Why Distance Learning?

In this episode of Why Distance Learning, Seth, Allyson, and Tami speak with Dr. Nichole Lemmon, Executive Director of Virtual Learning and Strategic Planning at Springfield Public Schools and founder of Launch Virtual Learning — about what it takes to run the only statewide K-12 virtual school in the country inside a public school district. Launch serves more than 400 Missouri districts and 23,000 students annually, with 85% of those students enrolled in just one or two courses at a time, a structure Nichole has maintained deliberately for fifteen years.

Together, Seth, Allyson, Tami, and Nichole explore how Missouri's public education funding flows through virtual providers and why roughly $60 million of it is going to out-of-state for-profit companies. They get into the three reasons Launch outperforms the field on state assessments: Missouri-specific curriculum, class sizes that mirror what the state mandates for seated schools, and in-state testing. They talk about what drove the decision to add synchronous instruction after years of building async-first, and what it looked like when Nichole told the governor of Missouri she could put the entire state on her platform in 2020 - and then had to deliver on it. The conversation also covers how Launch now runs direct-to-consumer ad campaigns on Hulu targeting millennial women on Sunday evenings, and why a public school program decided it had to compete on marketing terms with the companies it's trying to outperform.

Key Topics
  • Public vs. for-profit virtual school funding in Missouri
  • Course-access model and why 85% of Launch students take one or two classes
  • Class size standards and how Launch mirrors seated school requirements
  • Why Launch added synchronous instruction — and what wasn't working without it
  • COVID-era overextension: saying yes to the governor and the two-year recovery
  • Virtual special education and medically fragile learners
  • Direct-to-consumer marketing for a public school program
Links & Resources

Guest Bio: Dr. Nichole Lemmon
Dr. Nichole Lemmon is the Executive Director of Virtual Learning and Strategic Planning at Springfield Public Schools in Missouri, where she founded SPS Online in 2011 - now known as Launch Virtual Learning - and grew it into the only statewide K-12 virtual school in the country operating inside a public school district, serving more than 400 districts annually. She serves on the Executive Board of the Virtual Learning Leadership Alliance and as the Missouri State Affiliate for the Digital Learning Collaborative. Dr. Lemmon holds a doctorate in Curriculum and Instruction from Lindenwood University.

About the Hosts
Seth Fleischauer is the founder of Banyan Global Learning and a host of Why Distance Learning, a podcast for education leaders and practitioners making real decisions about how virtual learning gets designed, adopted, and sustained. Through Banyan, he designs live virtual programs that connect K-12 classrooms to global peers and expert facilitators. See https://www.banyangloballearning.com/programs/global-cohorts

Allyson Mitchell and Tami Moehring are co-hosts of Why Distance Learning and members of the team at CILC, the Center for Interactive Learning and Collaboration, which connects students to real experts through live virtual field trips and experiences. See https://cilc.org

Creators and Guests

Host
Allyson Mitchell
SF
Host
Seth Fleischauer
TM
Host
Tami Moehring

What is Why Distance Learning??

Why Distance Learning? is a podcast about the decisions, design choices, and assumptions that determine whether live virtual learning becomes shallow and transactional—or meaningful, relational, and effective at scale.

The show is designed for education leaders, instructional designers, and system-level practitioners responsible for adopting, scaling, and sustaining virtual, hybrid, and online learning models. Each episode examines the structural conditions under which distance learning actually works—and the predictable reasons it fails when it doesn’t.

Through conversations with researchers, experienced practitioners, and field-shaping leaders, Why Distance Learning? translates research, field evidence, and lived experience into decision-relevant insight. Episodes surface real tradeoffs, near-failures, and hard-won lessons, equipping listeners with clear framing and language they can use to explain, defend, or redesign distance learning models in real organizational contexts.

Hosted by Seth Fleischauer of Banyan Global Learning, and Allyson Mitchell and Tami Moehring of the Center for Interactive Learning and Collaboration, the podcast challenges outdated narratives about distance learning and explores what becomes possible when live virtual education is designed intentionally, human-centered, and grounded in evidence.

# Why Distance Learning — Dr. Nichole Lemmon
# Transcript
# *Timestamps after first cut are approximate*
# *Note: Obvious stutters and false starts have been smoothed for readability.*

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**[INTRO — recorded separately]**

[00:00] Seth: Hello, and welcome to Why Distance Learning, the podcast for education leaders and practitioners who are making real decisions about how virtual learning gets designed, adopted, and sustained. I'm Seth Fleischauer, founder and president of Banyan Global Learning, and my cohosts are Allyson Mitchell and Tami Moehring of the Center for Interactive Learning and Collaboration. Every episode we try to surface at least one assumption worth questioning.

Dr. Nichole Lemmon is the Executive Director of Virtual Learning and Strategic Planning at Springfield Public Schools, where she started SPS Online in 2011 and grew it into Launch Virtual Learning — now serving roughly 23,000 students annually across more than 400 of Missouri's districts. Launch is the only statewide K-12 virtual school in the country operating at this scale inside a public school district, and 85% of those students are enrolled in just one or two courses at a time.

In this conversation we get into why the course-access model is still the center of gravity at Launch fifteen years in, how she thinks about the performance gap between public and for-profit virtual providers, and what happened when she told the governor of Missouri she could put the entire state on her platform in 2020.

This episode is brought to you by CILC, the Center for Interactive Learning and Collaboration, connecting students to real experts through live virtual field trips and experiences — visit cilc.org to learn more. And by Banyan Global Learning, which brings K-12 classrooms face to face with global peers and expert facilitators through live, thematic international exchange programs — find them at banyangloballearning.com.

And now here's my conversation with Dr. Nichole Lemmon.

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[00:01] Seth: Doctor Nichole Lemmon, welcome to the podcast.

[00:04] Dr. Nichole Lemmon: Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here today.

[00:07] Seth: We are excited to talk with you. One of the things you mentioned when we were chatting here before is that your job is very big. And it is — 23,000 students at Launch Virtual Learning, which was started in 2011. Back then it was for course access for students whose districts couldn't staff certain classes. But with 23,000 students, is it still fundamentally that — a gap-filler — or has it evolved into something different?

[00:40] Dr. Nichole Lemmon: Yeah, so really for us the primary focus and primary audience are still students who need one or two courses. I actually just looked at the numbers today. About 85% of our enrollments are still what we consider to be hybrid or per-course enrollments — students needing anywhere from one class to not their full schedule. They may still have something going on in a traditional environment. As we continue to experience tightening budgets in public education spaces, the conversation has never been more relevant around how we're helping school districts — particularly in Missouri — provide a full range of options to their students when they don't necessarily have enough students to justify the cost of a full class. I was working with a superintendent this morning and he was mentioning: what do we do when budgets get tight? We look at classes with low enrollment and we cut those first. And low-enrolled classes are typically your upper level classes — classes for gifted or advancing students. We can't offer trigonometry in a rural part of Missouri for two kids. We can't spend a teacher's block of the day on that. So what we allow is this district's two kids and that district's five kids and another district's seven kids — when you put it together, you've got a full class. My goal is for no student to ever have to hear the word no from an academic scheduling perspective. How do we ensure yes for kids?

[02:32] Seth: Do you have to have those same enrollment numbers — do you need the two and the three and the six to get to eleven? Are there minimum enrollments you need in order for a class to go?

[02:52] Dr. Nichole Lemmon: We do have a minimum threshold — we want a class to have at least seven. That's our magic number. But we never really have to worry about it. Our classes are full; we roll more sections. The only time we see it is sometimes in really unique career technical education level four classes. We're one of the only providers of ag education online in the country. We have one of the only FFA virtual programs in the entire country — we were commissioned with the first virtual FFA in the country two years ago. An ag level four might have six kids or five, but they've worked their way to their senior year and we are their provider. It's worth it to offer that. So I'll let a health class be packed with 33 so I can run an ag with a few less. I can't think of any time I've closed a class in recent memory. We make it work.

[04:07] Seth: And that's your discretion, right? You see the balance sheet and you're like, I'm going to put 33 kids in that health class in order to be able to run upper level Latin.

[04:19] Dr. Nichole Lemmon: That's right. Exactly. You've got it.

[04:21] Seth: Amazing.

[04:22] Allyson: My goodness. So you get to play with all of the matrix — which must be fun and exhausting all at the same time.

[04:25] Dr. Nichole Lemmon: Sure. And I should say I have a great team. One of the things about Launch is we have a large footprint in terms of employing educators and a variety of people in the tech field. We build everything in-house. We run our own help desk, we have our own programmers, we own all the intellectual property — we don't purchase from vendors. When you call our office, you get a real person. When you chat with our chatbot, it's a real person on the other side. If I'm going to use AI, it's not going to be to replace forward-facing people who connect with kids. I have a great team that manages enrollment and has created a lot of systems to help me make pretty quick decisions from both a financial and business model perspective, but also just what's great for kids. It's fun.

[05:06] Seth: Yeah.

[05:20] Allyson: Yeah. Teamwork makes the dream work for sure. Well, you have a unique model — your school is a public school, correct? And I think there is a statistic that Missouri spends around $57 million in public ed dollars annually, with about $60 million going to private organizations. So I wonder — with all that you've been doing and the success of Launch — what do the outcomes look like? And how much of that performance advantage comes from being public versus the population you attract? How do you separate those two things?

[05:52 *(approx)*] Dr. Nichole Lemmon: Mm-hmm.

[06:11 *(approx)*] Dr. Nichole Lemmon: Sure. So we are the only one I have found in the country — and I've been around this for a long time, since 2011 — I have yet to find a virtual school that operates at this scale that actually sits inside a public school district. Usually programs like these are run by state departments or universities. So we are a public school that took this on for the state of Missouri. Our partner districts primarily sustain us. We have 407 partner districts who enroll directly with us. That funding is separate from the over $60 million that flew out of state to out-of-state providers — there are 15 other providers in the state of Missouri. It's always our goal to retain public education dollars in the state of Missouri. The business model is unique in that we sit inside a public school and revenue comes from two places: partner district enrollments, which are a flow-through of public ed money — the state pays them, they pay us — and parents who can enroll directly with us. That $60 million that flew out of state represents parents who chose to enroll directly in one of those 15 providers. Our goal is to ensure we're providing the highest quality. We are the highest academically performing of those 15 vendors. It's not even close. And I think it comes down to three things.

[07:58 *(approx)*] Seth: Hmm.

[08:01 *(approx)*] Dr. Nichole Lemmon: We are not a nationally normed curriculum — the other companies are. They might have a fifth grade class pulling from all states, so their curriculum has to be normed to national standards. We serve only Missouri. If you're in a class with us, you're with a Missouri teacher who lives in Missouri. We require students to live in our state, so the money stays local with taxpayer dollars. You're learning Missouri learning standards tied directly to state assessments. That's the first thing — it's truly a Missouri model. The second is class sizes. We know there are predatory virtual companies that will put 100 students to a teacher — we've seen the data in our own state. We cap our classes at what you'd see in a seated environment. If the state says third grade can't go over 24, we don't go over 24. High school says 33 — we don't go above 33. The third is how we test our students. We go to the community so they don't have to drive three or four hours for in-person testing. We want to make sure they don't have to go more than 30 minutes to take a test. We're here, we're in the state, we can shake your hand and look you in the eye. Those three things come together to help make sure our students are successful. State testing is one metric, but it's an important one, and we're proud to be the highest academically performing.

[10:12 *(approx)*] Seth: There's a lot there I'd love to dive into. Just to clarify — the metric is state testing, right? That's the one where you outperform all the private models. And then you also added the synchronous component, Launch Live, in 2019. I imagine the small class sizes are part of what makes that possible. I remember being at DLAC one year and hearing stories of some states where there's no limit — 400 people in an online class with one teacher, as if that's somehow going to allow the student-teacher relationship to flourish and enable high-quality learning.

[10:59 *(approx)*] Dr. Nichole Lemmon: I mean, possible — not possible.

[11:01 *(approx)*] Allyson: Yeah. Feel like you're walking into an undergraduate lecture and you're like, I'll sit here, maybe you'll see me.

[11:05 *(approx)*] Dr. Nichole Lemmon: And you're in first grade — what's happening?

[11:06 *(approx)*] Seth: Yeah, that's crazy. So part of what made Launch Live possible was these smaller class sizes. What wasn't happening in the asynchronous model that made you feel a synchronous component would add value?

[11:29 *(approx)*] Dr. Nichole Lemmon: Sure. At that time we introduced a couple of things that made us look at live instruction. One was a true K-5 model. I am an advocate for elementary online — yes, you can teach a kindergartener online. We mailed the manipulatives, our teachers are amazing, they're not on screens all day. But live instruction is a huge part of that. Once we started doing elementary, it was really important to our team that we designed a model where students were on live with a teacher. That started the conversation. As soon as we started that, our middle school teachers said they'd love a middle school option with live instruction for core classes. And that's also when we started our special education program. I'm really proud of our virtual special education program. We hear amazing things from parents of kids who were not successful in seated environments and are now thriving in virtual ones — particularly students who are medically fragile or have behavior disorders. I always joke that in a virtual setting you can just mute and act out all you want, and you're not hurting any other children.

[12:46 *(approx)*] Allyson: Yeah.

[12:48 *(approx)*] Seth: Yeah.

[12:50 *(approx)*] Dr. Nichole Lemmon: All of those things combined to start this live instruction conversation. COVID happened and parents started asking for more of it, even at the high school level. When everyone went online, schools were doing what was essentially emergency remote learning — not virtual learning. But parents started saying, why doesn't my freshman have the option for live classes with Launch? It really stretched us to start thinking differently. Last year we made an additional investment in live instruction — we doubled the amount we offered because our waiting lists were so long. Our goal is for no child to have to wait to get into a live class. It's expensive to run — that's why a lot of virtual schools don't do it. You can't run an adjunct model easily with live instruction; it takes investment. But we've seen huge demand for it post-COVID. Pre-COVID it had a specific niche audience. We were recognized for positive behavior intervention and support, tier one schools. We do PBIS and social emotional learning. It's been great.

[14:22 *(approx)*] Allyson: I love hearing you talk about the synchronous model and that you could see there was a need for it — especially after the digital pivot of 2020. A question that often comes up is where the synchronous component fits in the asynchronous experience. And you mentioned that COVID was a turning point — it became really big, and you spent two years in what we'd call the dust-settling period. I wonder — because you describe yourself as a leader who says yes — how do you hold onto that culture while knowing what it cost you? That's not something a lot of people in distance learning talk about openly.

[15:57 *(approx)*] Dr. Nichole Lemmon: Sure. I'll never forget driving home from a large meeting — at the end of it I received a kind of SOS text from our superintendent saying, "That's your last one of those for a while." I laughed and thought, how bad can it be? I got in the car and was quickly put on a conference call with the governor of Missouri and our superintendent. The governor said: are you in a position where you could give Launch to the state for free? I live by the motto of say yes, figure it out later. We said yes. And within about two weeks we had 120,000 students on the platform. Just the tech to keep something like that lifted — we didn't have the help desk support we needed. We crashed phone lines in our city. An entire quadrant went down because of it. In hindsight, was it the right thing? Yes. We were helping districts who had nothing — literally no LMS. We gave them our courses, but the support side suffered. That was the end of that school year. Then the next year it became even worse. Students in hybrid environments wanted to go full-time virtual. The state law in Missouri changed so families could enroll directly with virtual schools — that opened the floodgates through a different avenue. We just didn't have the staff. My team was like: Lemmon, we're getting terrible Google reviews. Hold times of an hour to two hours. It was taking us a week to enroll a child when we were used to doing it in an hour. The brand damage was real, but so was the damage to our team as people. We're often quick in our culture — and I suffer from this too — to move past it and say it's over. But the reality is it changed people forever. It really did change the way I had to lead. I still want to lead with yes, and I do. But I had to move from triage leadership to strategic leadership. What do we say yes to? What does brand damage look like? How do we clean it up? How do we keep the doors open for families and students while recognizing our own physical limitations? Part of that was asking for help. In hindsight, we should have just paused and said, what does this look like? Hopefully we never have to lead through something like that again. But what it taught me is: when there's an immediate demand, pause and ask some questions. Figure out what it needs to look like. And then it's been a lot of educating families about what virtual learning is versus what they experienced during that time. No one — even the best virtual school — was their best self during that time. It just wasn't possible.

[19:42 *(approx)*] Seth: Sure.

[19:43 *(approx)*] Allyson: Yeah, absolutely. It's like you're going to take the jump — you're just going to make sure there are no rocks you can see below first.

[19:50 *(approx)*] Dr. Nichole Lemmon: Like let's just pause, ask questions.

[19:50 *(approx)*] Seth: And as someone who was in a state that paused for nine months before anything happened, I have to say — on behalf of all your students — thank you for saying yes. Having something stand up, even if you had a hard time keeping it up, was better than the nothing we had in my state for a harmful amount of time. Michael Barbour was on the podcast recently and said that emergency learning — unlike typical virtual learning as it was — was probably the most normal thing those kids had during that time, because they were connected to their peers and their teachers. So thank you. Your whole function at Launch is to be a gap-filler, so of course you lead with yes. If you don't fill that gap, who will?

[21:07 *(approx)*] Dr. Nichole Lemmon: I think I would still say yes. I just think maybe we should have paused and asked some questions. We never had a gap in instruction — we closed seated instruction on Friday and lifted to the state on Monday.

[21:25 *(approx)*] Allyson: So interesting. Because I feel like there's almost an adrenaline you must have been feeling — you're just going, we have to go, don't let anything drop. Especially coming from a place of yes and being in education — all the empathy and compassion you feel for teachers, students, and families goes on such a wider level once you're doing it for the state.

[22:16 *(approx)*] Dr. Nichole Lemmon: Yeah. I think that adrenaline carried us for two years. And then when it was gone and you could pause and look back — so proud of us, so proud of our team. The families who stayed with us because they started with Launch during COVID and found success with their child. We had our graduation ceremony and there are kids who've been with us since sixth grade — that makes the pain worth it. I also have a ton of PTSD and I can't remember a lot of it. Someone will say, tell me about a decision you made during that time, and I'm like, I don't even remember.

[23:07 *(approx)*] Seth: Nichole, when we met at DLAC, you had something in your purse that you shared with me — a simple yet brilliant thing to have on you. It was your parent and partner newsletter. Schools so often have amazing stories to tell, but rarely see themselves as entities that need to market, that are playing a public relations game of communicating their successes. Can you tell us a little more about your newsletter — who you're actually writing it for, and what you think these audiences need from you?

[24:11 *(approx)*] Dr. Nichole Lemmon: Sure. We put out a magazine four times a year. We refer to it as a magazine — it's a high-gloss, full magazine, produced quarterly. There are two audiences. One version goes to superintendents, counselors, and principals, direct-mailed to their schools. It serves two purposes: it's a quarterly reminder that we're here and we're your partner, and we send it to districts that aren't yet our partners — just letting them know we exist. The parent and student magazine goes to current full-time students. That's a retention strategy — a reminder of what we do and who we are, and families love seeing their kids in it. I always say virtual learning is invisible. A superintendent once said to me, "You and your VR students." I said, well, they're not virtual reality — they're real people. They have real stories. My marketing and engagement team — two people — produce two versions of the magazine quarterly. One highlights how school districts are using Launch; the other highlights the stories of families and students. We have to make virtual learning visible. The digital space is so crowded — you get a thousand digital newsletters and toss them in the trash. I love physical mail in people's hands. We started it in 2011 and we're still doing it. It works. We print it with our local technical college — again, keeping funding local, in public schools. Those stories become blogs on our website, which become social media posts. It's feeding digital spaces. But we have to market our service as educators. The predatory companies are marketing, and we have to be better at telling our story. No one goes on Google and gives their school a positive review — the people who are upset do that. So how are you getting your story out there? It also gives me something I can hand to legislators and other audiences — a physical item that says this is what we do, and I'm happy to answer questions.

[27:34 *(approx)*] Allyson: I love that you know how to make it visible. And I love the idea of leaving a beautiful, glossy artifact that tells your story. I'm also interested in your new marketing campaign — I understand it's built around a very specific demographic: millennial women making educational decisions on Sunday evenings.

[28:22 *(approx)*] Dr. Nichole Lemmon: That's right. So I also know the limitations of our team, and I knew we needed to partner. I want to give a shout-out to Field Trip Marketing — they work primarily with nonprofits and they're out of Kentucky. We've been really happy with the work they've assisted us with. Part of it was we wanted to do more direct marketing to families, because the predatory for-profit companies are — and we were losing that game. When you think about the $60 million that flew out of our state: how do we make sure families even know we're an option? We weren't doing direct marketing to families. Our magazine went to families already with us. We were counting on partner districts to let their families know we existed. But the homeschool market is growing around the country and school choice is expanding. I had to say: we need to market to families, and I don't know how to do that. So we partnered with Field Trip and they did market research. What they found is that millennial women make the educational decisions primarily in their families, and we needed to do targeted marketing to them. And as we looked at when our website was getting hits and when our Google ads were performing, it was Sunday evenings. We laughed — that's when a kid goes, "Mom, I'm sick of school. I don't want to go back." Or: I'm being bullied and the thought of going back Monday makes me sick. Our ads run all the time, but we get the most hits on Sundays. So we started a campaign aimed at different strategies. Meta ads directed to direct-to-consumer, very narrow — how do we get to the right people making educational decisions? We also have ads running on Hulu. If you're a parent who has Googled "virtual school" or "homeschool" and you're in our demographic and our area, you're getting commercials from us with QR codes to enroll now. Those ads follow that user everywhere — to their podcast, to websites. It's targeted marketing and it's changed so much. I'm not an expert in it, so I was glad we partnered with Field Trip. Our applications have doubled from this time last year. We really just kicked off the full package — we started some of it this spring, but July 1 was the full launch, and the results are already speaking for themselves. We have people in our own community who didn't even know Launch had elementary. Direct marketing scares people in public education, but for not a lot of money, you can really get your message out there. I was in a meeting Monday about seated enrollment — which is down nationwide in public schools — and my friends on the seated side said, well, Lemmon's seeing positive results with her marketing. Why aren't we marketing our own traditional buildings? People are scared of it. It's not popular to think we have to advertise. But you have to get your message out.

[32:45 *(approx)*] Seth: So if we're in Missouri, where do we find this? And if we're out of Missouri, is there a place we can go to hear some of these stories?

[33:00 *(approx)*] Dr. Nichole Lemmon: Our website — launchvirtuallearning.com — has everything. You can see digital versions of our magazine. I give it away. I always tell people: just take the model. You don't need Adobe Illustrator to make magazines anymore — you can do it on Canva and print anywhere. Work with a local company and they'll even take your addresses and mail it out. All that inspiration can be found at launchvirtuallearning.com, as well as our course catalog, our story, what we offer. I'm also part of two organizations. The Virtual Learning Leadership Alliance — VLLA — is made up of 20 nonprofit virtual schools in the country. They have a new accreditation process called Accred that's accrediting virtual schools, recognized by Cognia and Middle States. That's how you can know if it's quality — a great opportunity to put your program through. And then there's DLAC — the Digital Learning Collaborative. I sit on their executive committee. They have a lot of research around virtual trends available on their website, and we've been part of several case studies with their work. I love to give things away to other nonprofit schools and organizations. If we found something that worked and don't share it, we're not benefiting all students. We've had other states come and meet with us, look at how we do it, and we give them tips on the business model. I went to school to be an English teacher and I run a $34 million business. If I can figure it out, we can help other people get past the scary part that might be keeping them from trying new things.

[35:27 *(approx)*] Seth: Amazing. And some of those things you mentioned — Accred, Chris Harrington is a friend of the podcast. DLAC, John Watson is a friend of the podcast. We're getting there — one episode at a time, clawing our way into the cool kid club.

[35:46 *(approx)*] Dr. Nichole Lemmon: Well, you all are the cool kids then.

[35:47 *(approx)*] Allyson: We can link all the wonderful resources in the show notes so everyone can get to you directly. I really loved the website — I had a great time navigating it. There's a beautiful image of someone dancing, talking about the balance virtual learning gives them alongside their dance commitments.

[36:23 *(approx)*] Dr. Nichole Lemmon: Thank you. Click around and ask questions.

[36:27 *(approx)*] Seth: And Tami, could you tee up our last question?

[36:33 *(approx)*] Tami Moehring: I'd be happy to. It's a question we ask everyone on the podcast — one of our favorites. It's the title of the podcast. Why distance learning? Of all the things — why? What makes it unique?

[36:50 *(approx)*] Dr. Nichole Lemmon: One of our core beliefs at Launch is that a student's opportunity should not be limited by their zip code. My team jokes it should be tattooed on my body — I say it all the time. A quick anecdote: I was a child who lived in poverty. School changed my life. Because I had educators who believed in me and gave me opportunities, I have a doctorate in front of my name and I'm running a really cool school for a lot of cool kids. We limit students so often just based on where their family happens to live. We have a large rural population in Missouri, and districts with fewer than a hundred kids in a school. You cannot offer the plethora of things kids need today to be successful when you're struggling at that scale. And now we're seeing it in our biggest school districts too as budgets get tight. How do we make sure all students have access to high-quality learning so they can become what they want to? That's what virtual learning does. And it's why I'm so passionate about it.

[38:21] Seth: Amazing. Well, Dr. Nichole Lemmon, thank you so much for being here today. We'll link all of this in the show notes, and we really appreciate you coming on here and telling your story.

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**[OUTRO — recorded separately]**

That's a wrap on our conversation with Dr. Nichole Lemmon.

Fifteen years and 23,000 students later, 85% of Launch's enrollments are still one or two courses at a time — a student in a rural district who needs AP Chemistry and would otherwise be told no. The case for virtual learning as infrastructure rather than alternative is harder to make than the case for virtual as a full-time option, but it's probably the more honest one.

If you're thinking about where virtual fits in your district, Launch's website — launchvirtuallearning.com — has their course catalog and digital versions of their magazine, and we'll have links in the show notes.

Thanks for listening to Why Distance Learning, and we'll see you next time.