Turning Staffing Challenges Into Student Opportunity Through an Alternative Learning Program

As a new school year begins, districts are facing a familiar struggle: there aren’t enough teachers, especially in high-need subjects and endorsements. But at Sumner-Bonney Lake School District (SBLSD) in Washington, that shortfall didn’t produce a workaround. It produced a brand-new alternative learning program.

It started with a simple staffing solution. At each of the district’s two high schools, one qualified teacher covers all six periods of the day, split between two staff members. That teacher isn’t delivering every lesson to every student. They’re partnering with Edmentum's customer success team, using the EdOptions Academy platform, to remove whatever barrier is standing between a student and their next credit. It doesn’t matter if that student is sitting in the building or learning from home as part of the district’s Alternative Learning Experience (ALE) program. Same teacher, same partnership, same support. 

An Edmentum webinar examined the success at SBLSD. Watch the full discussion here.

One Teacher, Six Periods, Hundreds of Students

That structure alone lets one teacher effectively support over 700 in-class enrollments and another 300-plus ALE enrollments a year, numbers that would break a traditional one-teacher, one-classroom model. Part of what makes it work, Kelly Denn, Assistant Superintendent of Instructional Services, explained, is that the curriculum itself doesn’t compromise on quality: “The courses are rigorous, and that allows for that seamless integration. Say a student is out because they have a medical issue, then they come back, they’re able to just jump right back into our in-person classes seamlessly.”

But the real test of a staffing model isn’t how many students it can hold; it’s what happens when the students in front of you don’t fit the model at all.

Building The "Frankenstein Course"

That’s what happened at Elhi Hill High School, with one science teacher and about 15 students in grades 9-12 who needed credit recovery in different units of science. One teacher, one classroom period, four grade levels of material. Under an ordinary schedule, that’s four separate courses that don’t exist and a problem with no solution.

The teacher built one course instead, using Edmentum's Courseware platform, to pull in the exact units each student needed and assemble them into a single, custom class. Staff started calling it the Frankenstein course, half a joke, half an accurate description of stitching four curricula into one. 

What they didn’t expect was what happened once it was running: instead of 15 students working in isolation on 15 different screens, they started working side by side, doing in-person labs together while each one progressed through their own material virtually. A staffing-driven fix turned into a stronger classroom than a fully staffed one would have produced.

Solving the Certification Problem, Too

That pattern, a single constraint forcing a better solution, shows up again in how the district solved a problem central to staffing solutions: certification. 

Washington requires a state-endorsed teacher for every course a district offers. As Denn put it, “If there’s a course that’s offered and there’s not a Washington state endorsed teacher, we have to bring this to the school board,” an uncomfortable admission that a course is running without a qualified teacher attached to it. 

That requirement was part of the reason the district moved away from its previous online provider. Edmentum works with districts to ensure state-endorsed teachers are in place for the courses they want to run, which turns “we can’t offer this because we don’t have the right teacher” into a solvable problem.

Protecting and Supporting Existing Classroom Teachers

If the teachers on staff have to stretch themselves too thin, none of this works, and most staffing strategies overlook that issue. Districts using this model don't have to solve that alone: Edmentum offers grading support, where a qualified reviewer manages grading and feedback so teachers can focus on students rather than paperwork, along with ongoing instructional coaching to help teachers adapting to a virtual or blended format get assistance rather than working alone.

Neither requires hiring. Both address the overload that drives teachers out in the first place, not just the shortfall that results from it. Denn credits the strength of that support system directly: “I don’t think there’s a question or an issue that we can’t bring forward that our [Edmentum] customer success team isn’t willing to help us problem-solve.” She’s equally direct about the staff who carry the day-to-day work: “Our online managers are miracle workers in my mind. They work so hard.”

The Resulting High Pass Rates Make the Case

Last school year: 

• The district’s in-class students posted a 94% pass rate across 723 enrollments. 
• Its ALE students, many of them managing anxiety, depression, medical leave, or other barriers to full-time in-person attendance, posted a 97% pass rate across 319 enrollments. 
• Summer school ran 98 enrollments with exactly one student not passing. 

Denn put the return on investment plainly: “You have students who sit in a classroom, they fail, then you’re just going to put them back in the same exact classroom again, have them repeat the same exact curriculum again. They don’t do any better the second time. And now they’re older than their peers.” Weighed against that outcome, she said, the numbers settle the argument. “When you look at our data and you look at return on investment, it’s like the data speaks for itself.” Basic education funding covers both the online courses and the certificated teachers, and pass rates like these make the spending easy to defend to a school board.

The Takeaway for District Leaders Nationwide

None of this is a district hiring its way around staffing challenges. It’s a district extending its instructional capacity, backed by a partner that handles certification requirements, platform support, and course customization. 

If your district is short on endorsed teachers and struggling to meet the learning needs of every student, Edmentum can help. Watch the webinar for more virtual learning best practices.