New virtual academy offers opportunities
The Association of Lutheran High Schools Online (ALHS Online) has a new name and an expanded mission.
For the past ten years, ALHS Online has been offering high-quality online courses to supplement the class offerings of WELS high schools and elementary schools. Beginning this next school year (2021–22), it now also will offer a fully online curriculum—starting with ninth grade and adding a grade level every year—that can lead to a high school diploma.
To highlight this expansion, the school has been renamed Amazing Grace Virtual Academy. “We have been truly blessed over the last ten years and have really seen God’s amazing grace in all that he has done to allow us to expand and be of service to WELS schools,” says Dr. James Grunwald, superintendent of the academy.
Grunwald says that over the last few years the organization has been receiving more inquiries about expanding its offerings from WELS and Evangelical Lutheran Synod families who don’t have the opportunity to send their children to one of WELS’ 26 Lutheran high schools. Several grants and gifts plus recent accreditation as an online learning service provider by the Middle States Association helped push this decision forward.
Amazing Grace Virtual Academy will continue to provide courses for part-time students as well. During the 2020–21 school year, about 320 students took courses each semester. It also offers a four-year high school religion curriculum and foreign language and mathematics courses for seventh and eighth graders.
Learn more at amazinggraceva.org.