Original Research by School Decision on Astravo Online Academy Elementary School
Astravo Online Academy Elementary School is a full-time virtual public school serving preschool through fifth grade. It is listed as a regular public school, not a charter, and is part of Byers School District No. 32J, a rural district that also operates multiple other online academies reaching families across Colorado. Though the school’s administrative address is in Lakewood, a large suburban city west of Denver, this is a statewide online program: the building is not a campus where students attend in person. The school’s character is defined entirely by its virtual model, and families choosing it are opting into remote elementary education, not a neighborhood school.
The student body of roughly the size typical for a multi-grade online elementary is diverse. White students make up the largest share, followed by a substantial percentage of Hispanic students, a moderate share of Black students, and smaller populations of Asian, American Indian or Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander students. The data on economic disadvantage was not available, so a reader cannot determine the share of students who qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. Similarly, the counts of students with disabilities and English learners were not reported. This limits a parent’s ability to gauge the school’s level of support services for those populations purely from available metrics.
Because state testing data for the most recent year was suppressed due to very low participation rates—roughly in the single digits—no meaningful academic proficiency results are available for math, English language arts, or science at the elementary level. The school’s statewide testing cohort was effectively zero, meaning that the vast majority of enrolled students did not take the Colorado Measures of Academic Success assessments. This is a major soft spot. A parent choosing this school would want to ask the school directly how it monitors student academic progress absent standardized testing data, and what its own internal assessments show. The comparison to other districts in Arapahoe County is not applicable because the school’s own performance metrics are missing. The school also serves only elementary grades, so there is no graduation rate to consider.
The context of the school’s home district matters. Byers 32J acts as an authorizer and host for a handful of full-time virtual schools, meaning the district’s footprint extends well beyond the small town of Byers itself. The district brief notes that this structure has substantially expanded the district’s reach. For a parent, this means the school is not tied to a single community’s demographics or local housing market in the way a traditional attendance-zone school would be. The Lakewood address on the school’s listing is administrative, and families anywhere in Colorado can enroll.
Housing data for the area surrounding the school’s listed address shows a home value that is above the national median benchmark, and rents that are similarly elevated relative to the national picture, reflecting the Denver metro area’s housing costs. But because the school is online, a family’s housing location is largely irrelevant to the school experience itself; the more relevant question is whether the family has a suitable home learning environment.
Overall, Astravo Online Academy Elementary School offers a straightforward proposition: a full-time virtual elementary curriculum for Colorado families who want or need an online public school option. The major trade-off is that the available state data tells a parent almost nothing about how the school’s students are performing academically, because so few families opted into state testing. A parent considering this school should treat the absence of proficiency data as a prompt to investigate further, not a verdict on quality, and should ask about the school’s own tools for measuring whether students are on track.
See more original research from School Decision →