(Editor's Note: This is the third in a series of articles featuring the perspectives of current and recent Michigan public school teachers’ experiences with school choice. See the first two articles here and here.)

Meeting Amy Dunlap now, it’s hard to imagine. But in the early part of this decade the energetic and passionate young woman was ready to give up on her teaching career. From defiant, disruptive students to uncooperative colleagues, her classroom experience had become far more frustrating than fulfilling. “You start to rethink why you went into the profession,” she said.

But in 2012 Dunlap’s eyes were opened wide by the discovery of Michigan Connections Academy, an online public charter school. “When I first heard about the virtual school option, I really just didn't know how that would work,” she said. “How do you teach a student through the computer? That can't be a thing.” She quickly came to embrace its unconventional way of schooling that she saw as a boon to many.

During her first six years at Connections Academy, Dunlap worked as a teacher, but since has assumed the role of instructional coach and field trip coordinator. Her experience demonstrates how a cyber school can offer far more than just learning through a computer. In recent years she has partnered with business sponsors to put more books in her students’ homes and organized a student boat tour of the Upper Peninsula’s Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore.

According to Dunlap, the online learning environment allows teachers to focus more on what students need to learn without the typical school day distractions or the added burden of developing curriculum materials from scratch. The school also provides extra time to huddle with colleagues who work in nearby cubicles.

A tuition-free public school, Michigan Connections Academy consistently outperforms expectations on the Mackinac Center’s Context and Performance Report Card, a measure of school performance adjusted for student poverty rates. But even that comparison doesn’t give the fuller picture of how the online school provides a powerful lifeline for children with rare autoimmune disorders, or the opportunity for extraordinary young people to pursue entrepreneurial, athletic, artistic or similar creative pursuits in addition to their schooling.

Unfortunately, bureaucrats in the state education department have forwarded rigid rules in recent years that jeopardized the ability of online charter schools to serve students. And both Republican Gov. Rick Snyder and Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer have proposed cutting the K-12 funding formula so cyber schools would receive substantially less revenue per pupil than other schools. While none of these efforts has succeeded, Gov. Whitmer’s recent line-item veto has denied cyber and all other public charter schools the same funding increase provided to district schools.

Dunlap is adamant about the unfairness of this approach. She recognizes that Connections Academy is not for every student: some will thrive and others will not. But the online educational environment has revived and helped the once-defeated teacher to blossom. Today, she earnestly believes that a genuine variety of quality learning options benefits educators like herself, not to mention the untold number of families with children who struggle in a one-size-fits-all setting.

“If we can offer something to a student to make them successful that another school can't, it's okay. And if the other school can offer something to make that same student successful that we can't, that's okay, too,” she said. “But we just need those options to be able to ensure that we're not losing that love of learning from our students and be able to give them something that will allow them to be successful.”

Permission to reprint this blog post in whole or in part is hereby granted, provided that the author (or authors) and the Mackinac Center for Public Policy are properly cited.