For some students looking for an alternative to the desk-and-textbook setting, a virtual classroom seems virtually good enough.

Local school officials are finding that a growing number of Sequim-area students are leaving classrooms for online schools and taking state-apportioned funds with them.

“We are losing students,” Sequim schools superintendent Kelly Shea told Sequim school board directors earlier this month. “The traditional setting is not working for them. Those options are somewhere else. The old days of every kid going to a physical place and going through the same educational system has changed.”

Shea said there are 87 students who live in Sequim’s school district boundaries but don’t attend Sequim schools.

“These are Sequim kids. It’s not that we want to force them to stay in Sequim,” Shea said. “This is a competitive world in public education. We need either to decide to offer something to keep Sequim kids in the Sequim School District or decide that’s not something we want to take on — knowing we are losing kids to other school districts. We do have the option to offer our own.”

A number of online schools have opened across Washington and while some are based in large school districts — iConnect Academy (Olympia), Kent Virtual High School (Kent), Internet Academy (Federal Way) and iQ Academy Washington (Vancouver, Wa.), for example — many popular online schools in the state are based in small towns. Washington Virtual Academies (WAVA) is based in Omak, Columbia Virtual Academy has offices in Colville and just south of Chewelah, and the Olympic Peninsula has its own Insight School of Washington, operated via the Quillayute Valley School District in Forks.

Those districts not only gain student numbers, but get about $5,684 per student apportionment from the state — meaning that the school districts students leave lose not only the student but funding.

By contrast, online schools such as WAVA and Insight are considered Alternative Learning Education programs by the state and would receive an apportionment of $5,755 per student — similar to what colleges receive for Running Start students.

“I’m not looking for a way to make us money,” Shea said. “If a Sequim kid wants to go somewhere else, great, but a Sequim kid shouldn’t have to go somewhere else because we don’t have that opportunity.”

Programs like online classes, homeschool/public school hybrids, charter schools and Running Start programs have become popular, Shea said, because “people want choices.”

“(We) need to be responsive to the community … so that we can compete,” Shea said. “The question is, ‘Should we be offering an online program for students in Sequim who’ve chosen to go somewhere else?’”

Randy Hill, Olympic Peninsula Academy principal and past president of the Washington Association for Learning Alternatives, gave Sequim School Board directors an idea of what a Sequim online school program, one he initially termed Sequim Option School Blended, could look like, at a school board meeting in early June.

Hill said that most of the pieces of such a program are in place already, as Olympic Peninsula Academy students use some online products, and that the district would focus on offering mathematics, language arts, social studies and science classes.

“We tend to lose them at grade 11,” Hill said, “(while) some … go and don’t enroll anywhere. We want to find those kids and give them another option before they drop out of school.”

Hill said he’s working on more details such as student access to technology — “We don’t want to send kids home with computers,” he said — and that he’d bring a proposal back to the school board later this summer.

The impetus to institute an online program becomes heightened, Hill said, as Washington State Board of Education leaders implement Core 24, a set of credit requirements for high school graduation that minimizes elective offerings for those intending to attend a college or university. Online schooling could allow a student to take seven or eight classes instead of the traditional six offered during the school day, he said, giving that student more options.

Sequim schools lost a significant portion of its anticipated junior-level high school class for the 2014-2015 school year. While some of the drop-off in this year’s junior class may be those choosing online schooling options, Shea said the vast majority of those leaving Sequim schools are opting for Running Start.

A mid-year budget review showed that district officials anticipated 75 full-time-equivalent students to opt for Running Start, but that 105 students enrolled.

Higher-than-anticipated enrollment in grades 2-6 offset the drop in grade 11 enrollment and the actual full-time-equivalent student number by mid-year was at 2,611, about five students more than budgeted.