Helping Families Turn the Home into a Classroom

Cyber charter schools are tuition-free, Pennsylvania public schools that teach children at home primarily over the Internet.
Three families who enrolled their children in one of these innovative schools, PA Cyber, tell why cyber works for them.

Mom gets to be Mom
Karyn Benner of Elverson, Pa., says the best thing about PA Cyber is that while four of their children are in school at home, she’s not the teacher. “I get to be the mom,” said Karyn. “I’m here if they have a problem, but I don’t have to sit down and teach them. It takes a lot of pressure off me.”
She and her husband Gary tried a different cyber charter school for Micah, Sarah and Rebekah, then put them in private school for three years. “They really wanted to come back home and do cyber school again,” she said, but this time they selected PA Cyber. That was 2008, and now they’ve enrolled their youngest, Josiah, in PA Cyber’s K5 kindergarten program. The others are in grades 10, 8 and 4.
One room of their home is designated as the “school,” and each child has a corner for his or her desk, working at a laptop supplied free by the school. Karyn works with Josiah under the guidance of an elementary teacher, while the three older children really like the structure and real-time interaction of PA Cyber’s virtual classes, which are taught live at certain times every day.
“I love the structure and accountability. They know when their classes are and exactly what they’re supposed to do,” said Karyn. “When you home-school you are the teacher and the mom. With PA Cyber, I can fill the mom role for them.”

Appointed to Coast Guard Academy
Downingtown resident Aaron DenDulk’s parents began homeschooling him in sixth grade because he was bored in his local school. “Two tests came back with an IQ of 129 and they refused to put him in a gifted program as a 130 was required,” said his father Arie.
“When Aaron was approaching high school we looked for a structured yet flexible environment with teachers who cared. PA Cyber proved to be an excellent fit for an independent self-starter like Aaron.”
The flexible schedule allowed him to do community volunteer work, play basketball and take advantage of a program which pays college class tuition for PA Cyber students while still in high school. He graduated with 41 college credits.
“There is no doubt that the (college) program coupled with his sports, volunteer activities and the independent thinking that a PA Cyber education instills, helped him gain an appointment to the U.S. Coast Guard Academy,” said his father.
Aaron graduated from the Academy in 2009 with a BS in civil engineering. He is now a lieutenant JG in the Coast Guard.

Wasted hours on the Bus
“I started my kids in PA Cyber four years ago. The only regret I have is not doing it sooner,” said Dawn Cole of Saylorsburg. “This may seem like an odd reason for enrolling in cyber school, but with the bus schedules, and all my kids going to different schools, and over an hour bus ride – it just seemed like a lot of wasted time in their short lives.”
Amanda, 13, is in the GATE program, and has through testing shown mastery of math through the high school level. Son Talon is 11, daughter Jordyn is 9, and little Darci is enrolled in age 5 kindergarten. All get very good grades and demonstrate – through PSSA and DORA-DOMA testing – that they are learning, and that’s what is most important to parents Dawn and Timothy. Dawn said teachers and their instructional supervisor, Jesse Light, constantly communicate with the parents to identify issues and keep the kids on track.

Contact PA Cyber at www.pacyber.org, or 1.888.PACYBER.