Doug Carroll
The Arizona Republic

Got high school? Thanks to a free, Chandler-based online alternative school, 81 students can say yes. And now they’ve got diplomas, too.

Primavera Online High School, a fully accredited charter school that began three years ago and has the Web address of www.GotHighSchool.com, graduated its fall class Friday in a brief ceremony at the East Valley Institute of Technology in Mesa.

The school, made possible by a program established by the Arizona Legislature in 1998, was the first in the state to offer high school classes online and now claims to have 2,000 students statewide. Most of the students log on from home, but some participate in a version called i-Learn that makes a YMCA computer lab available.

Primavera’s newly minted graduates include Laurin Yazzie, 21, a budding filmmaker from Tuba City. Yazzie said he first tried home schooling. Then, brrowing the laptop computers of friends and family, he stuck with the Primavera curriculum and got his diploma after about a year.