here are many VHS success stories. Some are about how individual students and teachers have been affected. A few are stories of schools mobilized to improve education. We want to tell you some of those stories.

Two years ago Monroe Senior School, Alabama's smallest K-12 school, was in trouble. Budget cuts threatened the school with closure. Low test scores were close to prompting a state takeover. The local board of education gave the school three years to make good. One of the proposals was to try asynchronous instruction. After researching the possibilities, and talking with Bruce Droste, director of the Virtual High School, they signed up five seniors for Introduction to Botany and then five sophomores the following semester.

Things began to change. Students were excited, and they did well in a difficult class which even the State Superintendent compared to a freshman college course. As a result, Monroe students started competing for the opportunity to take VHS courses. Since students had to fulfill specific local academic requirements in order to participate, their other work improved as well. "We do not know specifically what contributed to a change in overall test scores," explains Dr. Brooks Steele, Director of Library Media/Technology/Federal Programs, "but we know that the VHS course did help."

In her address to the school, the Monroe Senior School class valedictorian thanked the administration for allowing her to take courses via the Internet. Says Steele, "The students felt that they could not compete with other students from other parts of the country, but their success showed they could."

Monroe Senior has not closed, and its test scores have improved. And 40 students in two schools are now eligible to take VHS courses. The improvement is certainly not entirely due to VHS. Nevertheless, "VHS has changed the quality of education at Monroe Senior School," says Steele. "VHS has changed the notion of education for all of us."

VHS can also expand the horizons of individual students by providing a greater variety of courses to choose from, as we heard from Alan Seay, Principal of Iowa Park High School in Texas. "Your organization really helped out one of my students," writes Seay. A student of his was headed towards an honors level diploma, except for one problem. Her schedule of upper level honors and AP classes, necessary in order to receive an honors diploma, left no room for a state Fine Arts requirement. In order to take one of Iowa Park's Fine Arts classes, the student would have had to drop an AP class. But by enrolling in "American Music Heritage -- Song and Society" offered by VHS, she was able to maintain her honors classes while also fulfilling the Fine Arts requirement with a high-quality course. "She will be able to satisfy her dream through VHS," explains Seay.

VHS affected teacher Ken Sowards' life in a very different way. Sowards teaches in a small, rural high school in west central Ohio, where course offerings are by necessity limited. As a social studies teacher, Sowards had hoped that someday he could teach a course on the Vietnam War. He would get that chance when his school joined VHS, but that would be only half the story.

One day when Sowards was about to start teaching his VHS class, he received an email from Susan Gerber, a VHS site coordinator at the American Community School in Amman, Jordan. One of Gerber's students, an American whose parents worked at the U.S. embassy, was interested in the Vietnam class.

"I have always felt teaching to be a rather lonely profession," says Sowards. "I can go for months without talking to another history teacher. As far as I was concerned, communicating with another teacher from an exotic teaching environment was another benefit of participating in VHS." He also struck up a correspondence with Gerber's husband, a Vietnam veteran, who wrote a short autobiographical sketch of his Vietnam experiences for Sowards' students.

Three weeks into the course, a remarkable coincidence was discovered. Gerber had to leave Jordan to check her daughter into a hospital in Dayton, Ohio, 45 minutes from Sowards' school. Gerber spent a day there -- a VHS site coordinator from a private school in Amman, Jordan, visiting a VHS teacher in a rural public school in Ohio -- and discovered that not only had they grown up in the same town, they had gone to the same schools. "We had even had the same inspirational math teacher who in some small way had led us both to a career in education," explains Sowards, feeling nothing short of flabbergasted. They also discovered that Gerber's grandfather, a doctor, had saved the life of Sowards' grandfather in the 1940s.

"It seemed to me there was a lesson in all of this," says Sowards. "For five months I had been communicating with a colleague halfway around the world only to find out we had grown up a half-mile from one another. As a VHS teacher, I was reaching out, making contact with other teachers and students from all over the world, and in the end, the farther out into the world I reached, the closer it brought me to home."

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