The broad goals of this article are three-fold: Establish a baseline understanding of theepidemiology of online K-12 students, to determine the prevalence in K-12 online schooling ofchildren from certain racial/ethnic backgrounds, those with socioeconomic disadvantages, andchildren with special health care needs, and to determine how these children perform in onlineclasses compared to their prior experiences in traditional, face-to-face programs. In order toaddress these questions, this article reports data from two different studies. The first studycontains epidemiological data acquired from students across three states; the second study is adeeper exploration through a follow-up study from a leading virtual school in one of those states.…