Rachael Maves

Hello everyone. You are listening to the Rachael Maves Podcast, and I'm Rachael Maves, your host. Today we are speaking with Christine Feher. Christine is the Superintendent and CEO of California Pacific Charter Schools, also known amongst our team as CalPac, where she leads TK–12 programs centered on personalized learning and student success. With over 15 years of experience in online and independent study education, she brings deep expertise in charter operations, compliance, and policy. Christine is a strong advocate for educational equity and innovative models that expand access to diverse learners. Christine, thank you for joining me today.

Christine Feher

My pleasure.

Rachael Maves

So we always start off with the opportunity for everyone who joins to share a little bit about why they chose education. Tell us your story.

Christine Feher

Sure. So, like most college students, I was kind of searching for my purpose in life and trying to see how I was going to take my interests and connect them with a career. And so for a brief moment I thought I wanted to go into social work. And then I took a few of those classes and I went, wow, this is so heavy, so much heavier than I think I'm prepared for. And so I was like, "Nope, that's not it for me." I majored in sociology, and I was really interested in social justice and some equity-type themes in my interests. And so I sort of came to a conclusion that education was sort of the way to equalize, the way for certain groups of folks to have more opportunity and to sort of have a chance at equity, and that might be sort of the equalizer.

And I didn't really want to be a teacher. I was like, I don't think that's for me. And so I thought about my own education experience, and my school counselor was, frankly, not super awesome. And I thought, wow, I would have had more opportunities... I wasn't necessarily first-generation college, but my parents went to college later in life. So I was the first one in my family to go to college right out of high school, and my parents didn't really know how to coach or counsel me. And apparently neither did my counselor; she didn't do a great job either. So I thought, well, wow, what an opportunity to work with students to sort of help them identify their pathway and find a place to land. Maybe that could be my pathway. And I didn't really want to get a job right out of college; I kind of wanted to keep going to college. So for those reasons, I chose a pathway into school counseling.

And then, once I became a school counselor, I was a little bit frustrated at sort of handling problems on a one-to-one basis. I'm sort of a helicopter-up person, like: if all of these kids are having similar problems, how can I problem-solve on a larger level? And that paved the way to school administration for me.

Rachael Maves

Yeah, that makes sense. So I want to kind of come back to what you were talking about, of really wanting to engage with certain student groups and provide additional opportunities for them. The environment that you're in with CalPac is a little bit unique, and we have some people that listen to the podcast that aren't educators. Could you maybe just share a little bit about the structure of CalPac and how that's different than a traditional model? And then I'd love to hear how that vision and hope that you had ties into the model that you're providing.

Christine Feher

Sure. Yeah. So CalPac is a totally online school, and we've been online since pre-pandemic. So I like to say we were online before online was cool. We're fully remote, TK through 12th grade, so you might refer to us as a non-classroom-based school or a fully online school.

And our model looks very similar to traditional school. Our kids are online every day with teachers, but it's not all day, right? If you're in a classroom all day long, you kind of have some of those transitions, like, "Put your ELA book away, now get your math book out," and you kind of lose time in those transitions. Obviously there's the beloved recess and all of that, but in a six or six-and-a-half-hour school day, there's actually not six hours of learning happening, right? The learning is shorter. And so what we do is we kind of say, "Hey, we're going to give you a small chunk of learning, maybe an hour to an hour and a half, depending on your grade level, subject area, all of that." And then the rest of the day, you're going to learn asynchronously, engaging in the online coursework at your own pace.

So some of our students are finishing their school day in like three hours, because they're cutting out the fluff, they're cutting out the extra time. Or maybe they can get through a lesson in 30 minutes instead of what would take an hour in a traditional class. There's also no homework, right? You do the work, you do the practice, and it's done. You don't do it in class, waste a bunch of time, turn around and talk to your neighbor like I did in high school, and then do all your homework at night because you didn't get anything done all day because it was social hour.

So it provides a different, flexible approach to education, and it works for students who want to accelerate. It works for students who need to take twice as much time on a math problem and don't want to be embarrassed that it takes them a lot longer. We have some options for remediation, and things like that are, frankly, embarrassing if you're in a traditional school. People know when you go to the special class or when you have a math remediation class; those things are known, and they can be ostracizing. So in this model, you can learn, and it can be a little bit more hidden and private how you're learning and what you're choosing to do.

And so, back to my story, I guess, about being a school counselor. This was, gosh, 2010 to 2012. Back then we were only 6th through 12th grade, and most of our students were credit-deficient high schoolers. They were coming because their schools were like, "Hey, you don't have enough credits. You're in 11th grade. You don't have enough credits to stay here. You've got to go to the continuation school." Well, what was the narrative about continuation school? That's where the bad kids go. Well, we had a lot of kids who were credit deficient that aren't bad kids. They just maybe had something go wrong, go sideways, right? They came from a neighborhood where nobody could help them with their homework, and so they failed a lot of classes. And their parents didn't know; maybe culturally they didn't have an awareness that credits equal classes.

I can't tell you how many parents I've had to tell that you don't just go to school for four years and get a diploma at the end. They don't understand credits. They don't understand the grades. They don't understand how all that happens. So then their students... You know, I don't know how you were in high school, but I didn't always tell the truth in high school. I kind of slipped through the cracks. And so if you have a parent who doesn't understand how it works, and you're telling them something, they're like, "That must be how it is. I don't know; I didn't go to school in the US," right? They just kind of take your word for it. And then all of a sudden, these kids wake up in 12th grade and they're like, I'm not going to get a diploma.

So we created a credit recovery track, a pathway where students could actually earn more, because we're not bound by hours in a day. A student could take 10 classes in a semester and get more like a year, or almost a year's worth, of credits in one semester. So we were graduating kids on time, or as close to on time as possible, and it just sort of worked, right? And these are kids that would have been pushed out, cast aside, maybe sent to continuation school, where maybe they would have encountered some of these bad kids that everyone was worried about, and maybe made some different choices in their lives, and maybe their pathway would have been significantly altered. And maybe some of the narratives that come from their neighborhoods would have been realized, because they wouldn't have had an opportunity at a second chance to change, to course correct. So that is sort of how our model and some of the things that I'm passionate about coexist.

Rachael Maves

Yeah. Well, your background in counseling, I think, provides such a unique lens to be able to see that through line, from TK now all the way through 12th grade, and how do we make sure that students are as successful as possible. That's why I think it's beautiful that we have so many choices for schools, because, to your point, not everything's going to work for everyone. I'm sure that there are students for whom the model that you have set up isn't going to be the best choice, and that's fine. Similar with continuation schools and alternative programs and then traditional schools. But just that there's choice, and that the choices are fantastic, I think, is part of our call in education, right?

So that takes us into the next question, Christine, that I'd love to get your thoughts on, especially from your unique context of the type of school that you're leading, and also your background as a counselor. What are the things that keep you up? What are the one or two things that really weigh heavy on you?

Christine Feher

I think post-pandemic, I'm particularly interested in the mental health crisis that is consuming our youth. I've been sort of reading up on some of those causes, and I think social media, I think the internet, I think all of those things, right? And it's so funny, because I'm like, "Oh, get off the computer... but go to my school, that's 100% on the computer," right? So that's a little bit tricky.

But I really am worried about our kids. I'm worried about the anxiety that they feel, the pressure that they feel, and how it's showing up in younger and younger kids. So yeah, I'm concerned about depression, anxiety. At our school, there are more students who experience these things, because they are not able to get up and go to school all day. Maybe social anxiety is crippling, and being around that many people on a campus is not something that they can do. We're seeing a rise in that. So at our school, at CalPac, we do encounter students that, either diagnosed or undiagnosed, just have some of those vibes. And I'm seeing an uptick. I've been in online education for 15-plus years, and I've definitely seen the progression of the mental health epidemic in our youth.

Rachael Maves

Yeah. Yeah. So, as you're thinking about that, and I would just echo that... I don't know if you watched that Netflix show, was it The Social Dilemma? You would be interested in it, Christine. I would check it out. But all of it was around what the data shows around the impact of our phones and social media on students and kids, especially our middle schoolers, and it's pretty compelling. We actually made our three daughters, I have three kids, sit down and watch it with us before they were wanting to get on social media, and we're like, there needs to be a baseline here, and you need to understand some things. So it led to some interesting conversations.

But, that said, going off on it, I would love to hear, as you think about that mental health crisis and what your students are holding: how are you thinking of mitigating that, or supporting that, or providing that intervention, or whatever that looks like for you and your system?

Christine Feher

Well, I think the answer is connection, right? These kids are disconnected. I actually recently bought The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt, and I'm actually not totally finished with it yet, but I found it really interesting that our kids are literally sitting around with each other, holding their phones, on social media, and not interacting with each other, and they're in the same room. That never would have happened when we were young. And so, yeah, I think it's getting kids to connect.

I think it's really interesting. One of the things that we found online is that these kids are actually very connected online. They're super willing to get into an online classroom and chat. There are kids that would never speak up, that would never raise their hand in a regular class, but here, behind a computer... they're on screen. We do require them to be on camera, which is a battle in and of itself, but we're fighting that battle and we're winning. They are becoming more comfortable with being on camera and being themselves and representing themselves. And even if you don't want to raise your hand and take the microphone in class, being on camera and chatting, and people being able to match your chat with your name and your face, there's something that's really personal about that.

And I think that it's taking away that anonymity and that ability to just say whatever you want behind the veil of social media, or even a text message, right? You can text message people that you've never met, although you should not do that, but they can, right? And have these deep connections and lack that sort of face-to-face.

So that's something that we are weaving into our programming. Even though we're fully virtual, we actually have a ton of field trips, and our students are engaging with one another on field trips. And then they see each other in class, and they ask to be with the kid that they went on the field trip with and were in the same group with. They ask to be put into a breakout room. When they go into breakout rooms, the kids actually now have a preference on who they're going into a breakout room with, right? Which I think is really incredible, too.

And then also, we're noticing that our teachers and staff have deep connections with their students. I don't know, for the educators that maybe are listening to this podcast: if you are on a high school campus and you have 150 kids rolling through your five or six periods a day, you may only really deeply know five or six of those kids, right? Where you've actually held them after class, or maybe they're in a club, or if you're a coach... but you really don't know them because you're a teacher; you know them because you're the coach.

Rachael Maves

Yeah.

Christine Feher

Right. And I feel like the days of our teachers knowing our students are less. There's just less time. We spend so much time chasing after test scores and things like that. But I think actually the answer to the test scores is knowing the kids, and knowing their strengths and weaknesses, and building up their strengths, and then having a place to speak into their life about their weaknesses. And then they'll actually listen to you about how they can maybe lean into some ways that they can work on those weaknesses. And that's what we do here. We forge those deep relationships with students and parents, and we kind of form what we call a triangle of trust to work on the areas that students need help with. And when you know your students, and you know their families, and you know their circumstances, you actually have a voice to speak into them about these things.

Rachael Maves

Yeah, I think that's so powerful. And I love, Christine, that what I keep hearing you say over and over and over again is the relationships. At the end of the day, the way that we start to address this is through all these different modalities, but the heart of it is relationships: knowing kids, seeing them, connecting with them. And I love that you included parents in that. I don't hear that often, that triangle of trust, like you said, of them being that vital core piece. And it makes sense for your program, too. But I think that is a huge gap that we have in some of our traditional models, where they're not brought in and seen as that pivotal part.

Yeah. I'd love to hear, for a final question: what question in education are we not asking that we really should be?

Christine Feher

I mean, I want to lean into what's next, right? We've been doing education the same way for such a long time. And I know everyone's talking about AI, and it's like AI is the next wave, but how? And how do you personalize AI? Because you can't take the teachers out of it, I'm telling you right now.

Rachael Maves

I agree 100% with that.

Christine Feher

Yes. So to me, education is changing. Our society is changing, and education is not keeping up at the same clip as every other wave of innovation. And I don't have the answer. That's the question I'm truly asking: what is next? What does that mean? What's working and what's not working in education? And so, yeah, I think the question we should be asking is: what's next?

And I don't think it's one answer, right? I don't think that there's going to be one modality that works. I think we're going beyond that as a society. I think that you're going to find two or three or four modalities, and kids want to pick their own pathway. In life, there are so many choices and there are so many options. Why are there not more options in education, and in how you get there? And so I don't think it all has to look the same. But I think all kinds of education need to innovate, so that we can produce the next generation of workers, of thinkers, of citizens who are going to inherit the innovation that society is currently encountering.

Rachael Maves

I completely agree, Christine, especially with that comment. I mean, we're going to have to come at it from multiple ways, right? Because education encompasses so much. It's not just about English language arts and math. It includes pedagogy. It includes brain science, learning science [?]. It includes, I mean, all of these different components: social-emotional learning, the whole child. So I agree, there's going to be all of these different avenues.

Christine Feher

One model is not going to work for every kid. So I think having those options is critical.

Rachael Maves

It's been just a pleasure to connect with you today, Christine. Thanks for joining us on the podcast.

Christine Feher

Yeah, likewise. It's been great. Thanks for having me.

Rachael Maves

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This transcript was created from the episode's captions and lightly edited for readability. It may contain small errors; please refer to the audio for exact wording.