A six-step plan for deciding who teaches and who handles the grading in your district’s virtual program
A Formula 1 pit crew can swap all four tires on a car in under two seconds. Pulling that off takes around 20 people, and each one has exactly one job, whether that’s running a wheel gun or holding up the jack. If you’ve ever seen the pit crew live, you’ll notice that no one tries to do everything, because the time running on the stopwatch would be humiliating.
District leaders planning a virtual school picture the opposite, with the same handful of staff changing every tire while still running the regular building. Dylan Hoffman, our Chief Operating Officer at Subject, has sat through enough planning calls to know that picture is usually wrong. He has helped districts across the country stand up virtual programs, and he says most of the fear comes from a fuzzy sense of what the work requires.
“As soon as we kind of chart the map, as it were, from the district side,” Dylan says, “we’re usually able to give them a fairly short roadmap to launch.”
Here’s how.
Key Takeaways:
- A virtual school breaks into about 10 jobs, and districts can keep the ones their staff do best while a partner covers the rest.
- Districts planning a virtual school should settle the teacher-of-record role first, since most other job assignments depend on it.
- Portage Township Schools kept its own teachers as teachers of record and enrolled 267 virtual students in year one, against a 50-60 student goal.
When a virtual school’s to-do list lands all at once
When a superintendent first floats the idea of a virtual school, the whole to-do list lands at once. There are teachers to hire, software to buy, contracts to sign and a parade of vendors who each want “just 15 minutes.”
“A lot of districts think, gosh, who am I going to need to go and talk to, all the different vendors I’m going to need to work with, all the technology I’m going to have to invest in,” Dylan says.
Skeptics put it more bluntly. In Dylan’s experience, the room erupts in pushbacks that usually sounds something like this:
- “It seems like an impossible task.”
- “It’s a mountain to climb, and I just don’t have the time.”
- “I also just don’t have the wherewithal or money to do that.”
That’s a fair reaction from offices already juggling turnover and what Dylan calls “swirling competing priorities.” The trouble is that a project sized as one giant blob never gets started, and families aren’t waiting around for it.
About 1 in 80 public school students attended a fully virtual school in 2024-25, roughly double the pre-pandemic share, according to Chalkbeat. When those students leave a district, their state funding leaves with them.
Keep the jobs your people do best
Dylan’s fix starts with a mental shift. A virtual school is really a bundle of separate jobs, and a district only has to keep the ones its own people do best. A partner carries the rest, and both sides plan the gaps together. “We’re bringing the operating model,” he says. “They’re bringing the context.”
That beats both obvious alternatives. Building everything in-house is the mountain. Buying a boxed product and hoping for the best has problems of its own, and Dylan is the first to say so.
“I don’t mean to make it sound like when we used to go to Best Buy and buy Windows software licenses. Then you’d unwrap it, but you were kind of like, ‘wait, what do I do next?’,” he says.
The 6 steps to a virtual school org chart
Instead, once a district decides to launch, Dylan walks it through six steps. (If you’re still deciding, Dylan’s four-step launch guide covers the go-or-no-go homework, and our Catalog Math breakdown runs the money math.)
Step 1: Bring your pencil drafts
Show up to the first planning session with whatever your team has already talked through, even if it lives on a napkin from the last cabinet meeting. “You know your students and your communities best,” Dylan says, so he starts every partnership by asking what’s been discussed so far.
Most districts arrive with “the plans that have been written down in pencil,” which is a perfectly good place to start. What they’re missing is what Dylan calls “the shortest path from A to B.”
Your homework: Write a one-page summary of every idea your team has floated, including the half-baked ones. (Half-baked is kind of the point.)
Step 2: List every job first
Before assigning anyone, write down every job the program needs.
Dylan’s inventory runs 10 deep and works as a checklist with any partner:
- A course library covering graduation requirements plus electives and career pathways
- Grading, with personal feedback on everything students turn in
- Integrity checks, or as Dylan puts it, working to “ensure and re-insure and re-re-re-re-insure” that the work is the student’s own
- Special education support, including IEP accommodations
- Progress reports and data reporting for the district office or county
- 24/7 tutoring from an AI homework helper (Subject’s is called Spark) or a live person
- A teacher of record, the certified teacher legally responsible for a student’s grade
- Live sessions for real-time help, which Subject calls learning labs
- Progress monitoring with custom lesson plans and pacing schedules
- Parent communication
Seeing it written out tends to shrink the panic, since 10 named jobs fit on one page.
Your homework: Drop the list into a shared doc and add an empty “owner” column.
Step 3: Decide who teaches first
The teacher-of-record decision shapes every other assignment, so settle it early. Some districts keep their own teachers in the role, which is what Portage Township Schools in Indiana did. Others give it to the partner’s teachers. At Subject, those are “single subject certified teachers” who review student work and “actively, actively monitor student progress.”
Either way, it’s a staffing call about who covers one specific role in the virtual program. Staffing usually decides it. Dr. James Whitfield, superintendent of Treetops School International in Texas, points to districts “having teacher turnover or they can’t find teachers” as the ones with the most to gain from a partner covering the role.
Make the format call, too. Hybrid students take some courses online and the rest in a classroom, while fully virtual students learn entirely online but stay enrolled. “We still want them within the district,” Dylan says.
Your homework: Put “teacher of record” at the top of your job list and answer it in your first planning meeting.
Step 4: Hand off the jobs that eat time
Next, find the jobs that devour hours, like grading, integrity checks, tutoring and reporting. Those are prime candidates for a partner. At Portage, handing off that infrastructure “gives back the bulk of the time… to their teachers so that their teachers can still function as teacher [of] record and focus their attention on the students that need it most,” Dylan says.
Dr. Whitfield also sees it that way. “The teacher is the critical element in the classroom,” he says, and that teacher shouldn’t be stuck with “all these extra roles that have accumulated for teachers over time.”
As long as a district names a program owner (Dylan’s launch guide covers that step), our COO says Subject “will take on the brunt and the burden of the day-to-day and the legwork.”
Your homework: Circle every job that pulls teachers away from students and start the handoff conversation there.
Step 5: Meet the people doing the work
A handed-off job is only as good as the person holding it. Dylan says the typical vendor process can be “a little bit of a black box,” where a district chats with a sales rep and never learns “who’s actually working with my kid.” His fix is what he calls “an all-access pass,” which means sitting down with the people who run the virtual school and the teacher-of-record program.
Your homework: Ask any partner to meet the person who would run your program day to day. If the sales rep gets weirdly vague about who that is, take note.
Step 6: Keep the map open
Gaps show up once real students log on. A few weeks into Treetops’ first year, James’ counselor flagged that some kids were getting assignments on school holidays. That became the next item to sort out with Subject. Dylan says his team looks for “blind spots from a programming standpoint,” and partner districts help “push the envelope with our product roadmap.”
Your homework: set a short monthly check-in with your partner where the only agenda item is what’s missing.
How two schools handed off differently (and successfully)
Portage and Treetops drew their maps in opposite directions, and both paid off.
Portage, a medium-sized district, lost almost 300 students to outside virtual programs the year before it launched its virtual academy, PACE. It kept its own teachers as teachers of record and handed Subject “the curriculum, the services, and the infrastructure.” Portage projected 50 to 60 enrollments in year one and landed just under 270, which Dylan says added up to almost a 10x return on what the district spent.
Treetops, a Texas charter with about 240 students, went the other way. James’ team felt good about having “the administrative and operational support,” but building its own curriculum and online platform “was going to be a lot for us.” So the school kept operations and handed off content.
Setup took about five days of trial and error. “You don’t realize how many different platforms have to talk to each other to make this thing work,” James says. Now he can see “where students are at in real time throughout the day.”
It’s not that much different from F1, after all. The driver never hops out to change the tires, and the whole stop still takes under two seconds. Your district can run the same pit stop. Write down the jobs and keep the ones your people do best.
Then find a partner willing to show you exactly who’s holding the rest.
Bring your pencil drafts to a call with our team, and we’ll help you map which virtual school jobs your district keeps and which ones Subject can carry. Book a demo →
FAQs
What jobs does a virtual school need covered?
A virtual school needs about 10 jobs covered, according to Subject COO Dylan Hoffman. The list includes a course library, grading, integrity checks, special education support, progress reporting, 24/7 tutoring, a teacher of record, live sessions, pacing plans and parent communication. Districts can split these jobs with a partner.
What is a teacher of record in a virtual school?
A teacher of record is the certified teacher legally responsible for a student’s grade in a course. In a virtual program, districts can keep their own teachers in that role or give it to a partner’s certified teachers. Staffing gaps such as teacher turnover often decide which option fits.
Do districts need to hire new staff to launch a virtual school?
Districts can often launch a virtual school with current staff by handing time-heavy jobs to a partner. Grading, integrity checks, tutoring and reporting are common handoffs. Portage Township Schools kept its own teachers as teachers of record while Subject handled the curriculum and infrastructure.
How should a district vet a virtual school partner?
A district should vet a virtual school partner by meeting the people who will run its program day to day, beyond the sales rep. District leaders should also flag gaps to the partner as students start using the virtual program, such as assignments landing on school holidays.