Rosman High School in Transylvania County is small. Matthew Barton is a senior there, one of less than 275 students in grades nine through 12. He has spent most of his life in this part of North Carolina, where many of the towns are small, but school and feelings of community pride and connection are high.

It’s often difficult for small schools in rural districts to duplicate the breadth of curriculum found in large metropolitan districts. That doesn’t mean, though, that students from those areas aren’t interested in higher-level courses. Matthew was certainly eager for that kind of challenge. And he found it through the NCSSM Connect program, which offers North Carolina high school students at participating partner schools the chance to supplement their home high school curriculum with tuition-free, honors-level and AP courses in STEM and humanities from NCSSM delivered via Zoom videoconference. Students who earn a grade of C or higher in at least two Connect courses are recognized in April of their senior year as NCSSM Connect Scholars.

Matthew began taking Connect courses as a freshman at Rosman. As he now graduates from high school, he has five Connect courses under his belt. His favorite among them was AP Calculus BC. “That was a fantastic experience for me,” he says. “I was amazed at how well the teacher could engage us in an online class. The course was really well done.”

NCSSM created Connect 30 years ago for students exactly like Matthew. Originally branded as Interactive Videoconferencing, and then called Open Enrollment, NCSSM Connect is a signature offering of NCSSM’s Extended Learning team. In 2024, the program won a United States Distance Learning Association Excellence in Distance Learning Teaching/Training Award, the only K-12 school to do so.

Camilla Brothers, Director of Instructional Leadership, who plays a pivotal role in the administration of NCSSM Connect, says the program began some three decades ago as an initiative “to provide access to students that were in some of our more rural areas that might not have access to the high quality, high level courses that NCSSM offered.”

The program has been so successful that it’s now in place in rural and urban districts, delivering courses to students across all regions of North Carolina.

It’s easy for any high school student in the state to enroll in Connect. There is no tuition, nor any kind of application process. All that’s needed is a Memorandum of Understanding with partnering schools stipulating a few administrative requirements. More than 440 students took Connect courses during the 2024-2025 school year, representing 59 counties and 120 high schools. This is an approximate 46% increase in the number of students served by NCSSM Connect in 2015-2016.

Financially, Connect also “closes an opportunity gap” that often exists in school districts due to funding issues at the local level, Brothers says. “Schools everywhere struggle with funding, and a lot of times our schools simply aren’t able to afford a teacher to teach anatomy and physiology if that class was only going to have four students in it. With Connect, we can serve four students from one school, and then four students from another school, and four students from another school until we have a whole virtual classroom of students from the mountains to the coast participating and learning together when those options may not be available for them otherwise.”

In the 2023-2024 academic year, students could choose from 24 courses, with options seldom available in public schools, including AP Psychology, Honors Aerospace Engineering, Honors Cryptography: Computer Programming and Secret Messages, and Honors Forensic Science. And as long as they have the capacity for it, students can take as many of these courses as they’d like.

“There’s a lot of enthusiasm out there for Connect,” Brothers continues. “Our returning partner schools always want to know, almost as soon as the new year comes, when the new course catalog is going to be available.”

Charles Robinson, a computer science instructor at NCSSM-Durham, started out teaching in NCSSM’s Residential program but now teaches exclusively in NCSSM Connect, where he teaches Honors Introduction to Computer Science and Computational Thinking, Honors Connected Computing, and a web design course. Altogether, he reaches about 100 students a year through these courses.

Though the courses are taught remotely, Robinson makes it a point to live up to the program’s name, Connect, by visiting students in as many of the partnering schools as he can each year. This academic year he visited 14 schools, from Cherokee in Western North Carolina all the way to Ocracoke on the Outer Banks.

That kind of effort, he says, is always appreciated by the students. “They always, always mention how awesome it is to see a teacher face to face. We are the only program that meets with our students daily through Zoom, but once we show up somewhere like Cherokee or Ocracoke, where the students know it took you hours to get there, it makes them feel very valued. And they are valued. We want them to know that if you have an interest and a passion and a desire and you want to work hard, we have faith in you and we are willing through this Connect program to help show you just what you can do.”

Mariah Clark, a senior from Perquimans county, took Connect courses as a sophomore and junior at Perquimans High School before transferring in her senior year to Northeastern High School. She found out about Connect through her school counselor, who recommended the program as an option for finding additional courses that matched her career plans to become a nurse. She ended up taking Honors Diseases, the Dynamics of Epidemics; Honors Genetics and Biotechnology; and Honors Forensic Science.

The biggest draw of NCSSM Connect for Mariah was the ability to take Connect courses while remaining in her home school.

“I just couldn’t get it in me to just pick up and leave all my friends,” she says. “The most important things for me are the bonds that I’ve built with people around me. NCSSM Connect really gave me the opportunity to still get that academic piece and not really miss out on that chance without feeling like I was missing out on my life here at home.” 

Though Connect courses are advanced offerings, Mariah signed up to fill elective slots in her schedule. And, like most students signing up for electives, she expected a fairly ordinary experience. The courses were anything but.

“I really thought that we weren’t going to be doing a whole lot of ‘thinking’ activities, if that makes sense,” she says, “but they were actually challenging. There were some assignments where I was like, ‘Oh, this is kind of hard but I really like it.’ Now I have a lot of knowledge off the top of my head, and it’s kind of fun. I never thought that the things we were studying could apply to my life or actually use it in the future.” 

It’s that kind of knowledge, student Matthew Barton says, that has him feeling confident about his future.

“Every advanced class I’ve taken through Connect has furthered my understanding of the world,” he says. “I’m much more prepared academically, and I’m much more enthusiastic about going to college because I know I’ve already taken college-caliber classes.”