Rebekah Richards
The American Academy
Rebekah Richards is a Co-Founder of The American Academy. Rebekah has worked in online high school education since 1999. She has been involved in the early stage planning and implementation of numerous public and private online high schools throughout the country, including Colorado Online Learning, Connecticut’s Adult Education online program, The Online Latin School, and Insight Schools, Inc. As the Chief Academic Officer for The American Academy, Rebekah oversees education program development, policy initiatives, and program compliance.
Rebekah is a frequent speaker on dropout recovery and prevention and the use of online learning to address the needs of at-risk students. She has been featured at national and international conferences on topics including dropout recovery best practices, online learning for students with learning disabilities, online instructor training, learning management systems, training complex cognitive skills, and instructional message design.
Rebekah is very active in dropout recovery public policy initiatives. She has collaborated with legislators in multiple states on policies giving school districts the ability to better serve returning dropouts. Rebekah recently served on the advisory council for the International and Transregional Division of Northwest Accreditation Commission, now a division of AdvancEd. As a member of the standards task force for both Northwest Accreditation and AdvancEd, she has helped craft rigorous accreditation standards for online programs throughout the US.
Rebekah received a B.A. in Classics from Brigham Young University, an M.S. in Instructional Design and Technology from Utah State University, and an M.A. in Classical Philology from the University of Colorado-Boulder.
