACS) of the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) for all academies, grades K-12." --Marc Kupper|talk 09:02, 4 March 2010 (UTC)