Details About Sevenstar Academy
Sevenstar provides Christian educational platforms for schools throughout the world, therefore, the majority of their students are actually not really enrolled in Sevenstar. However, Sevenstar does host an online academy for students that cannot attend one of their affiliate schools.
Sevenstar purchased the rights to the use and make changes to Florida Virtual's global platform in addition to several other well known platforms. The State of Florida encourages homeschool, and they spent large sums of money to build an online public school. This online school is known as Florida Virtual. They became known for their online platform, and eventually opened it to students throughout the world. Now, anyone can attend Florida's public school online through Florida Virtual Global. However, it is a public school platform, and as such, many wanting a Christian homeschool did not find it appealing. Sevenstar kept the quality of Florida Virtual's online education and changed the content of its curriculum, along with the curriculums of several other platforms, to make them Christian.
There are two options with Sevenstar. A student can either attend full time or take classes a la carte. If a student attends full time and graduates, Sevenstar does issue a high school diploma.
Everything is online. Students do not receive books. Instead they access materials through the platform. Although with some classes, depending upon the class, additional materials may need to be purchased.
Interestingly, tuition to Sevenstar is actually substantially less expensive than tuition to Florida Virtual Global. A typical class at Florida Virtual for a full year runs around $975 plus application fee. Sevenstar charges $675 plus $45 application fee for the same class. The application fee is only charged once regardless of the number of classes taken for the year.
One of Sevenstar's most appealing qualities is the fact that they offer some classes that are not found in most of the other Christian academies. For example, with Sevenstar a student can take Chinese I and II, and they offer computer coding to students in middle school.
Not all students are accepted at Sevenstar. Students that want to attend the academy full time must go through an interview process. Although Sevenstar's website does mention the interview for all student before they are accepted, we found upon enrolling a student in one a la carte class that they did not require any type of interview or screening of the student. We were able to pay the fee and simply sign the student up the same as we would be able to do at any of the other academies.
We enrolled a test student in Sevenstar's Chinese I class, and have been quite impressed. The student, who has also used HSLDA and Liberty platforms, ranked Sevenstar's platform as her second favorite, directly below HSLDA. It features a live, native-Chinese speaking teacher with weekly live classes, and assignments in between. Additionally, the student meets with the teacher via phone regularly. The program is modern, easy to use, and has good content.
An additional perk that we found with our Sevenstar student is the fact that her Chinese class runs for 12 months. She doesn't just have 12 months to complete the classes, but rather, the class actually runs for 12 months, so it has far more material than the typical homeschool classes. Individuals only wanting to go 180 days should check with the school to see if a student can simply stop the class at that point.
Our test student has done very well learning Chinese, and she was so happy with Sevenstar's platform that she has decided to enroll in Chinese II with them next year.
Signing up for either the Academy or a class on Sevenstar's website can be difficult, however. Prospective students must sign up for an account before they can view sample classes even if they are not sure they want to enroll. It is a somewhat lengthy application that requires a lot of personal information. Once a student has signed up for the account, however, he/she can view sample classes and purchase classes from his/her account. It is not possible to sign up for the account using Edge because it is not compatible with their system, therefore individuals must use either Firefox or Chrome to access the site. Eventhough we were using Firefox, when we signed up for the account it appeared as though the form did not go through. After numerous tries, we contacted their customer service. The customer service was extremely helpful and was able to locate our account. They walked us through the rest of the procedure. Our recommendation is that if you have trouble with the process, call the number on Sevenstar's website.
Sevenstar does offer dual enrollment through a couple of different colleges.
Students pay for each class that they take individually. There is no discount in classes for attending full time. Although there are a number of factors that determine the total costs, on average, tuition for five full-year, non-dual enrollment classes would be around $3237.50 per year. Individual regular classes are $640.00 per year. Half year classes are $500.00 each.
After following a student enrolled in Sevenstar, we are impressed, and give them a "5 out of 5" rating.
A list of the classes offered by Sevenstar can be found at: https://sevenstar.org/courses/.
Sevenstar's website is located at: https://sevenstar.org/.
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