Merced Times

Cristian Miley is proud of his school. 

Miley is the “proud principal” at Delhi High School in the Delhi Unified School District. It has an enrollment of about 2,580 students in a high school, middle school and three elementary schools.

“Our graduation rate is truly one of our proudest achievements at Delhi High School,” Miley told Merced Times. “We are at the top of the county with a graduation rate of 98.2%. Over the last five years that we have utilized the Acellus program, we have seen a steady increase in our graduation percentage, and that increase can definitely be linked to using Acellus." 

Acellus Academy is an online course of study that provides a road to graduation for K-12 students in 6,000 school districts, according to the Acellus website. They can study all courses through the program and also enroll in advanced placement classes.

“Acellus Academy provides instruction online through distance education via the Acellus learning system,” according to its website. “Acellus, a program of the International Academy of Science, is an online learning system that has been used to provide primary instruction to millions of students in thousands of schools throughout the United States.

Acellus Academy was established in 2013. The Acellus learning system, created in 2001, is designed to use science to create an instructional system that seeks to more effectively reach and empower students while offering more than 250 courses.

Miley said it’s not a brick-and-mortar facility. It’s an online course and a state of mind.

“There is not an academy so to speak, and that is the beauty of what we are doing,” he said. “When students are assigned a ‘hybrid’ class, it is simply one period of their day just like English, or math or science. Some students may take more than one period simply due to their needs, but they are not in any way different or separated from any other students on our campus.”

Miley said the district used to operate a separate school for students who were in need of credit recovery.

“That school, Shattuck Educational Park, also yielded great success but as a district, we knew that we could improve on this idea,” he said. “In high schools across the country students, unfortunately, fail classes for a wide variety of reasons. These range from family concerns, poverty and homelessness, moving around in foster care, and mental health concerns. 

"When students fail enough classes, most school districts have a system set up to displace those students from the 'traditional' high school program and send them to an 'alternative' program that is designed to specifically attend to credit recovery issues.”

Miley said his district chose a different approach.

“What would happen with our students who had gotten behind in credits if we never displaced them from the ‘traditional’ school family?” he said district officials asked. “What if we recovered their credits in real time as the deficits occurred as opposed to waiting for the continuation education code language that requires us to wait until a student is 16, and in at least the second semester of their sophomore year, before we began to remediate the deficits?”

With those questions as the driver, the district created its hybrid credit recovery program at DHS five years ago. The results have been spectacular, and Miley said one person in particular deserves the lion’s share of the credit.

“Acellus is a valuable part of the program that was developed, but the essence of why it is so successful is the teacher who runs this program, Erika Pilcher,” Miley said. “In concert with our counseling staff, Mrs. Pilcher has been critical to building a program where we almost never displace a student from the school family at DHS. We deal with their deficits as they occur, and by having this program within our campus and by using the Acellus model, students are given a period or two of ‘hybrid’ in order to recover the credits they are missing in A-G approved courses through Acellus." 

He added, "This means that the rest of their day continues to be in their traditional classes on our campus, with all the benefits of still being a [Delhi] Hawk and still remaining with us as a part of our school family!”

Pilcher provides direct support and assistance to students while also setting individual learning plans for each student that includes meeting weekly goals, he said. The high school has an enrollment of 812 students. Almost all are on track to graduate.

“Mrs. Pilcher and our counseling staff work in tandem to support this as well as, our independent study program [which uses Acellus as the core curriculum], and additional GATE offerings to ensure that we provide as many opportunities for advancement as possible,” Miley said. “We offer additional AP course opportunities in Acellus, and students who are UC/CSU bound and wish to remediate a grade in an A-G course have the flexibility to do so based on our seven-period day and the flexibility it provides to them in their junior and senior years." 

He added, "We believe that by offering such a dynamic program, with such a dynamic teacher and support staff, we have been able to visibly demonstrate the power of keeping as many students as possible in their home school family. The results are evident.”

He said as the COVID-19 pandemic lessens its grip on schools, many districts will resume 100% in-person instruction. The DUSD will stick with what it considers a winning hand, including Acellus.

“Absolutely, we have used it as an integral piece of credit recovery and advancement for five years,” Miley said. “I believe that all high schools have the ability to do this, but not all have schools have Mrs. Pilcher, and gifted teachers and support staff are critical to these successes.”