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Academy expands course offerings

STEUBENVILLE — The Jefferson County Educational Service Center’s Virtual Learning Academy has expanded its course catalog to provide more educational offerings to users, officials said.

Teresa Silvestri, director of education and outreach at JCESC, said staff members continually were adding courses to the fall 2016 online curriculum.

“We’ve added Intro to Sign Language and Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint and Word 2013,” Silvestri said. “To help better prepare students for testing, we are developing more test prep courses. We already have those for ACT, Ohio Graduation Test and basic study skills, but now we are adding A.I.R.”

A.I.R., as it is known, stands for American Institute for Research and the new course will center on English and language arts. In addition, a revised course is offered for computer applications and U.S. and world history.

“We’ve revised courses to update them and the content and technology changes to make it more relevant,” she added. “We’ve added the Intro to Jazz and Intro to Rock-n-Roll for fine arts. We’re also working on additional test prep courses in American History.”

The VLA offers more than 150 courses and Silvestri said they extend beyond classroom subjects.

“There are career training courses for students to find out about careers they may be interested in, as well as interviewing, resumes and dressing properly. We’ve also added two gaming courses to learn development, marketing and scriptwriting. There are a total of nine entertainment and technology courses.”

She continued the VLA curriculum strives to stay ahead of Ohio Department of Education standards and requirements while officials also obtain input from the school districts they work with. The courses are based on need or state and national standards and help better prepare students.

VLA is an online educational delivery system that provides full-year and semester courses for students in grades kindergarten through 12th grades, officials said.

It works in cooperation with school districts and can be used to service any student who is home-bound, homeschooled, in need of credit reclamation dropped out, special needs or at risk and assigned to alternative schools.

For information, call (740) 283-3347 or (888) 283-3347 or go online to www.jcesc.k12.oh.us.

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