VIP Academy: A Program First, Then a School

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10 min read

Last updated November 5, 2026

By Dr. Julia Daniely, guest contributor

Editor’s note: Dr. Julia Daniely created VIP Academy and served as its principal until her retirement in October 2024. She submitted this account in her own words through the Global Watchdog guest article program. It follows our earlier piece from inside the school, Do Not Close VIP Academy, by a current VIP Academy teacher. The piece was edited only for clarity and legal risk, as our guest article guidelines describe. The views expressed are the author’s.

I created VIP Academy, a virtual school in Macon, Georgia, where I served as principal until I retired in October 2024. But VIP Academy was a program first.

It began as a program during COVID-19, in the 2020-2021 school year. On April 15, 2021, the Bibb County Board of Education approved VIP Academy as a virtual school for the 2021-2022 school year, making it the new home for all virtual learning in the district.

It was a response to COVID-19 and the re-entry of Bibb County public schools. Some families did not want to re-enter a brick-and-mortar school, and they needed another option. As the person in charge of non-traditional programming for Bibb County Public Schools, I was tasked by the superintendent to build it.

I was already running the academies that served students who needed something different. SOAR Academy focused on behavior. Another academy focused on academic acceleration for middle and high school students who were over age and under-credited. We also had YouthBuild, a United States Department of Labor grant for 16-to-24-year-old opportunity youth, focused on high school completion, diploma or GED, and workforce development. My role was to create the instructional design and the teaching and learning process to get those students back on track, with behavior and with academics.

VIP Academy was the last academy we developed. It was a virtual option for children coming from homeschool, families who desired homeschool, and students in private school. That was the pilot. We had 127 students, and those students stayed attached to their zoned middle or high school.

It went well. More families were interested, and we had a cap of 600. Then VIP Academy moved from a program to a school. When the district enrolled the students, we received FTE dollars, and that funded the staff. I did earn Title dollars and FTE. It gave us a platform, full-time teachers, a registrar, and a counselor.

At first, I was running all of those academies by myself. I did not have an assistant principal, and I was serving up to 900 students a year. When we added VIP Academy, they did assign me an assistant principal. We ran all of those academies with little funding, but we made it work. I am not complaining, we embraced it. I had run Westside High School with close to 1,300 students, so this was easy for me, and I embraced the challenge to provide personalized learning for families and students.

We were one school and one faculty. We had professional learning together. We did everything together.

I did not have a full staff like the traditional settings. So I worked to build the leadership capacity of teachers from all of the academies, and they assisted me operationally and instructionally. I could not have done this work without my staff and teacher-leaders.

How we actually did it

VIP Academy was not just putting school online. I worked closely with the instructional support team with Edgenuity. We built curriculum. We designed personalized learning.

On Sunday evenings, I would coach the parents as learning coaches on how to lead homeschool in their homes. We did a lot of home visits. Children did come in based on their need to get face to face. We had a process of remote teaching and asynchronous learning, but it was designed based on the data and what students needed.

That is what made it work. It was personal, and it was planned.

The results showed it. In 2023, VIP Academy’s graduation rate was 88.5 percent, above the district’s 87.07 percent and the state’s 84.4 percent. I have always said the most rewarding aspect of virtual school is our ability to equip parents and guardians with the skills to serve as effective learning coaches within their own homes. By sharing the responsibility of overseeing their child’s daily accomplishments, parents become instrumental in the virtual learning journey.

But I was never completely satisfied with just graduating students. My goal was to ensure that the college readiness rate, content mastery, and literacy rate mirrored the graduation rate. I would express that frequently to all stakeholders. Therefore, there was much work to be done.

The same approach worked in YouthBuild. SOAR Academy was awarded the YouthBuild grant in February 2019, one of only two school districts in Georgia to receive it. By June 2024, we had received a third YouthBuild grant of $1.5 million, bringing the total to $4.1 million since 2019. More than 62 young people, ages 16 to 24, had the opportunity to build a Habitat for Humanity house, earn employability skills, and graduate with a diploma or a GED. YouthBuild works because it removes barriers that are often caused by socioeconomic status while giving students the tangible skills they need to live successful and meaningful lives.

Intervention, not punishment

One thing I wanted to be clear about: I did not want to run an alternative school that was punitive. I wanted to run an alternative setting that was intervention, because we wanted to reduce the recidivism rate. And I did not punish the academics of a child when they came for behavior.

If I had a child who was gifted, I was able to provide gifted services through VIP Academy because I had gifted teachers. If I had a student athlete who had to come to the alternative setting and was on track to go to college, I would use the resources through the lens of equity so that student could take the NCAA courses. If I had a student in dual enrollment, I did not punish his academic future because of behavior. That seemed to be problematic for some of the school leaders at that time, but I was able to navigate through all of that, even the budget cuts, even taking money away, because I was very resourceful.

I also wanted to be clear about who VIP Academy was for. Across the state of Georgia, virtual schools are typically used as dumping grounds, schools where people are placed when they are not being successful in high school. If you compare graduation rates or test scores, you will see that districts use those virtual schools for that purpose.

I did not use VIP Academy that way. I used it for families that needed VIP Academy, for homeschool, for parents who wanted to be learning coaches. We did not enroll students just because principals wanted them to be there.

That became problematic with other school leaders, because in their eyes, VIP Academy became an elite option. There was a lot of resistance and a lot of complaints made to the administration, and I had to fight for my staff. I even spoke in front of the board meeting advocating for my teachers and for the programs because of the scrutiny of VIP Academy. A later superintendent even asked me if I would be open to changing the name. I did not care about changing the name. VIP Academy came from the past administration, and he came in with a different vision, so changing the name was not a problem for me if he wanted to move in that direction. But it was very clear that the senior administration was listening to disgruntled leaders, my colleagues, and that is where the resistance came from. Yet we would get the most results.

Dr. Curtis L. Jones gave me the autonomy, and he communicated that if secondary schools could not manage the unique needs of the students, they should send them to me. That did not go over well. When the new superintendent, Dr. Dan A. Sims, came in, Dr. Sims was unaware of the past superintendent’s expectations. I feel these leaders took advantage of the transition. There was a coordinated effort to disband the autonomy of doing what was good for children, to allow these leaders to tell me how to run my building. I was not going to tolerate that, because we kept students in the forefront and it was my job to advocate for them.

One school leader was especially disgruntled because some of her top students transitioned to VIP Academy in their senior year. It was apparent, and it was communicated.

We ran that as one school for years. It was only when I exited that they divided the schools. They brought in more staff members and they added more money to what was needed. They added two principals and two assistant principals and two different secretaries. They did not need to add all of that. We ran it for years without it. So to say that VIP Academy is costing money: they were the ones who added the money to what was already working.

What is at stake now

Now they want to disband VIP Academy and put the virtual option within the high schools, calling them in-school academies, when there has been no online teaching training. My teachers got the online teaching endorsement. They received the personalized learning endorsement. And now you are proposing to move VIP Academy, disband it, and allow high schools and secondary schools to do their own virtual option when they do not have the teaching and learning expertise in that area. That is not a smart move.

The difference is live instruction. VIP Academy is the only virtual program in the district where students receive live, teacher-led instruction. In the in-school academies, students sit in a classroom at their home high school and work through Edgenuity on their own while a teacher watches. That is supervision. It is not instruction, and it does not replace what VIP Academy provides. For students who cannot succeed in a traditional classroom because of health needs, scheduling conflicts, credit recovery, or other circumstances, live instruction is often their only path to a diploma.

The results speak for themselves. VIP Academy’s Milestones scores have grown every year in every subject. Algebra I grew by 26 percent, more than any other high school in the district. The district has also proposed putting VIP Academy’s original blueprint in place at every other high school, which admits the model works. Instead of supporting the virtual school it already has, the district plans to copy what we do and close the original.

And closing VIP Academy will not fix the budget. VIP Academy is a small campus with very few staff. Today it runs with seven content teachers, two special education teachers, one counselor, one administrative assistant, paraprofessional support, and one principal. There is no assistant principal. Those seven content teachers cover every grade from 6 through 12, each teaching three different live courses at three different grade levels and also monitoring students working in Edgenuity. VIP Academy has still faced closure two years in a row.

The other thing is, I do not think the district is leveraging the homeschool population and partnering with it. We have close to a thousand children who have elected Georgia Promise to do homeschool or go to private school. VIP Academy would be a response to that. But because there is no district-level support to champion VIP Academy, we have lost enrollment to private schools and to home.

VIP Academy was built for those families. It was built by teachers who were trained to teach online, who were trained in personalized learning, and who knew how to support parents as learning coaches. That expertise does not just transfer because you change the name and put it inside a high school.

I do not manage difficult children, I educate them. I love them and forgive daily. That is how VIP Academy was built, and that is why it worked.

Dr. Julia Daniely is the founding principal of VIP Academy and a former Director of Personalized Learning for Bibb County Schools. She retired in October 2024 and now works as an author and life coach.