Online School Makes the Grade for Extreme Skier
September 4, 2008
By ALYSSA PATRICK
EISENHOWER HIGH SCHOOL
Willi Furr practically was born skiing.
The 17-year-old hit the slopes for the first time at age 2. Though he cried the first few times he fell, he grew to share his family’s love for the sport.
In fact, skiing has become his life; a phenomenon that’s made possible through parental support and online schooling.
At 10, Furr participated in his first competition. Up until early this year, he followed the path set by his older brother and competed in freestyle skiing.
But “hitting the moguls” began to bore him. So he made a switch to extreme skiing. Competition venues can include a varying number of cliffs, trees and chutes.
“The winner is essentially whoever can find the coolest way down,” Furr says.
And in the world of extreme skiing, “cool” is defined in three ways: how much control the skier has, how aggressive the skier is, and how technical is the route that the skier picked.
Furr must be pretty cool: He placed 19th out of 63 in the Junior Division at the Crested Butte extreme championship in Crested Butte, Col., earlier this year.
Though it was a national competition in the junior division, it was actually the third stop in the world tour for the adult division. In other words, a pretty big deal overall.
Competing has always been a part of Furr family life. Johann Furr, the boys’ 55-year-old father, is a freestyle director at White Pass Ski Area.
While Willi and his brother are the only two in the family who compete now, both their mother and sister are longtime recreational skiers.
So, though the events are both time- and money-consuming, the Furr boys have always been greatly supported.
It was only after Willi missed a month and a half of his freshman year at West Valley Junior High due to skiing, however, that the family decided a change needed to be made. And skiing was definitely not going to change.
“We contemplated moving to a ski town at first,” says Johann Furr, “but we soon came to the realization that we would have to travel to different competition areas anyways. It was Willi’s decision to look into alternate schooling.”
So the Furr family stayed in Yakima and Willi enrolled in the Insight School of Washington, an online school that started three years ago. Though fairly new, 901 students were attending the school by last April. The program offers iMentors (which provide constant comprehensive support to students), online clubs, an all-student prom and graduation in June, and more than 120 courses.
“Insight offers all the classes you would take at West Valley or any other high school,” Willi says.
The difference comes in the ability of the school to bend around his schedule. During winter, he attends classes four days a week without any teachers nagging him about making up work. The rest of the year, he attends five days a week for five to six hours a day.
“The switch (from public to online school) hasn’t been an issue,” says Johann Furr.
Willi maintains a grade-point average of about 3.9, and has performed well on both the PSATs and the WASL exams. Though he was doing just as well in public school, his dad says he feels that his son was not challenged enough.
Now, “he creates his own schedule, and does basically everything else on his own as well,” his dad says.
If Willi ever needs help with a single assignment or an entire lesson, he has various resources to which to turn. Insight offers online tutoring, chat rooms that “allow you to ask questions like you would in any other class,” and the ability to e-mail teachers.
For students such as Willi — people who want to follow their passions and still receive a high school diploma — online school seems to be a definite option.
Skiing at a competitive level is like a full-time job. Willi says there’s no way he would be able to do both if he still attended public school.
From December until April, he travels to places such as Montana, Utah and the East Coast to compete. Once the competition season is over, he trains with his coach at both White Pass and at a water-ramp facility in Utah. During summer, he stays in shape by mountain biking and longboarding.
His schedule does not mesh with attendance requirements of public schools, and as long as he is able to get an education, it does not need to.
Though Willi does hope to turn professional, he also plans to attend college. He’s even toying with the idea of going pre-med, then heading to graduate school.
As far as skiing goes, his next big competition will be sometime in late December or January, which will be the first of about four competitions for the upcoming extreme skiing season.
“It is my aspiration to win every competition I enter,” he says.
• For more information about Insight School of Washington, visit www.insightwa.net.
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Quite an inspirational story. It makes me wish that this option was available when I was in high school. I didn’t have a full time job as a competitive skier, but I certainly wasn’t very interested in or challenged by high school. I think, given the same opportunity, I would have been a much happier student and probably would have chosen to continue my education at the postsecondary level, but almost certainly with an online school again.