Celebrating 25 Years of Service: Our Digital Impact Report
Introduction: a Letter from Superintendent Steve Olmos
On the eve of a new millennium, Visions In Education was founded to help students better prepare for a world that promised nothing but change. The past twenty five years has seen a technological and cultural boom the likes of which the world has never seen before; one that directly impacts the day-to-day lives of the young people we serve. From the popularization of the internet and the rise of personal computing, through the tumultuous years of the global pandemic, Visions In Education has strived to equip our students to face an ever-changing world.
With a combination of instructional innovation and a firm operations foundation, our school has grown from a program serving 506 students in 1999 to serving over 7,500 TK-12 students in Northern California in 2024. By improving our services 1% better every day, we have pioneered new ways to deliver quality education to students from all walks of life. From students looking to catch up on credits and graduate high school to those bound to succeed in universities across the country, Visions has risen to meet the needs of thousands of students and helped them prepare for life after 12th grade.
Throughout all of this, as we have transitioned from a dependent to independent charter school, we remained committed to being a part of California’s public school system. Through a strong partnership with our authorizing district and under the measured guidance of our Board of Directors, Visions has remained focused on our mission of bettering our students’ lives for twenty five years. I am proud to be the latest in a line of successful superintendents and as we prepare for the next chapter in our school’s history, it is important to reflect on what has made Visions successful.
This report is dedicated to all Visionaries past, present, and future. May we continue to live up to the ideals of our mission and continue to prepare our students to succeed in a rapidly changing world.
Dr. Steve Olmos
Superintendent/Executive Director
Table of Contents
(Click the hyperlinks below to navigate to other sections)
- Introduction from Supt. Steve Olmos
- 25 Years at a Glance Video
- Our School
- Our Board of Directors
- Our Staff & Teachers
- Ensuring a Stable and Sustainable Financial Future
- Charting Our Own Course: A Journey to an Independent Visions
- Our Programs
- Home School Academy
- Independent Study Academy
- University Prep Early College Academy
- New Worlds of Work: Career Technical Education
- Instructional Innovations and Improvements
- Our Students
- Student Stories
- Key Metrics
- Our Impact
- Powered by Technology
- Student Services: Supporting Our Students Outside the Classroom
- Human Resources: Staffing Our School
- Business Services & Support: Supporting Our Educators
- Our Community
- Community Partnerships
- Partnering with Established Business Leaders
- Community Engagement
- Legislative Impact
- Our Future
- Lead Learners: Development For All Staff
- 1% Better – Improving Our School for Our Students
- Alumni: Celebrating Students Who Make an Impact
- Visions of the Future – A Conversation with Visions’ Leadership
Our Board of Directors
Since achieving independence in 2018, Visions In Education has been overseen by our own Board of Directors. Working with our leadership team and Superintendent’s office, our Board of Directors offers both guidance and oversight to ensure we meet our students’ diverse needs and wisely make use of our funds.
Our Board is an all volunteer board who generously donate both their time and expertise in educational, legal, and business fields for no compensation. Many of the strides Visions has made since achieving Independence have come as a result of our Board’s direction and guidance.
The guidance that our Board provides is critical to the ongoing success of our school. We thank all of our Board Members, current and former, for working to ensure Visions lives up to its mission of serving students.
Mark Holman
Chairperson
Board Term: 7/1/23 – 6/30/26
Learn More about Mark Holman
Terrence Shelton
Vice-Chairperson
Board Term: 7/1/23 – 6/30/26
Learn More about Terrence Shelton
Sandra Morales
Board Member
Board Term: 7/1/24 – 6/30/27
Learn More about Sandra Morales
Clark Shueh
Board Member
Board Term: 7/1/24 – 6/30/27
Learn More about Clark Shueh
Former Board Members
Our former Board of Directors members have dutifully served Visions In Education through countless hours of volunteer service, including guiding our school during the turbulent pandemic years and meeting with legislative representatives to represent our school. Visions is grateful for the years of service our former Board Members have provided and is proud that they chose to be part of Visions’ history.
What started as a small collection of teachers and support staff has grown into an organization that can effectively support thousands of students in nine counties. The bedrock of Visions’ success for twenty five years has been the staff that serve our students with everything from instructional support, to technology services, to ensuring our school operates sustainably and ethically.
Our highly qualified, fully credentialed teaching staff is composed of passionate, thoughtful educators who embrace the challenges of teaching in a non-classroom based environment. Students often credit their teachers with their success when asked and value the personal 1:1 relationship that our school structure allows.
“My relationship with Mr. Garcia was great. His guidance and advice is what motivated me to step out of my comfort zone and explore different academic fields at a young age.”
“We have a fantastic relationship with our teacher. We love her because you can tell she cares about each student and endeavors to work with them individually according to their needs.”
“I’ve never met a single teacher that wouldn’t help me learn the material. I’ve also had some really good teachers like Miss Grant! Her class is very flexible, and she likes our creativity on assignments and our own personal projects we share in her Video Game Design class.”
Teachers receive two weeks of training prior to the start of each school year to train them on Visions policies and technology as well as set educational goals for the year. This training is reinforced with regular monthly training and personal development opportunities. In 2021, our Instructional Services team embraced the Professional Learning Community (PLC) model that sees teachers in academies work together to better serve their students. Over the course of 2021, Visions paid to send all of our teachers to training so every student had the opportunity to benefit from increased PLC collaboration.
Our classified support staff are likewise made up of dedicated professionals from all sectors that choose to use their skills in service of California’s students. From ensuring our finances are well managed to managing student orders, records, technology, and enrollment to supporting our teachers and administrative staff, our classified staff work in a fast-paced, mission-focused environment where improving service to students is our foremost objective.
Ensuring a Stable and Sustainable Financial Future
What started as a school with less than a $5 million dollar operating budget has grown to serve more than 7,500 students with an operating budget of over $100 million dollars.
Early in our school’s life, we experienced some missteps. Linda Gatenbein, our second school leader, made the case that Visions can do better and in the last twenty-three years, we have done our best to honor the trust placed in us. Since then, Visions has taken a prudent approach to managing our funds and is careful to set money aside for future investments such as replacing our student’s technology as it ages out. Under the stewardship of our Board of Directors and our Fiscal Services team, our school strives to ensure that the state funds we are entrusted with are used responsibly and for the benefit of our students.
Responsibly managing our finances ensures that Visions has the funds to continue to provide increased opportunities to students. As we emerged from the pandemic, Visions was in a stable position to hire more counselors, social workers, as well as invest in competitive salaries for educators. While other districts struggle with teacher shortages, Visions has been able to start the year with no vacant teaching positions thanks in part to having a stable financial base grown over years of prudent financial decision making.
Visions has strived to provide great options for students that need something different. With the best of intentions we tried various ideas and initiatives to support students, sometimes we were successful and sometimes we took some lumps as we learned what not to do. But we have also learned what to do as well, building on a quarter-century’s experience in the education sector and continuously striving to improve our processes.
Responsibly managing our finances and avoiding debt has allowed us the flexibility and freedom to chart our own course. Over the last twenty-five years, Visions has:
- Entered into a direct partnership with the Sacramento County Office of Education.
- Refined and updated our curriculum regularly to ensure our students have the best options available and our teachers can effectively support their learning.
- Negotiated with Apple, Amazon, and other large companies for goods and services for our students.
- Offered Synchronous Instruction Classes for weekly face-to-face interaction with students
- Created new efficiencies in LPAD Student Support System (LPAD SSS) for our operations, ordering, and accounting teams.
- Invested in staff training by covering degree and credential & certification costs for teachers as well as investing in regular training options/degree reimbursement for classified staff.
- Saved money by innovating new technology and integrating it into LPAD vs contracting with third-party programs. Since going independent, we have created our own messaging tools, enrollment tools, student event tools, and budget checking software that we would have otherwise needed to buy.
- Built a comprehensive and competitive benefits package to attract and retain high-quality staff.
- Shifted to an entirely online application system to make it easy for interested families to apply.
- Taken ownership of our student technology management and distribution.
- Pivoted as a response to crises (i.e. we were able to shift to an entirely online school in 2020 more effectively than other programs, including our office operations team who worked remotely for 2020 before returning to a hybrid program as restrictions were lifted).
- Continued to build our social work and counseling teams to address our students’ mental, emotional, and safety needs.
- Developed post-secondary education pathways through Career Technical Education, Early College for University Prep students, and Dual-Enrollment opportunities.
- Enhanced our regional event options to provide engaging events for students of all ages throughout our service area.
While we have never been (or claimed to be) perfect, we at Visions pride ourselves in learning a little more and doing a little better than we did in the past. As we look to the future, we intend to take the lessons we’ve learned and use them to make a more perfect school for our students.
Charting Our Own Course: A Journey to an Independent Visions
Visions began as a dependent charter school under the San Juan Unified School District. While much of the day-to-day operations were handled by Visions staff, we still relied on the district for much of the back-office operational things like payroll, student records, CALPADS, technology services, and other key operations. While Visions was and still is grateful for our partnership with San Juan Unified School District, in 2014 we began exploring ways to become an independent charter school to better serve our students.
As Visions grew in experience and started refining our processes, we decided that becoming an independent charter school would give Visions more flexibility to effectively serve students and build structures that would set Visions up for success for years to come. However, independence was not something that was undertaken lightly; between 2013 and 2018 when Visions submitted our petition to SJUSD for independence, Visions took on the work necessary to become an independent charter school while still maintaining our daily responsibilities.
At a high level, this work included:
- Working with STRS/PERS to ensure our staff could continue contributing to their pension plans.
- Applying for status as a non-profit organization.
- Implemented a new Student Information System (SIS) from School Pathways.
- Connecting with a new Learning Management System (LMS) to allow for course enrollments and student academic reports.
- Taking on the work of managing our students’ records and related CALPADS reporting,
- Partnering with the Sacramento County Office of Education to help us manage our fiscal responsibilities.
- Taking on core technology supports such as our phone systems and networking.
- Establishing our own independent human resources policies and benefits plans.
- Take on the work of managing accountability and oversight for student assessments.
- Establishing a new Board of Directors and training them on their responsibilities.
- Developing new governance policies and establishing a regular board meeting schedule.
This work took nearly four years to complete and was done while our school continued to provide service to our students. Leaders at the time compared it to “building a plane mid-flight” as we shifted our school from one way of doing things to another. Going independent also came with an unspoken caveat; with independence came increased responsibility and less support from the district. Thankfully, a dedicated staff, a good relationship with San Juan Unified School District, and strong enrollment trends gave Visions the sturdy base we needed to become independent successfully.
Independence Day
On August 27, 2017, a team of teachers, administrators, and staff members turned out for the SJUSD Board of Directors Meeting as Executive Director (soon to be our first Superintendent) Jody Graf presented our petition for independence. The work that Visions had done to become an independent charter school paid off as SJUSD’s Board of Directors granted Visions the independence we sought.
While the work that went into independence was tricky, it has paid off for the students we serve and the staff and teachers that serve them. As an independent charter school, Visions has had increased control over how we serve our communities, allowing us to innovate and experiment with methods of instruction while accepting full responsibility for our operations. Visions is grateful for our continued partnership with San Juan Unified School District.
Like most charter schools, Visions In Education was founded to serve an unmet need for diversity and individualized learning in public education. For 25 years, our team of teachers, administrators, counselors, and support staff have creatively met our student’s changing needs and grown to effectively serve thousands of Northern California’s students.
Visions started with a homeschool program and our TK-8 Home School Academy remains a large part of our student body. When we started in 1999, our goal was to help parent-partners effectively deliver instruction to our students by providing them with the tools, resources, and training our families need to meet California State Standards.
Supporting our Home School families requires a wide range of supports ranging from live synchronous classes hosted by Visions teachers to curriculum support and coordination. This support was done on a case-by-case basis until 2015 when Visions created the Home School Hub, a digital repository of curriculum support managed by a specialized Curriculum Coordinator housed in The WIRE (Visions’ family intranet). The Hub is widely used by teachers and parent-partners to access curriculum pacing guides, parent-partner resources and training, and helpful Home School Documents.
Over the years, homeschooling at Visions has become more diverse, both in terms of parent-partner experience and in the demographic makeup of our students. This is partly a reflection of the changing landscape of California’s students but also a shift in how structured homeschooling programs have become more accessible. Digital curriculum and integrated ordering systems allow Visions’ parent-partners to quickly order and acquire curriculum and the support provided by Home School teachers allow families who may have otherwise been hesitant to take on the challenge of home schooling their students to deliver instruction with confidence. Our teachers in the Home School Academy build personal working relationships with the families they serve, providing valuable instructional support to parent-partners and connecting with students on a personal level.
As the needs of our students shifted, Visions made some difficult decisions in order to best serve our students. In 2021, Visions made the decision to discontinue our high school program for Home School to provide more effective service to our 9th-12th graders across all academies. With the challenges that come with teaching high school, many parent-partners and teachers felt overwhelmed when it came to supporting high school classes. The decision to make the Home School Academy a TK-8 academy allowed Visions to shore up its offerings in Independent Study and University Prep, providing more comprehensive support for the final years of our students’ education. It also allowed us to provide more resources to our TK-8 Home School students, expanding our live synchronous class offerings and piloting a 7-8th Grade Online Middle School program for students who need an independent study model before high school.
Our Home School Academy has changed with the years, but it remains a program that empowers California’s parent-partners to teach their children with confidence.
Hear From Our Home School Families!
“Visions was amazing at accommodating that and helping me succeed in spite of those obstacles. They really created an environment where I could thrive.”
“[Visions] has taught me that I can do anything I set my mind to do. My future is limitless, without boundaries.”
“I am very thankful for my time at Visions. I do not think I would have accomplished as much as I have without it. Thank you to everyone at Visions that makes everything possible.”
“Visions has been a great experience for me. I am grateful for the opportunities that Visions has provided and that I have been able to start my flight training while still in high school.”
Students choose charter schools like Visions for a number of reasons, but for our Independent Study Academy students the choice is often made as a response to unsafe school environments and turbulent living situations, the need for a flexible schedule, need to catch up on credits, or simply need to work at their own pace. Our program strives to serve students in Grades 9-12 who need support meeting high school graduation requirements while preparing them for success after graduation. This academy was designed to serve students in a flexible model that empowers our students to take ownership of their educational future in a safe, supported environment. When this program started, students were provided print textbooks that teachers had to deliver to students personally. With the change in the programs and the investment in technology, students are now able to receive curriculum digitally using Visions Chromebooks and Mifi units, allowing them to work around challenging schedules and in some cases catch up on credit deficiency.
Independent Study students have a variety of unique needs with many experiencing credit deficiency as juniors and seniors when they enroll. To meet these needs, our teachers and counselors work with our students to identify areas where additional support is needed and set students up for success. Teachers now provide more virtual instruction to students to help them stay on track to graduate and provide more direct support to students. The 1:1 teacher-student relationship allows for more individualized instruction, with many graduating Independent Study students crediting their teachers, counselors, and tutors with their success in and after high school.
Beginning in 2024, Visions created a specialized pilot program for students who were more than one year behind in school. The Credit Recovery program grouped students together under a veteran administrator and focused on providing them the support they need to graduate. In 2023-2024, we helped 36 students graduate with the rest of their class and plan to serve 90+ students in SY 2024-2025 with a staff of five dedicated Credit Recovery teachers.
At the same time, we understand that student needs evolve over the years and after going independent, Visions expanded our services to our Independent Study and University Prep students by offering them increased socialization opportunities like dances, clubs, and regional events at parks and public facilities. We have also allowed these students more discretionary funding for enrichment activities, tutoring, and classes like behind-the-wheel driver’s education which may have otherwise been out of reach for students due to financial reasons. Equipping students with tangible life-skills has always been central to our educational philosophy as we look to support our students beyond graduation and help them find meaningful careers.
Hear From Our Independent Study Students!
“I enrolled in Visions because of the flexibility. I am so glad I came here, I honestly think it was the best decision for me. I had an amazing teacher, who I hold very dear to my heart. I’m not sure if she will ever realize what it meant to me that she saw more in me than just another pregnant teen.”
“Independent study helps keep my schedule open. Having the freedom to do the work and get it done whenever I need to get it done sets lots of motivation for me.”
“I was really scared of being judged. My teacher would talk to me about what I’ve been through which is something that no one ever did for me. That’s what opened up the gates for me to succeed.”
“I just want to say thank you for accepting me into this community when I needed it the most. I would choose Visions over and over again. To my teacher, Ms. Kemp, tutors, and [Principal] Moses, I thank you from the bottom of my heart. Visions is the place to be.”
While the Independent Study Academy prepares students to transition to work or community college after graduation, we identified a need to support students with ambitions of attending a four-year university following graduation. What started as an online program called EDGE (Educating Differently in a Global Environment) in 2010, transformed into the University Prep Early College Academy that we have today. This program was founded with the goal of providing a rigorous curriculum that prepares our students to succeed in a four year college or university after graduation.
In addition to similar support and opportunities offered to our Independent Study Students, students in the University Prep Early College Academy work in small cohorts and with content expert teachers to more closely mimic a university experience. The graduates of this program are equipped with the time-management and self-direction skills to go on to some of the best universities in the country, including Duke, Baylor, and Universities of California.
Students in this academy have historically been driven, with many student-athletes taking to this program to help them balance a full schedule of training with college-prep classes. Higher education has always been the focus of this program, and beginning in the Fall of 2024, University Prep students will have even greater access to college opportunities as part of our new Early College initiative.
This program partners with Los Rios Community College District to offer our students dedicated college classes they can take concurrently as they complete their high school education, with the potential to earn an AA degree and a high school diploma at the same time. This gives students perspective on life after high school and offsets the financial costs of higher education by allowing students to take core classes at no cost.
Hear From Our University Prep Early College Students!
“Visions honestly was better than I expected for preparing me for life after graduation,” says Nora. “If I could choose to do high school over again, I’d probably decide to go to Visions sooner.”
“We liked that Visions was flexible with creative ways to ‘show-what-you-know’ beyond just workbooks and tests but still held him accountable and challenged him to progress and grow at his accelerated pace.”
“Visions just seemed like the best option. I was allowed to pursue a lot of things I couldn’t have done at a regular school.”
“Visions beautifully let me pursue dancing AND education. The independent study [model] lets me learn material at my own pace, and not the class average pace. Having a personalized speed helped me fly through assignments and learn way better!”
New Worlds of Work: Career Technical Education
University education is not the only path available to students, and with more lucrative careers requiring specialized training, Visions shifted to provide students with more hands-on learning opportunities in emerging fields.
Prior to establishing a robust Career Technical Education department, our team worked with local businesses like Old Navy and SeaQuest to provide students internship opportunities to explore. We also worked with American River College to provide a hands-on automotive technology program for our students. But as the pandemic struck and many of our partner businesses stopped operating in person, Visions had to pivot to continue to provide our students with valuable career opportunities. Starting in 2020, Visions started a formal CTE program under a veteran CTE coordinator that began as a series of internships and courses in partnerships with local community colleges focused on preparing students for their careers. Today, with career pathways in medical careers training, cybersecurity, and video game design, high school students are able to graduate with college credits and an idea of what a career in this field might entail.
Our program has expanded since its inception, with a Memorandum of Understanding with Los Rios Community College District to offer students full pathways with students their own age. These courses come complete with capstone courses that put a student’s learning to the final test and allow them to demonstrate mastery of their chosen career path. Our CTE students receive support and resources from both Visions and our partner colleges, ensuring they have the best possible chance of success in these programs.
One of the advantages Visions has over traditional schools is the flexibility to explore effective teaching strategies and methods of instruction to deliver the best education to our students. More than just delivering education, our Instructional Services team is responsible for measuring our progress and asking how we can consistently do better as an organization.
Over the years, we’ve accomplished this in a number of ways, including,
- Rolling out a summer school program for which we collect no ADA to help our students succeed. This program has evolved from a program of a few hundred continuing students to over 1000 students in summer 2024 that included newly enrolled students. Through this program, Visions has recovered over 7000 student credits in Summer 2024 and graduated 66 students who would have otherwise needed to attend another year of high school.
- Implementing iReady and NWEA assessments to better track student progress and give teachers more data points to make educational decisions. This also involved getting our students and parents comfortable with more frequent testing and developing a culture of positivity around assessments.
- Partnering with established curriculum partners like Gradpoint and other Learning Management system vendors to deliver curriculum to our students and support their non-traditional schedules. Our teams thoroughly vet the new curriculum and ensure it is up to standards.
- Transitioning to Zoom based instruction to more effectively support students with virtual learning options.
- Establishing directed projects to allow students to pursue their interests in an educational setting. Students in these classes can study particular areas of history/literature, explore trades like automotive repair and woodworking, or simply go deeper into a core subject they are interested in.
- Refining our curriculum for Home School to provide more support to parent-partners and build out comprehensive guides on teaching English, Math, Science, and Social Sciences.
- Establishing a Professional Learning and Innovation (PLI) team to focus on supporting students and teachers across the school by tasking teachers on special assignment (TOSA’s) with supporting teachers with full caseloads.
- Maintaining a repository of curriculum guides and teaching tools for both our home schoolers (The Home School Hub) and high school academies (Curriculum Corner).
- Partnering with PowerSchool to bring their career exploration tool Naviance to student dashboards.
- Sending all teachers and administrators to the Professional Learning Community trainings to foster better collaboration and encourage data-driven instruction.
Visions regularly evaluates our tools and techniques, keeping only what is effective and using what we’ve learned to consistently improve student outcomes. As we go forward, our Instructional Services team will continue to explore the most effective ways to deliver instruction to ensure we are doing the best we can for our students.
Aspiring musicians, app designers, teen parents, Olympic athletes, and students who just need a different environment to graduate. Visions In Education has had the privilege of serving over 50,000 of Northern California’s students over the past twenty five years. The only thing that unites our students is their uniqueness; each individual student has individual needs and our school was founded with the philosophy of individualized education. As we have grown, our school has grown into alignment with the demographics of the counties we serve, reflecting the changing faces and demographics of Northern California.
Student Voices
For years, Visions’ has reached out to our student body to hear from them why they chose Visions and we can think of no better way to learn about Visions students than to hear about them in their own words.
Visions has prioritized a steady, thoughtful enrollment philosophy for years founded on the notion of only enrolling as many students as we can effectively support. Starting out with in-person enrollments at our facilities in Carmichael, we quickly realized that a full Enrollment team would be needed to equitably enroll students in all nine counties. By investing in staff to ease the enrollment process for families, we can ensure every family that wants to be in Visions has a chance to learn with us.
While many charter schools do not market their available seats, Visions works to ethically and effectively raise awareness about our programs through targeted ads and marketing efforts. During the recession of 2008, Visions was able to preserve much of its fiscal integrity by growing to serve more students and adding new programs to support the students we took on. Growing through adversity requires thoughtful leadership and the willingness to do the hard work of effectively educating our students. As a public school, we take our responsibility to enroll all students seriously, even if some of these students require additional academic, behavioral, and special educational support.
As we continue to grow over time, we are intent on growing thoughtfully and ensuring that we can support the students we have before taking on more.
Visions has succeeded over the past quarter-century based on providing excellent instructional support backed up by effective operational management. This strong partnership has allowed a core team of support staff to support our teachers and families throughout our service area in a number of different ways.
Serving more than 7,500 students in a service area over 9,200 square miles is only possible thanks to technology support. Since our start, Visions has made technology literacy and support a cornerstone of our success. Technology has evolved by leaps and bounds since Visions was first established, and a large part of our success has been the ways in which we keep up with the changing times. Our Technology Services team was created early in our school’s history, operating as more than an IT Department. In addition to serving staff and students, Visions Technology Services maintains vital digital environments, proactively test-drives and troubleshoots new technology, and even develops in-house software to better facilitate the work we do.
Staying in-touch with our families also requires technology-focused communication. Visions consolidated numerous individual sites in 2015 to form the WIRE, an intranet that acts as a repository for all Visions related announcements and information. The WIRE contains all student policies, announcements, and Visions-related information and acts as a foundation for our communications strategy. By centralizing our information and streams of communication, Visions can quickly and effectively share important announcements, updates, and opportunities with our families.
As new technologies present new opportunities and challenges, Visions strives to stay ahead of technology trends. We annually audit our systems using independent consultants to help us identify and fix key issues before they present a danger to our students or staff. Visions partners with MS-ISAC to ensure cybersecurity best-practices are implemented and followed, and we have recently started adding staff to support cybersecurity efforts. By training our staff on cybersecurity fundamentals, we are able to head-off major threats to our system through group effort.
LPAD Student Support System
LPAD Student Support System (LPAD SSS) is Visions’ proprietary software, acting as a single access point for everything students, parents and staff need to succeed at Visions. LPAD is a single, secure platform that gives users access to all of our integrated tech systems like Schools Pathways and our learning management system, built with tools to manage educational budgets, integrated with ordering platforms to make ordering quick and seamless, and created with an integrated messaging system that gives teachers and counselors a safe, easy to use way to stay in touch with their students.
LPAD’s integration with Enrollment Services allows Visions to easily complete enrollment appointments regardless of where our students are located in our nine county service area, providing an equitable experience to all students who want to join Visions. In addition we’ve partnered with major curriculum and supply vendors to create custom integrations in our systems. Our integrated partners include Amazon, Staples, Bookshark, Lakeshore Learning and Rainbow Resource Center. This gives students and families an “Amazon-like” experience where they can spend less time ordering curriculum and more time studying.
From an operations perspective, LPAD has evolved over the years to integrate data analysis tools like ParsecGo, mass communication software to stay connected with our staff and students, and budget management software to help our teams effectively manage our funds. As new ideas emerge, our programming team gets to work creating new tools to make educating students and connecting them with resources easier. Our investment in technology allows us to scale more efficiently as less staff are needed to handle things like curriculum order processing and enrollment tracking. Much of our growth and operations support has come as a result of our investment in a stable technological base.
LPAD is a big part of how Visions serves our students and is continually invested in and developed with new tools and functionalities to meet the changing needs of our school.
Early LPAD Design Docs
Student Technology Services (STS) – Equipping our Students for Success
Visions’ programs bolster tech-literacy and give families access to technology they may not otherwise have an opportunity to use. Starting with desktops and monitors we shipped to each family, Visions has evolved to ship laptops to each student to use while enrolled. Originally partnering with an outside vendor (SkyQ), in 2021 Visions made the decision to bring student technology services in-house in order to better serve our students.
Our Student Technology Services department grew during the pandemic, shipping and maintaining equipment students needed to stay engaged during challenging times. Our response to this need earned our school a Pivotal Practice Award from the State of California, recognizing the lengths to which Visions went to eliminate technological barriers to education during the pandemic years.
This team takes on the lion’s share of our student technology management, managing the maintenance, storage, and inventory of more than 25,000 laptops, Chromebooks, and other technology items. In August of 2024, this team completed over 4,000 technology orders including 2,000 laptop & Chromebook shipments.
Schools do more than simply deliver instruction; they are where our students experience some of the most formative years of their lives. Our Student Services team supports our students with socialization opportunities, counseling support, mental health and wellness services, and social worker services.
Counseling for College, Career, and Life
Throughout the changes in Visions’ history, our counseling team has strived to prepare our students for what comes next in life by connecting them with valuable opportunities for growth and learning. In addition to keeping students on track to graduate, counselors for all of our academies provide sound college and career advice to students, allowing them to explore their passions while in school and supporting them as they chart the next crucial stage of their educational journeys.
This team has worked with an ASCA coach to develop a comprehensive counseling plan based on California and National counseling standards to meet the academic, career, and wellness needs of our students. The Counseling department started with enrolling students by hand as Visions struggled to establish itself in its early days. Today, as operations support takes on less-specialized work, our counselors have been able to focus on delivering students better service. In recent years, Visions has invested in our counseling team, hiring more counselors (15 as of SY 2024-2025) and a counseling manager to support the team and strategize with instructional services. From career events to digital webinars with guest speakers from diverse professions, the counseling team goes out of its way to create opportunities for students to discover more of themselves. They also play a vital role in early crisis identification, supporting students in need and spearheading intervention requests. In SY 2023-2024, our counselors responded to 325 intervention requests, helping students in crisis and working with our administration team to ensure student safety.
“Visions gave me a support system of teachers and counselors who were willing to help 24/7, as well as gave me and my education a dedicated focus. Getting my diploma early opened up a lot of opportunities for me.”
Connecting Students In Need with Vital Resources
Over half of Visions’ students (55%) are classified by the State of California as Free or Reduced and 3% of the students we serve experience homelessness or are in the foster care system. These students experience a variety of challenges outside the classroom and our social work team strives to connect students with resources to prevent learning loss and improve quality of life. We periodically survey our students’ living situations to ensure students who need support have the resources they need to succeed. Our Foster and Homeless Liaison has developed into a full position that works to get students access to housing, food, financial support, and more. For the first time in 25 years, we are exploring Title Funding to better serve our students through accessing federal monies for unduplicated students.
“My motivation to fix my grades was due to a variety of factors, but at the heart of it all was wishing better for myself. I saw what poverty can do to someone first hand. I had no money or resources to turn my life around any other way but education. If I was to achieve anything in life I had to start the journey.”
Fulfilling Unique Learning Needs
16% of Visions students (1000+) have special education needs and 8% of our students are English learners. Ensuring these students reach their full potential requires dedicated teams of support staff in addition to the student’s primary teacher.
Our Special Education department was established early in Visions’ tenure to serve students with different learning needs, starting with a staff of one and growing to become one of our largest departments with over 50 members. Our team supports our students with teachers trained to support both mild/mod and mod/severe students, physical therapists and psychologists, and a dedicated team of special education veterans guiding our work.
Students receive personalized support, physical therapy, access to a school psychologist, and modified education to meet their individual learning goals. Visions prides itself in serving our community with special needs and works to build a comprehensive support network for the whole student, now transitioning to the El Dorado County Office of Education’s Charter SELPA to offer more effective support.
“Dominic would not be where he is now if he wasn’t homeschooled with Visions. We have the freedom to deep dive into specific topics, to switch gears, to take breaks, to not take breaks, to change our minds and go to a museum instead of completing a lesson at home. Visions helps me by bridging any gaps before I even see them.”
Serving Multilingual Students
As Visions grew, so did our population of multilingual students. Our Multilingual Learner department was created to support multilingual learners with acquiring English skills, focused on identifying their needs and progressing towards eventual reclassification. At the same time, we recognize that being fluent in multiple languages is a benefit and we approach English-language acquisition from a perspective of adding to our students’ existing language skills rather than replacing them.
Our staff works with students and their families, supporting with translated material, curriculum consultation, and helming the English Language Advisory Committee (ELAC). Our goal is to equip our Multilingual Learners with the necessary language skills to succeed after school and in life.
“Visions’ staff helped me grow so much as a person and improved my English skills. I had such great staff that I remember their names to this day.”
School Life and Culture
Emerging from the pandemic, Visions students told us one thing; we’re ready to socialize. One of the challenges of a non-classroom based school is to find ways to provide traditional socialization opportunities to students in a much larger service area. Visions has always strived to provide students with activities like Home School Field Days and high school dances, but recently we have stepped up our efforts to offer a more robust selection of socialization opportunities to all of our students. Our decision to eliminate 9-12 in Home School allowed us to offer more diverse events to high school students, enriching their learning experiences and leading to greater student engagement in their studies.
- Visions has expanded our events selection (over 100 in-person events for students and families) to offer regular events for students in each of our nine counties including dances, field trips, museums, plays, sporting events, bowling, and more. These events are opportunities for students to connect with their peers in person, make new friends, and have fun in a safe and structured environment.
- We piloted sports clubs for the first time in 2023, starting with soccer and eventually branching out to basketball. These friendly competitive clubs give our student athletes ways to stay healthy while building important bridges with other schools in our communities.
- In addition to sports clubs, Visions offers more than sixty culture and hobby clubs ranging from book, movie, and gaming clubs to coding clubs and cultural clubs like the Black Student Union. These clubs meet virtually and in-person, serving as another way to connect students with like minded peers.
- Visions has partnered with mentorship programs like Mindset Academy and UC Davis’ STEM Program to pair students with mentors who can offer career, academic, and life advice. Visions also has a long-standing California Scholarship Federation (CSF) chapter, offering students college scholarships in exchange for community service.
With a robust selection of social opportunities, Visions students have the same opportunities available to their peers at a seat-based school.
Human Resources: Staffing Our School
Keeping our school staffed with teachers and staff is a full time profession our Human Resources team tackles with enthusiasm. Managing a staff of over 500 employees, the Human Resources department has grown with our school, onboarding new staff, managing our benefits programs, and creating a culture of inclusivity and support in our school.
Attracting, training, and retaining qualified staff is a challenge that Visions meets in a number of ways. We proactively promote our seasonal hiring fairs using paid advertising to connect to job searchers and actively recruit to fill open positions. Through offering competitive compensation and partnering with our marketing team on teacher recruitment initiatives, our school has remained fully staffed over time even as other schools in the state face shortfalls in staffing.
When COVID-19 struck, our HR team partnered with our facilities team to ensure compliance with safety and testing guidelines and as we emerged back to in-person work, our HR team has taken lead on employee engagement initiatives, including our Visions All-Stars Employee of the Semester Program. By creatively recognizing our team, Human Resources helps create a welcoming environment that our staff is happy to be a part of.
Thoughtfully supporting our students and our teachers takes a dedicated team of over 150 classified staff. These professionals come from all fields and careers, both in education and in the private sector, and work together to create a network of support for our students from the time they first learn about Visions until the day they successfully leave our school.
Marketing and Communications Services: Spreading the Word
As a school of choice, our students need to first know that they have the option to choose Visions. As our school expanded over the years, the need to have dedicated marketing and communications staff became apparent and in 2015, our formal Marketing & Communications Services Department was created. This team creates informational marketing advertising campaigns using best-practices designed to highlight our programs and provide students and parents with the information they need to make an informed choice.
The team manages digital advertising on Google, Meta, local community groups, creates radio and print ads and more to build awareness about the school. These efforts direct parents and students to our website to learn more about our offerings and help feed enrollment. In 2023/2024, 53% of our new student inquiries and 38% of our applications were influenced to take action after seeing a paid marketing source. We currently contract with Grow Enrollments, an educational and enrollment consulting firm that helps us maximize students recruited per dollar spent.
Additionally, this team has grown from managing our basic communications to assisting leadership with sensitive communications, running our in-house media strategy, and partnering with external consultants to ensure smooth internal and external communication. Like our marketing efforts, our communication strategy is bolstered by help from outside consultants, including Bertelli Public Affairs that has helped our organization with key communication goals. They maintain and use our public marketing website (viedu.org) and intranet service (the WIRE), to manage the daily flow of communications to more than 20,000 students, parents, vendors and staff members to build connections across our sprawling service area. This team also creates our Student Spotlights and staff story content, sharing the good news about our school and students with our communities.
Check out these ads from the past few years
Enrollment Services: Getting Students In the Door
Interested students are quickly contacted by our knowledgeable and friendly Enrollment Services team who work with our prospective families to confirm their enrollment and get their necessary documents submitted. Enrollment at Visions began with individual counselors enrolling students in person but Visions quickly learned that our methods provided a barrier to enrolling students in a fair, equitable fashion.
To overcome this barrier, a team of enrollment specialists were hired to call families, complete applications and confirm start dates, and work with our analysts to assign teachers to each student. Our team has worked to smooth over the enrollment process over the years and are often the first contact new families have with Visions.
Hear about our familes’ experience with our Enrollment team!
Ordering Services: Getting Students the Tools They Need
In order to succeed, students need to have the textbooks and learning supplies they need in a timely fashion. When Visions was first founded, our teams had to order textbooks and supplies manually for students to pick up at our Resource Center in Carmichael. As we grew, this model quickly became unsustainable and a drain on both our time and the time of our families. Our Ordering Services team was founded to fill the gaps, coordinating the approval of orders, purchasing of new materials, and managing the educational resources of our school. Each of our ordering Student Services Representatives tackles unique areas of expertise, but each is also cross-trained to support one another in high-volume periods.
Through carefully managing our time and working to confirm orders as quickly as possible, the Ordering Services team coordinates purchases and ensures deliveries of vital resources to all corners of our 9 county service area. Recently, this team has found new ways to refine our ordering processes, working with Amazon and our educational partners to design integrations that make ordering for families quicker and easier than ever.
Fiscal Services: Maintaining a Stable Financial Base
As an organization that handles more than $100 million in public funds each year, Visions is committed to handling taxpayer dollars in an ethical and responsible manner. To that end, our Fiscal Services team handles everything from payroll management for our staff to making major purchases for our organization in a way that complies with state regulations and ensures Visions has a stable financial base.
Taking over payroll and accounting responsibilities from our authorizing district was a major challenge as Visions explored independence in 2018; leaving San Juan Unified School District meant taking responsibility for our financial future. To do so meant building a team of professional, ethical accountants and finance experts to manage our finances and keep Visions both financially solvent and accountable for the financial decisions we make in service of Visions’ students. To that end, our team proactively complies with auditing processes, working behind the scenes to keep Visions’ finances running smoothly.
Operations and Support: Providing Support to Our Staff
Supporting our Instruction and Business Services team requires a team of talented project managers and analysts to oversee the vital background work that makes our school function. The Operations and Support team helps Visions by overseeing our buildings, managing student records, maintaining relationships with our enrichment vendors, ensuring our systems (LPAD, CALPads, etc) are functional, and supports teachers with workbooks and spreadsheet trackers so our staff can make educated decisions based on concrete data. These tools are critical to ensuring our teachers and instructional administrators have data to back up educational decisions and a strong data-driven approach is crucial to delivering the best results for our students.
Records and Attendance: Keeping Student Information Accurate
Ensuring our students are engaged and that their records are up-to-date is a task that requires a fully staffed team of focused record-keepers and student service representatives. Our Attendance and Records Department has grown as the number of case files has grown over the years, ensuring that Visons is up-to-date with all of our student information as they go through our program. A key but often overlooked department, our Records team maintains the highest levels of confidentiality and compliance with independent study charter law as well as updating information so that teachers and other key support staff always have a full picture of where a student is in their educational journey.
Through managing our attendance reporting, this team can identify troubling trends in student absenteeism and works with instructional services to ensure we are accurately reporting student attendance. Each year, our team audits a random selection of student records to ensure consistency and compliance between our files as part of a special project. In 2023-2024, our Records team completed the audit with zero major findings, confirming that Visions’ student information is in good hands under their thoughtful supervision.
Facilities & Safety: Keeping Our Buildings in Order
Though Visions does not have traditional classrooms, having safe, clean, and well-maintained spaces for our students to visit and our staff to work in is critical. Our Facilities Services team keeps Visions’ HQ in top condition by coordinating daily maintenance work and overseeing safety at our facilities. What began with one facilities technician has expanded to include coordinating off-site facilities requests, working with independent event spaces throughout our nine county service area to source clean, safe, family-friendly venues to host events.
Additionally, our Facilities team oversees safety at our main campus by keeping safety information current and regularly hosting lockdown and evacuation drills. These drills help staff keep safety top-of-mind and give our communities the opportunities to practice life-saving processes.
Internal Business Services: Providing Oversight and Project Support
Keeping the lights on and our web of systems operational is a full time job that our Internal Business Services team handles tactfully in support of our greater goals. From data analysis support to developing and refining Visions processes, our team of business analysts and organizational leadership supports our teams through projects designed to address the needs of our teachers, staff, and students. This department supports our Assessments team, oversees Special Education compliance, manages our schools Title funding requirements, and takes the lead on special projects as needed.
Assessment Services: Making the Grade
As a public school, Visions requires our students to participate in the same battery of tests as students in other school districts. The challenge with our model is ensuring students in every part of our 9000+ mile service area have an equitable opportunity to succeed on these crucial exams. Our Assessment Services team does this by thoughtfully connecting our students with the technology they need to succeed, providing in-person testing sites stocked with laptops and staffed by qualified test proctors, and thoughtfully using the data we receive from these exams to inform educational decisions.
As the state pivoted to virtual exams, our team was ahead of the curve and able to provide the resources our students needed to pass our tests. Our team’s efforts have grown over the years and through a combination of thoughtful communication and a concentrated effort on the part of our Assessments team and our teachers, we successfully achieved a 95% participation rate for our 2022-2023 CAASPP Exams! This milestone was only possible due to a partnership with our Instructional Services, the culture of testing we have created over the past few years, and the work our staff did to help lower barriers to testing such as coaching families with nervous students through their test-taking anxiety.
Community Partnerships
Visions In Education has succeeded over the years thanks in no small part to the well-respected organizations, businesses, and community leaders who work with us in our nine-county service area to support the mission of educating our students.
Enrichment Vendors: Working with Local Businesses
One of the key advantages of a school like Visions is our ability to supplement state-standards curriculum with enrichment classes that students and parents can select themselves. From driver’s education to coding classes to tutoring support, Visions believes in giving our students the freedom to shape their education and pursue classes that interest them.
With the support of a vendor support team, Visions In Education contracts with over 600 online and local vendors in our communities to help students explore their interests. Our vendors range from small tutoring services to regional franchises and the funds our students use to supplement their education return to the communities we serve. We are also proud to receive support from our sponsors who generously donate gift cards to be used directly by our students for incentives and to address needs such as food-insecurity.
Partnering with Established Business Leaders
Visions has proactively created partnerships with national and multinational companies for the benefit of the students we serve. By developing relationships with companies like Amazon and Staples, we are able to connect families and staff with resources in a more cost-effective manner, effectively managing our funds and creating bridges with leaders in industry. As we sought independence, partnering with School Pathways has allowed Visions to better organize student data and streamline how we manage the organization.
Visions was one of the first twenty schools to become part of Amazon’s Business program and has been an early adopter of many new integrations and technologies. In 2024, Visions was invited to present at Amazon’s Business Reshape Conference in Dallas, Texas to share how application programming interfaces (API’s) have made it easier for Visions to support our students by streamlining ordering, reporting, user management, and more.
Building Bridges In Our Communities
Visions serves a diverse and multicultural student body representative of the communities that we live and work in every day. We take pride in partnering with social organizations to better understand our students and connect them with valuable resources and mentorship opportunities. In addition to our partnership with UC Davis’ STEM Program, we have partnered with local writing nonprofit 916 INK to bring creative writing classes to our students as an elective class. As we continue to grow and more diverse student voices join the conversation, Visions seeks to learn more about the students we serve and invest in our communities.
Partnering with Educational Leaders
Getting better for our students means learning from other leaders in the educational sector. To better develop our school, Visions partners with organizations throughout California to share best-practices, learn from leaders in emerging fields, and bring what we learn back to Visions to improve our services.
Visions proudly partners with:
Making a Legislative Impact
Charter schools play an important role in the public school system and Visions is committed to championing the story of our school and highlighting the excellent work our students do. Visions leadership has met with multiple state senators and assembly members over the past year to provide clarity around how schools like Visions operate. Additionally, Visions’ Superintendent Dr. Steve Olmos was elected to sit on the Advisory Commission on Charter Schools (ACCS) as a parent-representative, offering his insight as both a charter leader and as a parent of a charter school student. Director of Student Services Matthew Patterson was also recently elected to the California Practitioners Advisory Group (CPAG) to represent charter schools for the State.
Supt. Olmos Presents to Legislative Aides and Workers on Charter Schools, Feb. 2024
As we take part in these frank and fruitful conversations with the California Department of Education and members of the state legislature, we hope to dispel some common myths around charter schools like Visions and show the value a school like ours brings to our communities. Visions contracts with consultants and lobbyists to help represent our school and our students in public and political spheres. In 2023, Visions met with both the CDE and the state’s Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team (FCMAT) to discuss non-classroom based schools and how Visions effectively and responsibly manages our organization.
As attitudes towards charter schools shift, Visions plans to be part of the conversation, speaking out against excess and abuses of power and standing up for responsible charter school practices. Visions has Sponsored SB 593 (2021) and SB 1477 (2024) in an attempt to proactively influence the charter school space.
In order to “prepare students to succeed in a rapidly changing world,” Visions needs to have one eye on the future. We carefully consider the forces influencing and impacting the students we serve and ensure our staff is ready to meet the challenges of educating youth in a world that never stops changing.
Lead Learners: Development For All Staff
As educators, Visions’ staff embraces a growth mindset and our organization encourages staff to undergo training to broaden their horizons and deepen their skillset. Visions offers assistance with higher education and credentialing for our teachers, ensuring our staff is up to date on the skills they need to serve our students.
As a growth-focused organization, all staff receive access to training opportunities to enhance their skill sets and improve soft skills like communication and connection to purpose. Staff are able to access a stipend for higher education expenses, conferences, and professional development. Growing as an organization means growing our staff, and our highly motivated team has embraced a growth mindset, constantly looking to improve themselves and weather the changes that come from working in a charter school environment. Additionally, we have on-demand training with Percipio by SkillSoft that all employees can take advantage of to find classes and training at no additional cost.
In addition to developing hard-skills, Visions also takes the time to help employees develop soft-skills like collaboration, conflict management, and mindset training. We partner with leadership coaches, including former Board Chairperson Katie McCleary, to train our leadership team on best-practices to strengthen team cohesion. We have also worked with organizations like Project Optimism and CliftonStrengths to bring developmental opportunities to staff and connect them with their strengths.
Our leadership team employs a variety of consultants to help us make the best decisions to support our staff and our students. As a school that embraces a growth mindset, we realize that we don’t always have all the answers and are willing to hire experts with more experience to provide valuable insight. Visions’ commitment to listening to feedback and using it to get better has been recognized by many of our educational partners, including Studer Education who Visions partners with to conduct leadership surveys. Recently, Visions leadership was invited to present at the 2024 What’s Right in Education Conference (WRIE) to share how we use feedback to make informed leadership decisions.
To become one of the largest charter schools in the country, Visions In Education needed to adopt an attitude of growth, both as an organization and on an individual level. As Visions expanded over the years, we constantly looked for ways to improve the services we provide our students, using feedback from parents and our communities to continue to pursue excellence in education.
As a result of the thoughtful advice of consultants and other educational leaders, Visions In Education has adopted what we call the 1% Better philosophy based on the idea that small, incremental growth applied consistently leads to greater yields over time much like compound interest. This practice encourages our staff and teachers to seek out better ways to improve our processes and deliver better education to our student body and better ways to support Visions as a school.
1% Better Improvements
Coming out of COVID, our students and parents expressed a desire for more socialization opportunities and socialization was frequently listed as a reason for student withdrawal on exit surveys. Since then, Visions has ramped up our socialization efforts, offering regular regional events in all counties and large events such as prom, bowling trips, and more. We also launched a clubs program that sees nearly 1300 students participating in club activities, including multiple sports clubs.
A concentrated effort to encourage students who were one or more grades behind in Math and ELA to take the Middle of the Year (MOY) exams. Our organization set a goal of 95% which we fell short of our first year by only getting 89% of students in this category to test. We redoubled our efforts, working with teachers and assessments staff to overcome barriers to testing and in SY 2023-2024, 93% of our students participated in the Reading portion of the i-Ready exam, and 94% participated in the math portion.
Our Career Technical Education (CTE) program began as a series of internships that unfortunately stopped due to the 2020 lockdowns. Emerging from the pandemic, Visions hired a dedicated CTE Coordinator to build a robust program that all students could take advantage of. As of the 2023/2024 school year, this program had 133 students (up from the original enrollment of 70) with 13 students completing a full CTE Pathway, and 22 becoming First Aid Certified. Our program also grew to encompass three full pathways for our students.
As part of our surveys, our staff expressed the desire for more powerful technology to keep pace with the technologically demanding nature of their work. After weighing some options, Visions made a nearly $5,000,000 investment in new laptops designed to meet teacher and student needs in an effective and cost-effective manner.
As our school grows, we were faced with the challenge of how to honor all of our graduates in a timely and effective manner. To allow all of our students the opportunity to graduate at the historic Sacramento Memorial Auditorium, Visions will be implementing a Fall graduation for the first time in February 2025.
Alumni: Celebrating Students Who Make an Impact
Visions strives to prepare our students for life after high school and we are proud of every graduate and alumnus who leaves our program. Whether they are trailblazing Olympic athletes, Ph.D Students, or future attorneys, our graduates leave Visions ready to tackle the world with gusto. To celebrate our graduates, we are launching our first ever Alumni Hall of Fame for students who have been a part of Visions and have since gone on to do great things with their lives.
Building a Foundation for the Future
Over the years, Visions In Education has operated out of a variety of locations in the Sacramento area and (prior to state legislation changing the rules around charter school facilities), operated learning centers in South Lake Tahoe, Amador, and Yolo counties to meet the needs of our students. As our school continued to grow, we continued to move into progressively larger facilities, culminating with our upcoming move to Gold River which we hope to make our permanent operating center. This new facility will have training space and offices for our growing staff as well as expanded amenities for our students when they come to visit. At the time of writing, construction on this facility is underway and we hope to be in our new facility in Spring 2025.
Visions HQ Through the Years
A core factor of Visions’ success has been our school’s willingness to learn from our past as we look to the future. Preparing students for a world that consistently changes requires foresight and as we turn the page on our twenty-fifth year of service, we would like to take a moment to have a conversation with our Superintendent (Dr. Steve Olmos), Board of Directors Chairperson Mark Holman, Chief Academic Officer (Dr. Micah Studer), Chief Operations Officer (Tom Tafoya), and long-serving Director of Independent Study and University Prep Instruction Sarah McFarland to get their perspective on where Visions has been, how far we’ve come as a school, and where they see Visions going in the future.
Looking to the past, what do you see as Visions’ greatest strengths when it comes to serving students?
The relationships that our staff builds with students and families is our greatest strength. Our staffs’ willingness to make improvements and evolve our practices and offerings is also an extraordinary strength. We are able to work with students on an individual basis so that they find success, however they define success.
One of our biggest strengths is being able to meet students where they are and provide students what they need when they need it. This individualized, personal, standards-based approach to education allows for greater partnership with students and their families to meet their needs. We keep the student at the center of our program design.
I think the organization has continued to be willing to evolve to meet the needs of the times. From moving from a dependent to an independent charter school, to the expansion of technology, to new services and new programs to meet the needs of a more diverse group of students and families, we don’t take the easy road; we do the right thing no matter the effort. Being able to evolve and get returns on previous investments allow us to compound our knowledge, skills, and increase our impact for students.
The greatest strength of Visions–which MUST be preserved–is its commitment to innovation in public education. We are based in Sacramento where we can affect legislative perspectives on the charter movement. Rather than being adversarial with the traditional public education system, we are their servants looking to lead them into the new world as it rapidly changes. We are fast, nimble, experimental while also being deeply law abiding and respectful of the role that public education plays for all students in all communities for the benefit of a civil society.
Visions’ greatest strengths are our people—the teachers, staff, students, and families who are at the hearts of our school. Over the years, we have built a culture based on relationships, where educators work closely with students, families and each other. We are deeply committed to meeting students where they are in their personal journey. Whether a student is recovering credits, preparing for college, earning a CTE certification, or pursuing a homeschool education, Visions has teachers to provide support. As a team, we provide individualized support to ensure that every student succeeds, always putting relationships at the heart of everything we do.
How has educating students changed over the past 25 years? As career educators and parents, what challenges exist today that students didn’t have to deal with in 1999?
Unfortunately, I’m not sure that education has changed much in the past 25 years. 25 years ago I was a middle school teacher; my youngest son is now in 9th grade. Not much has changed in education in that time span.
However, everything around education and with kids has changed tremendously. Students are now having to deal with a rapidly changing world, social media, artificial intelligence, mental health, anxiety, etc.
What hasn’t changed? 25 years ago I was graduating high school as part of the first class of a new millennium. I went to school with scantron tests, backpacks that weighed 800 pounds and cemetery seating. Email was new and innovative and cell phones weren’t yet the powerful pocket computers we have today. Technology is evolving in ways we still need to come to grips with; as AI becomes more sophisticated, our students will need to learn how to responsibly and ethically interact with it. Information literacy is also more important now that there’s so much of it available. In this environment, there is less emphasis on memorization and more on application and skill building. Technology assists us with that is ways we couldn’t even dream of in ‘99. Our ability to assess every student and get individual results to customize their education program was once thought impossible. In ‘99 we demanded that every student fit our model of “school.” Now we have the tools to make school fit the needs of our students.
But beyond technology, the way we educate students is changing. Equipping students for life after graduation is becoming increasingly important through robust CTE opportunities (a far cry from the Regional Occupational Programs (ROP) that used to exist). We are empowering students to take control of their education in new ways and giving them more authorship over their education. Education can happen anywhere; you don’t need to be locked into one option any more and both of my students are also charter school students.
I believe technology is leveling the playing field and enabling schools like ours to provide great instructional opportunities in ways that simply were not possible when I first started here some 21 years ago. Technology is more ubiquitous than ever and the costs have dropped dramatically. From bulky desktop systems with CRT monitors and dial up, to state of the art Chromebooks with MiFi, the technology our students are now receiving is state of the art at a fraction of the cost.
The role that technology plays has certainly come to enable new techniques and tools. At the same time, the problems with technology have also become just as apparent. One of the key challenges for the next 25 years is to embrace the limits of technology as well as its possibilities. There is also a massive cultural breakdown in American society. The fractionalization of our communities pits the goals, objectives, and traditions of public education against some of the strongest critics of freedom on both the left and right of the political spectrum. So, another key challenge for the next 25 years is finding our role as a public school in rebuilding civil society and the midst of a breakdown of civility among our political leadership.
Over the past 25 years what education looks like at Visions has evolved significantly with technology becoming a key tool to support student learning. In 1999 we relied on traditional materials like textbooks and workbooks. Today we have shifted to include Zoom classes, digital curriculum, and Chromebooks that allow students to stay connected and engaged. While technology opens doors to personalized learning, it also brings challenges like managing screen time, ensuring online safety, and navigating the pressures of social media. At Visions, we remain focused on meeting each student’s unique needs, blending the benefits of technology with the personalized support and 1:1 relationships that are at the heart of our learning community.
Visions is planning a number of great initiatives for our students in the coming year. What areas of growth are you most excited for?
There are many things I am excited about. Our new Online Middle School program will be a game changer for many students and families. Our new Credit Recovery program will be life changing for many students who have been told they will never have a high school diploma. University Prep offering students the ability to graduate with a high school diploma and an Associates Degree from a community college will make higher ed much more attainable for many students.
I am excited as we develop our Career Technical Pathways and look to add pathways into the trades with pre-apprenticeship programs. The addition of student clubs and athletics is also very exciting. Our students are able to connect with other students and adults that share the same interests and passions as they do.
Our biggest focus is on Professional Learning Communities (PLCs), which have helped us grow as educators by working together to answer four essential questions: (1) What do we want students to learn? (2) How will we know if they’ve learned it? (3) What will we do if they haven’t learned it? (4) What are the next steps for those who have? This framework allows us to refine our teaching strategies, provide targeted support, and offer enrichment opportunities so that every student can succeed.
We’re also serving students at a higher level through the incredible work of our Student Services team, who have developed and implemented a comprehensive ‘System of Support.’ This approach addresses the needs of the whole student, providing vital social-emotional and behavioral supports. From organizing dances, clubs, and sports to offering various opportunities for students to connect with staff and each other, we are building a strong, inclusive community. Our counseling and social work teams have been nothing short of extraordinary, stepping in to support students and families, especially in moments of crisis. There have been instances where, without the valiant efforts of our staff, students might not be here today. We don’t just change lives—we save them.
Finally, there is so much to look forward to as we expand our Career Technical Education (CTE) and Dual Enrollment offerings. These programs play a pivotal role in preparing our students for life beyond graduation, offering them hands-on experience and real-world skills that align with today’s workforce demands. Through CTE, students can explore career pathways in fields such as healthcare, technology, and business, gaining industry-recognized certifications and skills that give them a competitive edge in the job market. At the same time, Dual Enrollment allows students to earn college credits while still in high school, setting them up for academic success and reducing the time and cost it takes to earn a degree. By equipping our students with both practical skills and academic advancement, we are ensuring they are better prepared to thrive in their chosen careers and higher education pursuits after they graduate from Visions
I am excited for the potential of our Online Middle School (OMS) program which has the potential to attract new families who are looking for distance learning rather than traditional homeschooling. I believe this is an untapped opportunity for families concerned with keeping their students safe and unable to provide an appropriate homeschool experience.
In addition, I believe our current work of looking for ways to support our Independent Study high schoolers is an area of continued growth; I believe we can give hope to students who, due to circumstances beyond their control, need a more flexible program to help them move forward in life.
I am most excited about bringing the Visions model to as many students as possible in as many communities as desire it through whatever partnerships made sense. I am very enthusiastic about our embrace of vocational pathways as equal to college pathways.
At Visions, the Professional Learning Communities process is one of our biggest initiatives supporting all 7,500 students. Our teachers, staff and Administrators come together regularly to share insights, analyze student progress, and develop strategies to help students succeed. This teamwork has been a key part of our success, especially in programs like Credit Recovery, Summer School, CTE, and the University Prep Early College Academy, which have helped boost our graduation rate by 10%. I’m also excited about our Online Middle School program. This new program provides great virtual instruction to prepare 7th & 8th graders for high school. Finally, we’re incredibly proud of the 150+ events we offer to Tk-12th graders including field trips, dances, clubs, and sports teams, allowing students in all nine counties to connect, learn, and have fun.
Where are the greatest opportunities for schools like Visions?
I believe the future is bright for schools like Visions. We are able to meet students where they are, provide individual attention, and work with them to find success. I believe the silver lining of covid was students and families realizing that they now have options. They do not have to be sitting in a traditional classroom setting for 6 periods a day when it does not work for them. They can look for options that are a better fit. Schools like Visions can lead the way in disrupting the traditional educational system that really hasn’t changed in the past 25 years.
We have the opportunity to create academic social-emotional learning programs that our students and our communities need. We can respond to the changing world of education as it evolves; we are not locked in one model. We can try and learn different things to create systems to help our kids.
In our current structure, the combination of having the resources to take strategic risks and our ability to refocus and improve our services, practices, and programs to serve unmet needs in service of ALL students will be our strategic advantage over other schools that choose to do the easy work. The specific direction will depend upon the changing needs of our students, an objective assessment of our strengths and weaknesses, and where we leverage these strengths to scale up to make the greatest impact.
One word: INNOVATION!
Schools like Visions, including Home School, independent study, charter, and non-classroom-based programs, have a tremendous opportunity to support students who need a choice in pathways to graduation. Many high school students do well when they have options that fit their individual needs, such as catching up on credits, balancing school with a job, or managing family responsibilities. Schools like Visions offer the opportunity for students to take community college courses while still in high school. This gives them a head start on their careers or college education. Independent Study schools can truly help students stay on track in a way that works for their lives so they can take control of their education and futures.
If you could say one thing to the Visionaries reading this in 2034, what would you tell them?
Never forget that at the core of what we do is serving our students and families. We’re people helping people, making sure they get what they need when they need it. That’s what education is really about. When our students have the right support, they can grow, thrive, and become the best versions of themselves. When our students become their best selves, they will make the world better, too.
My hope is that the leaders and staff will have leveraged the resources, technology and know-how to provide industry-leading educational services and generate industry leading educational outcomes for all students, but especially for students from underserved communities. So, I would say, don’t do the easy work of status quo, do the hard work of improving and creating better services, supports and systems to support our students, families and staff.
[To Visions Students]: You received your education the way you did because people built a solid foundation for you. Giving back generously and holding firmly and courageously to the values that made Visions what it is can be part of your expression of gratitude, helping to preserve what you received for others.
To the students of 2034: Always remember, your education is more than just getting through assignments—it’s about finding your path. Everyone at Visions believes in you and your ability to take control of your future. This is your journey, and you have the power to shape it into something incredible. So go for it, make it yours, and don’t forget—we’re here with you every step of the way!
Thank you for making Visions such a special place to learn, work and grow.
Acknowledgements from the Author
The author would like to take a moment to thank all those who made this report possible:
To the Marketing and Communications Team, Justina Janas, Ellie Fazzi, and Ronaldo Gomez: Thank you to our team of creative communicators for creating stories to draw from as we produce this report. Many principal sources from our 25 year history come from stories this team has created and this team provided support in the creation and construction of this article.
To Dr. Steve Olmos (Superintendent/Executive Director), Tom Tafoya ( Chief Operations Officer), Dr. Micah Studer (Chief Academic Officer), Michael Brubaker (Senior Director of Operations), Uriel Gonzalez (Director of Technology), Tania Houchin (Associate Director of Business Systems and Support), Sarah McFarland (Director of Instruction: Independent Study and University Prep), Christina McKinnis (Principal: University Prep Early College Academy), Donna Glenn (Director of Human Resources), and Betty Brady (Assistant to the Superintendent’s Office): Thank you for the hours of intensive feedback and sharing stories of Visions’ twenty five year history. Visions has seen many people come and go over the years and your insight, anecdotes, and personal history were invaluable in creating this document.
To the generations of Visions credentialed and classified staff: Thank you for keeping Visions afloat through trying times and keeping our school focused on living up to our promise of serving students to the best of our ability.
To the generations of Visions students: Thank you for continuing to choose Visions and pushing us to be the best school we can be.
Looking back over Visions’ 25 year history, the only constant is change and as we look towards the future, Visions will continue to grow and change to better serve the families who choose to put their faith in our school. As we go forward as a school, the author hopes this document will serve as a stable marker of history that our organization can use as a touchpoint for our school’s story as well as a reminder that Visions In Education succeeds when we align our work with what our students need. Our greatest strength as a school and institution is that, at the end of the day, the people who work here decided to dedicate a meaningful portion of their career and their lives to bettering the lives of Northern California’s students.
Ben Drahmann
Marketing and Communications Analyst
Visionary Since 2017
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The Marketing & Communication Services Team (Left to Right): Ben Drahmann, Justina Janas, Ellie Fazzi, & Ronaldo Gomez)
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