Connections AcademyReviews 623

My two daughters have been enrolled (6th & 8th grade) since Sept. 2016, and they both love it. Yes, the workload is high, but it's possible to have flexibility if taking off and catching up during weekends and other holidays. Even if the amount of work is high but students soon catch up with the rhythm and know what is expected of them. Connecting with teachers is super easy too, again it's a matter of habit to pick up the phone or email them when we need something; they are very responsive. I haven't had any issues and both our daughters love it.

The work load for my 4th grader was at levels I didn't deal with in college. Average 30+ lessons/week; average 1.5 - 3 hours per lesson - well, you do that math. I feel I would be remiss in not warning every, single parent out there considering this program. Unless your child is supremely organized, mostly OCD in nature, and has zero interest in doing anything but sitting at the computer for 7-10 hours a day, then I really don't think this is what you are looking for as an alternative to regular school. There is NO REAL FLEXIBILITY, because if you take advantage of the illusory flexibility, you will fall so for behind it will make your head not only spin, but fall off. This school took my 4 years' consistent A-honor roll (straight A's, no B's at all) child, and made her dislike nearly everything about school. This really crushed me as a parent, because I had hoped that the flexibility with a little bit of structure would be beneficial. Well, I was wrong. And I want as many parents out there who are researching this to see my review and I pray it gives them pause. Don't do this to your child!

We are still doing homeschool, but I have pulled her out of this "slave to the computer 40+ hours/week" insanity that is Connections Academy, and gone back to my more laid back parent-driven curriculum. We don't have enough focused resources, it is true, but CA is NOT the answer - please believe that.

The incompetency of the enrollment department and those they work with is mind blowing. After going through the whole process and uploading all needed documents they continually messed up my son's immunization approval. After not one mess up and wrong information but FOUR and me resubmitting numerous ways and them admitting they had messed up multiple times and was continually told the wrong thing, I was then told it was past the deadline for enrollment... even though they had had all the needed documents in plenty of time and the errors were on their side. They put in for an exception to the principal, I was told I would get a phone call. No call and the exception was denied without review. When I tried to talk directly to the principal (the only one with authority to make the change) I was told she would be traveling for a week and I may or may not get a call in that time and no guarantee this would be fixed. By this time my son had not been in school for a week, they expected me to wait another for no guarantees and their incompetency caused my son to miss all deadlines to enroll at a different online school. I had to put him back into the local high school. Working with them is an absolute nightmare and you will get a different answer every time you call and if they mess up. They will not take responsibility. GO ELSEWHERE!

The curriculum is AWFUL, I have never seen so many portfolios due so often as I do here. The work content and work load for Kindergarten is just entirely too much. God Forbid your Microphone doesn't work and you can't do a recording because you will fall so far behind so quickly. The program is designed for failure, plain and simple. I had a high schooler that couldn't seem to graduate with the program, B/C student in Public school and completely fell behind here. My 8th and 5th graders have been enrolled 1 week and have done every assignment and already have an average of 60%, Both A/B students in a public setting. I have Two Kindergarten students in the program and they both carry a solid 60% which I find odd because I've NEVER seen a kindergartner fail. Every assignment is turned in and on time, it must be the 3 recordings we couldn't do, those need to go. The ONLY reason my kids are in this program is because we happen to live in the worst state for Education currently. I get wanting to be competitive or even "the best" but your lessons are ridiculous, the work load is entirely too high and God forbid we take a sick day. Time to withdraw!

I was sold on the "flexibility" -yes, you have flexibility, but you'll "pay" for it, by becoming even more swamped, couldn't keep up! She got A's and B's in regular school, she is smart, but this method is insanity, she struggled with lessons that are repetitive, redundant and were so long, The amount of reading is ridiculous. It was so stressful every day to keep up. That's all it was, barely keeping up. You won't enjoy school vacays and weekends or days off, because of the crush of work to do. A friend had her child in it, so I tried it, right after I enrolled, she pulled her child out. I thought, "uh oh." she expressed what I am expressing right now; but I thought, "everyone is different, we'll try it." I wish we never did it. The "field trips" are always on the other side of the state or at least a few hours ride away and very few and far between. It is "packaged" as a wonderful program, but you'll see how overwhelming it is. The anxiety every morning turning that computer on was through the roof, it was not enjoyable, it was drudgery. And it was difficult to get through the Walpole, MA school admin. Office, mailboxes are full or the option they give you is an "invalid entry." Rarely do you get a call back IF you can find a mailbox with room on it. I had to call the 1800 number more just to get a human being. She has an IEP and there wasn't IEP support, she was on her own. They are a business, they need good reviews to get the money from the state. I have been trying to unenroll her for a week and keep getting a runaround. They need the numbers for the audits and the funding. I feel that I am being discouraged and ignored because they don't want to let a student go, it's B. S. --When you google reviews, check the website it is on, it's usually a "connections academy" website review, so they will all be stellar.

I like to read real reviews, so every now and then I take the time to write one. I have a son who attends Georgia Connections Academy. He has been enrolled for three years, so I know a little bit about the program. All students learn at a different rate, so what works for one may not work for the other. This is a great program for a student with a great learning coach and who does not need a lot of instruction. There are live lessons and teacher interaction, however distractions are still a concern. Some teachers come to these lessons unprepared and with instructions for the whole curriculum, which takes up a lot of instructional time. Teachers work mostly on a part-time level, almost like a substitute teacher. Some kids don't need that constant attention, so this would be great for them. I am writing this review because school is taking a private turn to the right and cyber school will be one of the alternatives. I urge parents to do your homework and research any school, before enrolling your child. Curriculum assignments continue to be a concern for parents and students, however we all need to give a full-time effort in educating our children.

I have had to remove both a Freshman and a 6th. Grader for the same reasons. There was entirely too many assignments each day and the Live Lesson were a joke. Live Lessons consisted every day with technical difficulties on the teacher's behalf, continuous chatting among peers about unrelated content-very distracting. Most Live Lessons had zero instruction, but only had to do with showing up to be held accountable for attendance. Meanwhile the Live Lessons were a complete waste of time. If questions were asked by teachers, only one student would usually dominate the entire class. This school left my children feeling like failures and completely destroyed their confidence in school. Terrible waste of time!

I'm a 9th grader at connections and iv'e gotten behind a HUGE amount almost every year, with a lot of stress and challenges whether that's in school or outside of school HOWEVER one of the great things about this school is if you work you butt off you can get your grades to A's and have no overdue's, at the beginning of this week i i had 30 overdue's because i went on a cruise with my family but when i got back i worked hard and got down to 3 by the end. Now theirs something a lot of people are misunderstanding is most of the time the students just cant get their head in the game because of stress but this can be fixed or even avoided by just talking to your teacher, i didn't to get from 30 to 3 but that's just because i didn't want to bother them and Honestly the teachers are awesome at least mine (shout out to Captain Mrs. Pyle best Teacher in the school).

The main thing you want to do is stay ahead of the game so you don't have overdue while still doing work and PAY ATTENTION TO THE MATERIAL it may be hidden but it basically has all the answer flat out on the page you just have to look... oh and one last word of advise Quick checks are Incredibly Important so dont just blast through them.

My daughter attend CA in Southern California. We transferred so that my daughter could focus on her education instead of wasting time at her brick and mortar school.

CA promised the moon. Don't believe it. In my district, Southern California, I have found that they do not support PSAT testing, for this year(2016) they offered 35 spots to the entire population. They don't support SAT testing, if you want to do it then you are on your own. They don't offer science labs close to most homes, we had to drive 2 hours a day for my kid to complete lab time. The school simply says "we dont have the facility" that's it. Apparently the staff is not so much interested is CA graduates moving on to college as much as collecting tax based tuition.
If you are considering this school DO NOT! They will not support you and they don't spend on eduction. You are on your own.

My kids never enrolled in connections. I was looking into charter/online schools for my boy. I watched the informational video to find out about the school. Within 2 hours I got a call from them, I explained that I was just checking out options and wasn't ready to enroll. He was cordial and said I could call them when I was ready. The very next day I get another call from someone else. Why are you hounding me? I look at the frequently asked questions on website: Is connections a non-profit? Well only part of it... what I gathered is the schools themselves are non-profit. Since other charters in my state only get 80% of the state money for enrollment I am guessing that maybe this works the same? And the "company" gets the other 20%... and they probably aren't non-profit. Now I am just guessing here. I just really had a bad feeling about getting calls from across the county from a call center to enroll in a school in a different state. Seems fishy. But who knows.

My daughter has health issues but was an A student, she just had trouble with her number of absences in public school (9th grade). We thought this would be a good fit. Her regular workload was never this heavy in public school, but we could handle that if it were flexible. I don't know why they advertise it as being flexible, it's not. If she doesn't turn in 6 completed lessons a day she's counted absent for the day. We didn't know that at first and thought she could make up the hours on weekends or work more lessons on another day to make up for it, apparently you can do extra work whenever but you can't do a few hours on a week day and add the rest to the weekend and be counted present for the whole week. It doesn't matter if a lesson took more than an hour or if she turned in a portfolio or a paper assessment or was studying their resource flashcards or reading the lesson text... 6 submitted lessons a day or she's counted absent. The handbook says they have to attend 25 hours a week, but the teachers tell me anything less than 30 lessons (30 hours) is an absence and the hours the learning coach logs in apparently mean nothing because they only believe the child was working on school work if they have a completed lesson to show for it. Also she was enrolled a little late and I don't think she will ever get caught up (very discouraging to try to tackle every missed lesson on top of a full workload). On top of that making for crushingly long days, you have to learn in reverse to get caught up by doing the current lesson then fitting in the overdue ones and if the current lessons are building on the previous lessons you're lost. I am surprised at the amount of time I've had to devote to the program as well trying to sort this all out. I get at least 5 emails a day about stuff that doesn't even apply to us and it's easy to get lost. I had such high hopes and now I just have regret and worry.

My daughter is beginning her senior year with Calif CA. She started at CCA mid sophomore year, after struggling with sleep deprivation, anxiety and working within her classes' time frame.
She thought a lot about going back to her huge high school so she could do all the senior stuff with the kids she grew up with, but the benefits of the online learning were greater.
She loves being able to do the work at whatever time each day. If she sleeps till 11:00, and starts work at 4:00 pm, that's fine! It is a lot of work, probably more than the regular high school, but she loves the style of learning.
Any time we have needed anything the teachers and staff have been fantastic. We have learned the importance of establishing a report with them through emails and occasional phone calls.
My daughter's grades are all A's and B's now. She knows what she has to do and gets it done. She is picking out colleges to apply to, and feeling positive about school thanks to this great program.

My daughter atrends this school and we both absolutely love it. The teachers stay in touch, yes they call your house, and there are many field trips for the children. Communication is NOT a problem with Connections. This school is very involved with its students. Do not enroll if you think it will be easy. You have to attend live lessons on the computer, you have to talk to your teacher, and you have to treat this as if you get up and go to a school every single day. There are many clubs, field trips, etc. for the students. They definitely can stay social with other sudents if they want to. I feel like my daughter gets one on one attention and help when she needs it. We have never had a problem at this school.

We started at Connections Academy because my daughter suffered chronic headaches and we wanted to take some pressure off of her. That backfired, unfortunately. The online format was sometimes difficult to follow (i. E., what is supplemental work vs. what is the key work), assignments were not always easy to submit (many, many assignments were not saved properly or submitted), the scheduler was a joke (it would schedule assignments randomly and often after the due date so that the online planner because virtually unusable), and the teachers all seemed to have different philosophies about what "work at your own pace" and "flexibility" mean. A few were great, but towards the end, many seemed frazzled and overworked. My daughter finished the year with a zero and a really bad grade on a quiz, dropping her grade from a "b" to a "d", but I was unable to get any feedback or find out what happened because the teacher was on vacation. In reality, the school offers no flexibility or self-paced learning at all; the deadlines are hard and fast and in fact I found the school less flexible and harder to work with then the local public school.

My son will be getting a few Fs and a few other low grades because... his homeroom teacher, other teachers failed to ACTIVELY respond to his cries for help.

Positives were at the beginning of the year when some teachers had time to call and encourage him. Near the end of online high school, he got some automatic responses because teachers were busy part of the time with Istep or other projects.

He also likes the independence of homeschooling. We will be giving it one more try! And hopefully he can still graduate on time.

But... he struggled all semester to get his homework transmitted to Connections. Yes, the teacher was informed... but to no avail. People there are good at telling you to "call someone else". He will be getting an F in a class where he did the work... but it dropped out of the system.

The principal, assistant principal gave no ground. Too bad... So sad. Factually (and I am sparing much detail here) I estimate Connections as 80% responsible for the failures to heed my son's cries notably the last few weeks... and thus responsible for his 2 Fs and a couple other too-low grades. (And he was on the way to get possibly all or mostly As and Bs... before the last few assignments and exams!)

I have worked in customer service for a technical sales company and a major world bank. We NEVER treated cries for help from customers like Connections treated our son and us. Basically, no one was his advocate when he repeatedly said "I am having problems submitting stuff in all my classes".

So... if Connections works for you... fine. We liked part of it. But you need to dog their steps with emails and repeated calls IMMEDIATELY if something goes wrong. It took a week (about4-5 actual business days, with a couple of phone calls and SEVERAL emails) before an administrator called us back.

This school called me the day before graduation to let me know my son was not eligible, I asked why I wasn't notified sooner and was told they didn't know until 4 days ago, and did not have the staff to notify us sooner. They told us on that same phone call that my son is not eligible because he is short. 5 an election credit and because of this he is not eligible to attend the graduation ceremony. We verified several times with his counselor and homeroom teacher that he was signed up for the right classes to complete school on time. This may be a free program, but what is the sense of all this when you hold the children back from their end goal. I'm not sure if it is so they will have enough students to complete their summer program, or because they did not have the sense to get a large enough venue for the entire graduating class. This staff member also told me there were 243 students in the graduating class, and they booked a venue that only seats 500 for the venue. It doesn't take a diploma to do that math.

My son has social anxiety and a learning disability so we decided that online school would be perfect for him. When we signed him up we had no idea what kind of hell was in store. When he needed help from a teacher they were always out for one reason or another causing him to get behind. He ended up barely failing 2 classes so he has to do summer school. Not only that it's $325 for one class in summer school! I'll have to pay $650 for his teachers failure to help. Summer school in a public school was $50 for all classes needed to be redone for my other son and they actually get a real teacher with them for it! This place scams you on so many things

I chose Connections Academy for my sophmore daughter after she decided she did not want to return to our local public school. Huge mistake. Both of my sons had attended a different online school for 3 years and had very little trouble. Connections academy is terrible. The lessons are terrible, the staff is terrible and there's no flexibility in scheduling. My daughter went back to public school before the end of her sophmore year because it was so bad..