"Consider this scenario: You're a high school student at a small school in Alabama. You and a couple of other students want to take an advanced class, but there's not enough interest - and no qualified teacher - to make a class feasible at your school. What are your options? Well, today, they're much different than they were just a few short years ago," The Gadsden Times reports. "At least they will be soon, as students statewide will have ACCESS by the start of school in 2009. ACCESS (Alabama Connecting Classrooms, Educators and Students Statewide) is a distance learning program that began just two years ago - Southside High School was one of the schools in the pilot project - and has grown rapidly. All 371 high schools in the state will be part of the program next year, a year ahead of the scheduled completion date."