By Annemarie Mannion
Tribune staff reporter
Published October 3, 2006

The 18-year-old Adamski wanted an alternative to regular high school and she found it at the American School, housed in a two-story, brown, brick building off busy Torrence Avenue in Lansing.

There are no ivy, grassy quad, sports fields, stage or even classrooms. Founded in 1897, it is a correspondence school.

The private, nonprofit institution still communicates with its approximately 40,000 students the way it did when the telephone and the automobile were new-fangled inventions. It receives and returns about 750,000 exams a year by mail from students who live across the country and around the world.

A proliferation of online courses has fueled rising enrollment in distance education, which includes online and correspondence schools, by about 15 percent a year, officials said. Students now total about 8.5 million.

"Online learning and its ubiquitous, cheap and fast technology all provide more convenience to adult learners," said Michael Lambert, executive director of the Distance Education and Training Council in Washington, D.C.

Still, the American School has no plans to drastically alter the way it does things. Mail bins stacked with exams are stamped when received and then distributed to instructors who specialize in specific subjects.

Thirty instructors sit in long rows of desks in a large room, using red pens to grade exams and make handwritten, personalized comments to students.

The school was founded in Boston on the idea that education should not be just for the elite. It meant that factory and farmworkers, maids and seamstresses should have the same opportunity to get an education as wealthy people.

"The idea was to bring education to the masses, the working masses, who didn't have leisure time or money to go to school," said Roberta Allen, executive vice president of the American School.

The Armour Institute of Technology (now the Illinois Institute of Technology) invited the school to move to Chicago in 1902. It relocated from Hyde Park to Lansing in 1996.

Chicago was once a hub for correspondence schools, with 30 located in the area by the 1950s. They flourished because of the convergence of rail lines in Chicago, which facilitated mail delivery all over the country.

"It [Chicago] was known as the `home study capital of the world' for many decades," Lambert said.

Today, besides the American School, only the Hadley School for the Blind in Winnetka and the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago offer correspondence courses, he said.

The American School has had students from diverse walks of life: actors, performers in ballet troupes and circuses, missionaries, ice skaters and from religious communities, such as the Mennonites.

"Over the years, the needs have changed. But always, new needs have found us," Allen said. "There was a time when pregnant girls were kicked out of high school. We were there. There was a time when the physically disabled were not mainstreamed. We were there."

Of those currently enrolled, about 15,000 are working toward a high school diploma. The rest are taking independent study. The American School contracts with 7,000 high schools nationwide to provide courses those schools do not offer.

Many students are home-schooled or, like Adamski, are opting out of regular school. She had attended the Latin School in Chicago and then spent her junior year at a boarding school in Arizona, where she broke her ankle. Returning to Chicago, she wanted to keep occupied while nursing her ankle and was eager to put high school behind her. "I basically felt I needed a way to finish high school. I was done with it," she said.

Adamski finished her credits in three months by studying four hours a day and cramming in courses in social science, psychology, economics and English. "I found it very easy to do on my own. You just read through the book and took practice tests," she said.

Unlike in regular high school, students who fail an exam are allowed to retest as often as they need. They also can call to talk to an instructor.

"We're not looking to be punitive. The focus is on learning," Allen said. Exams are open-book, but Allen stressed that mere regurgitation of the textbook is not sufficient.

"The tests are designed so you ... have to synthesize what you learned and apply it," she said.

Adamski, now a sophomore at The School of the Art Institute, had no problem getting her credits recognized by colleges. The American School is accredited by the North Central Association of Schools and Colleges and by the state. Students graduate with diplomas, not equivalency certificates.

Adamski missed classroom discussions, something neither correspondence nor online education offers. Still, officials at the American School note the growing interest in online courses.

"Every time I turn around, there's a new school offering an online course," Allen said.

Launching an online program would be costly, and the American School is testing the waters slowly. It is updating its Web site with a student resource center that will provide enrichment, such as help sheets and links to more information on subjects.

Though online education represents competition, it seems unlikely the American School will ever entirely abandon hand-graded exams for computerized grading or the U.S. Postal Service for e-mail.

Even today, some students do not have access to computers, Allen said. Others, like Adamski, enjoy studying from a book.

"I didn't want to [finish high school] online," she said. "I like having something physical, the book, in front of me."

By the numbers

The school was founded in 1897.

The school currently has 40,000 students.

It receives and returns by mail about 750,000 exams a year.

It offers 70 courses.

The school contracts with 7,000 high schools nationwide to provide courses those schools do not offer.

The average age of the school's students is 17 to 18 years old.

amannion@tribune.com