As Molly Hamill explains the origin of the Declaration of Independence to her students, she dons a white wig fashioned into a ponytail, appearing as John Adams, before sporting a bald cap in homage to Benjamin Franklin, then wearing a red wig to imitate Thomas Jefferson. But instead of looking out to an enraptured sea of 28 fifth graders leaning forward in their desks, she is speaking directly into a camera.
Hamill is one of a growing number of educators who forwent brick-and-mortar schools post-pandemic. She now teaches fully virtually through the public, online school California Virtual Academies, having swapped desks for desktops.
After the abrupt shift to virtual schooling during the COVID-19 health crisis — and the stress for many educators because of it — voluntarily choosing the format may seem unthinkable.
“You hear people say, ‘I would never want to go back to virtual,’ and I get it, it was super stressful because we were building the plane as we were flying it, deciding if we were going to have live video or recordings, and adapt all the teaching materials to virtual,” Hamill says. “But my school is a pretty well-oiled machine … there’s a structure already in place. And kids are adaptable, they already like being on a computer.”
And for Hamill, and thousands of other teachers, instructing through a virtual school is a way to attempt striking a rare work-life balance in the education world.
More Flexibility for Teaching Students
The number of virtual schools has grown, as has the number of U.S. children enrolled in them. In the 2022-2023 school year, about 2.5 percent of K-12 students were enrolled in full-time virtual education (1.8 percent of them through public or private online schools, and 0.7 percent as homeschoolers), according to data published in 2024 by the National Center for Education Statistics. And parents reported that 7 percent of students who learned at home that year took at least one virtual course.
There’s been an accompanying rise in the number of teachers instructing remotely via virtual schools.
The number of teachers employed by K12, which is under the parent company Stride Inc. and one of the largest and longest-running providers of virtual schools, has jumped from 6,500 to 8,000 over the last three or four years, says Niyoka McCoy, chief learning officer at the company.
McCoy credits the growth in part to teachers wanting to homeschool their own children, and therefore needing to do their own work from home, but she also thinks it is a sign of a shifting preference for technology-based offerings.
“They think this is the future, that more online programs will open up,” McCoy says.
Connections Academy, which is the parent company of Pearson Online Academy and a similarly long-standing online learning provider, employs 3,500 teachers. Nik Osborne, senior vice president of partnerships and customer success at Pearson, says it’s been easy to both recruit and keep teachers: roughly 91 percent of teachers in the 2024-2025 school year returned this academic year.
“Teaching in a virtual space is very different than brick-and-mortar; even the type of role teachers play appeals to some teachers,” Osborne says. “They become more of a guide to help the kids understand content.”
Courtney Entsminger, a middle school math teacher at the public, online school Virginia Connections Academy, teaches asynchronously and likes the ability to record her own lesson plans in addition to teaching them live, which she says helps a wider variety of learners. Hamill, who teaches synchronously, similarly likes that the virtual format can be leveraged to build more creative lesson plans, like her Declaration of Independence video, or a fake livestream of George Washington during the Battle of Trenton, both which are on her YouTube channel.
Whether a school is asynchronous or not largely depends on the standard of the provider. Pearson, which runs the Virtual Academies where Entsminger teaches, is asynchronous. For other standalone public school districts, such as Georgia Cyber Academy, the decision comes down to what students need: if they are performing at or above grade level, they get more flexibility, but if they come to the school below grade level — reading at a second grade level, for example, but placed in a fourth grade classroom — they need more structure.
“I do feel like a TikTok star where I record myself teaching through different aspects of that curriculum because students work in different ways,” says Entsminger, who has 348 online students across three grades. “In person you’re able to realize ‘this student works this way,’ and I’ll do a song and dance in front of you. Online, I can do it in different mediums.”
Karen Bacon, a transition liaison at Ohio Virtual Academy who works with middle and high school students in special education, was initially drawn to virtual teaching because of its flexibility for supporting students through a path that works best for them.
“I always like a good challenge and thought this was interesting to dive into how this works and different ways to help students,” says Bacon, who was a high school French teacher before making the switch to virtual in 2017. “There’s obviously a lot to learn and understand, but once you dive in and see all the options, there really are a lot of different possibilities out there.”
Bacon says there are “definitely less distractions,” than in a brick-and-mortar environment, allowing her to get more creative. For example, she had noticed stories crop up across the nation showcasing special education students in physical environments working to serve coffee to teachers and students as a way to learn workplace skills. She, adapting to the virtual environment, created the “Cardinal Cafe,” where students can accomplish the same goals, albeit with a virtual cup of joe.
“I don’t really consider myself super tech-y, but I have that curiosity and love going outside the box and looking at ways to really help my students,” she says.
A Way to Curb Teacher Burnout?
The flexibility that comes with teaching in a virtual environment is not just appealing for what it offers students. Teachers say it can also help cushion the consistently lower wages and lack of benefits most educators grapple with, conditions that drive many to leave the field.
“So many of us have said, ‘I felt so burned out, I wasn’t sure I could keep teaching,’” Hamill says, adding she felt similarly at the start of her career as a first grade teacher. “But doing it this way helps it feel sustainable. We’re still underpaid and not appreciated enough as a whole profession, but at least virtually some of the big glaring issues aren’t there in terms of how we’re treated.”
Entsminger was initially drawn to teaching in part because she hoped it would allow her to have more time with her future children than other careers might offer. But as she became a mother while teaching for a decade in a brick-and-mortar environment — both at the elementary school and the high school level — she found she was unable to pick up or drop her daughter off at school, despite working in the same district her daughter attended.
In contrast, while teaching online,“in this environment I’m able to take her to school, make her breakfast,” she says. “I’m able to do life and my job. On the daily, I’m able to be ‘Mom’ and ‘Ms. Entsminger’ with less fighting for my time.”
Because of the more-flexible schedule for students enrolled in virtual learning programs, teachers do not have to be “on” for eight straight hours. And they do not necessarily have to participate in the sorts of shared systems that keep physical schools running. In a brick-and-mortar school, even if Bacon, Hamill or Entsminger were not slated to teach a class, they might be assigned to spend their time walking their students to their next class or the bus stop, or tasked with supervising the cafeteria during a lunch period. But in the virtual environment, they have the ability to close their laptop, and to quietly plan lessons or grade papers.
However, that is not to say these teachers operate as islands. Hamill says one of the largest perks of teaching virtual school is working with other fifth grade teachers across the nation, who often share PowerPoints or other lesson plans, whereas, she says, “I think sometimes in person, people can be a little precious about that.”
The workload varies for teachers in virtual programs. Entsminger’s 300-plus students are enrolled in three grades. Some live as close as her same city, others as far-flung as Europe, where they play soccer. Hamill currently has 28 students, expecting to get to 30 as the school continuously admits more. According to the National Policy Education Center, the average student-teacher ratio in the nation’s public schools was 14.8 students per teacher in 2023, with virtual schools reporting having 24.4 students per teacher.
Hamill also believes that virtual environments keep both teachers and students safer. She says she was sick for nine months of the year her first year teaching, getting strep throat twice. She also points to the seemingly endless onslaught of school shootings and the worsening of behavior issues among children.
“The trade-off for not having to do classroom management of behavioral issues is huge,” she says. “If the kid is mean in the chat, I turn off the chat. If kids aren’t listening, I can mute everyone and say, ‘I’ll let you talk one at a time.’ Versus, in my last classroom, the kids threw chairs at me.”
There are still adjustments to managing kids remotely, the teachers acknowledge. Hamill coaches her kids through internet safety and online decorum, like learning that typing in all-caps, for example, can come across rudely.
And while the virtual teachers were initially concerned about bonding with their students, they have found those worries largely unfounded. During online office hours, Hamill plays Pictionary with her students and has met most of their pets over a screen. Meanwhile, Entsminger offers online tutoring and daily opportunities to meet, where she has “learned more than I ever thought about K-pop this year.”
There are also opportunities for in-person gatherings with students. Hamill does once-a-month meetups, often in a park. Bacon attended an in-person picnic earlier this month to meet the students who live near her. And both K12 and Connections Academy hold multiple in-person events for students, including field trips and extracurriculars, like sewing or bowling clubs.
“Of course I wish I could see them more in person, and do arts and crafts time — that’s a big thing I miss,” Hamill says. “But we have drawing programs or ways they can post their artwork; we find ways to adapt to it.”
And that adaptation is largely worth it to virtual teachers.
“Teaching is teaching; even if I’m behind a computer screen, kids are still going to be kids,” Entsminger says. “The hurdles are still there. We’re still working hard, but it’s really nice to work with my students, and then walk to my kitchen to get coffee, then come back to connect to my students again.”
