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Osseo District Ending Online School For K-5 Students
The Osseo Area School District is downsizing its online school heading into the next school year.
279Online — the district’s web-based K-12 school — will only offer classes for grades 6-12 starting in the 2025-26 school year.
The school opened in 2021, after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It gives us a pathway for our [students] who, brick-and-mortar doesn’t work for them,” Superintendent Kim Hiel told CCX News.
District officials say the K-12 school had 970 students enrolled in its first year.
However, enrollment has dropped significantly since then, with current student counts just under 370 students.
Likewise, there’s only 70 K-5 students in the program this year.
As a result, the K-5 portion of the school is closing.
“Once again, it wasn’t a bad staff, it wasn’t a bad program,” Hiel said. “There was just, we did not have the enrollment to maintain it for several more years.”
According to Hiel, more than half of the students that were impacted have now enrolled at their local schools.
SOURCE: CCX MEDIA
