Plug And Learn

Dawna Foucht of Fall City, Washington, wanted to homeschool each of her four children, but she found it increasingly difficult as they grew older and their educational needs became more varied. In the middle of last year, she broke down and put her 10-year-old in public school.

Then she learned about the Internet Academy, an online "school" run by the Federal Way, Washington, district, which offers free K-12 courses over the Internet. Foucht pulled her son back out of school and enrolled him and her 12-year-old daughter in four and five Internet Academy courses, respectively. Now, while her older children work on the online courses, she is free to teach her younger children herself. "I still feel like I'm homeschooling," she says, "but I feel like I have a little more help, rather than trying to do it all alone."

"This is one of the new ways to do your homeschooling, where parents aren't the sole teachers," says Janet Hale, a former public elementary school teacher who founded the private Willoway Cyberschool in 1994. Based in Reinholds, Pennsylvania, her school currently has 24 students, all of whom take a full curriculum over the Internet for a fee of $2,250 per year. "That's how I envisioned it-opening up the doors [to homeschooling] for people who never considered...