Sunrise Online High School
A school-issued diploma path that runs on the till, the puck-drop, and the household calendar, not a campus bell.
A private, independent high school for grades 9 through 12, serving families across the western edge of Broward County entirely online. The city was platted around a mall, an arena, and a corporate park, and a school whose calendar moves with the till and the puck-drop, not a Broward bell, slots in cleanly: rolling enrollment any month, a school-issued high school diploma at graduation, and a transcript that travels.
EXHIBIT A · SunriseWhat does accredited private online high school mean for families in Sunrise, FL?
Recognized means an independent school that meets verified academic standards, with a diploma that colleges, employers, and the military treat the same as a campus diploma. Private means the family chooses it; it is not a Broward County Public Schools program, and the choice is not bounded by which side of Sunrise Boulevard a household sits on. No zoning, no lottery, no campus address. The official transcript carries a College Board CEEB code, and the registrar signs the verification letters.
Sunrise online high school courses, grade by grade
Every grade from 9 to 12 lives here, with each course taught and graded by a qualified teacher. This is an independent online school that grants its own diploma, not a menu of standalone classes a family stitches together. Browse the full course catalog, or have a counselor draw the four-year sequence around the credits a student already holds.
The foundation year. Core academics, electives, and the credits that start the diploma path.
- Biology
- Algebra 1
- U.S. History
- Art History
- English 1
- Physical Education / Life Management
- Elective (foreign language, fine art, CTE)
Core academics deepen. Geometry, Chemistry, English II, and college-readiness coursework.
The year colleges look at hardest. Algebra II, U.S. History, English III, SAT/ACT prep built in.
- Pre-Calculus
- U.S. Government
- English 3
- Economics
- Foreign Language II
- Elective or honors course
Graduation path, senior project, college-prep English, economics and government.
Where the W-2 comes from a Sawgrass storefront
The city wraps the till, not the bell. The single biggest employer footprint inside the limits is the Sawgrass Mills ecosystem, roughly 350 stores across the main mall and The Colonnade Outlets, with food court, kiosks, security, cleaning, and seasonal staffing wrapped around it. Closing shifts run past 10pm. Black-Friday-to-January tourism waves stretch the schedule from Thanksgiving morning into the second week of the new year. Hotels along the boulevard and restaurants on Pat Salerno Drive feed the same labor pool.
The teens who work this circuit are not edge cases; they are a sizeable cohort of Piper High and Plantation High families. A sophomore on a 4pm-to-10pm Hollister shift cannot answer to a 7:20 first-period bell six hours later. A junior pulling a 5am bakery prep at the food court on a Saturday tournament weekend has the same problem in reverse.
This is a self-paced program for grades 9 through 12, and the laptop opens around the work, not against it. A counselor builds the weekly arc on the first call. When a credit gap shows up from a previous campus, the credit recovery course layers alongside the regular load. Many households run the routes side by side before any decision happens.
- First period 7:20am · 25%
- Lunch 11:15 · 25%
- Last bell 2:40 · 25%
- Off-hours · 25%
- Clock in 4pm · 25%
- Dinner rush 6 to 8 · 25%
- Close-down 10 to 11 · 25%
- Off-hours · 25%
- Morning core work · 40%
- Afternoon nap and meal · 20%
- Pre-shift review · 15%
- Off · 25%
Tue, Thu, Sat: the arena schedule a household lives by
A second cohort lives by the Amerant Bank Arena calendar.
The Florida Panthers play a 41-game home slate from October to April, with Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday the standard weeknight rotation and back-to-backs in the schedule. Live Nation tours fill the other dates. Ushers, concessions, parking attendants, in-arena retail, and the broader event-staff workforce work nights when the building is open and rest when it is not.
A student in one of those households cannot study against a parent’s swing schedule with a 7:20 bell pressing in. The matinee side of the day belongs to coursework, the work this independent program is built around. The post-game block, when a parent finally walks in past 11pm, is dinner and decompression, not algebra. The counselor pre-plans the weekly arc against the arena’s home schedule and revises it when the playoff bracket adds Wednesday or Sunday games in late April.
Families who weigh this against the public route often book a fifteen-minute counselor call before they decide, and a 12th grader on the arena schedule usually still graduates on time. The arena calendar is one of the most predictable variables in the city, and a four-year plan that respects it is straightforward to draw.
A school whose registrar signs the verification letter
This is an institution that owns its records start to finish. The school employs the qualified teachers, the registrar holds the file, and one school-issued diploma comes out at grade 12. Nothing about that is rented from a district. Nothing about it depends on which campus the student would otherwise have attended. The transcript carries a College Board CEEB code, and a registrar at the school signs the verification letters that go to colleges and employers.
The same business day a transcript arrives, a counselor reads it through and writes back with the route through senior year.
In a city where mall closings, arena playoff runs, and corporate-park relocations move students in and out around the calendar, owning the records is the point. Households deciding between this and another route usually run the side-by-side first and then check the tuition page. The municipal government does not run a high school; the district does, and this school sits outside that district entirely.
| Piper Bengals | Sawgrass shift | Online program | Parent-led | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Works around a closing shift past 10pm | – | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Issues its own diploma | ✓ | – | ✓ | – |
| Holds the official transcript | ✓ | – | ✓ | – |
| Qualified teachers on staff | ✓ | – | ✓ |
Banking hours, EU-zone calls, and a senior who still gets to graduate
There is no bell here, no live-session attendance window, and no scheduled video block to dial into. The design is fully asynchronous on purpose, and the laptop opens whenever the day allows. A student moves through teacher-built material, submits the work, and advances only once the concept actually sticks.
The Sawgrass International Corporate Park on the south side of the city gives that flexibility a second use. Citibank Florida ops runs a Treasury shop on extended hours. BankUnited handles European-zone calls before 8am. American Express runs on-call IT, and Sun Life Financial and Comcast staff carry rotating workloads no campus bell can accommodate. These are white-collar parents on shift-irregular schedules, not blue-collar shift workers, and the household calendar reflects that.
A junior whose parent runs a 6:30am EU call and a 9pm New York wrap can still build a school day around the parent who is home rather than the one who is on. A senior whose mother works a Tuesday-Thursday-late at the corporate park can front-load the heavy lift on Monday and Wednesday and pick up review work on a Saturday morning. The teacher who actually answers means a question at 9pm gets a response, and the counselor pre-plans the weekly arc on the first call, redrawing it when the parent’s quarterly schedule shifts.
When the moving truck pulls into a Sawgrass-park subdivision in March
Whatever credits a student already holds carry over intact. The transcript-read is the first move, before any lesson queues up: a counselor walks the incoming document against Florida graduation requirements line by line, and reads the diploma date off the resulting map.
The pattern repeats every March, June, and October. Citibank Florida ops moves a treasury family in from New York. Sun Life Financial relocates an analyst from Wellesley. American Express transfers an IT lead from Phoenix. A household closes on a new build off Northwest 136th, or signs a lease in a Sunrise Lakes condo, and the student needs to enroll the week the boxes come off the truck. Waiting on a semester boundary is not an option when the parent starts work on Monday.
A student who transfers credits keeps the actual progress made, not the calendar year started. Placement lands on the credit just completed, never on day-one of a prior grade. If half a semester slipped during the move, the credit recovery course drops in next to the regular load so the climb out does not double back. Many families arrive at this stage just past a 10th grade or 11th grade checkpoint and want the senior-year map drawn before they sign.
The matinee block before the lights come up at Amerant
Most weeks split into two halves around the household’s busiest hours. Mornings and early afternoons are the matinee block: structured lessons, problem sets, a draft submitted, a graded response back from a qualified teacher. Late afternoons and evenings belong to the work that pays the household, whether that is a Sawgrass closing shift or the post-game crowd at the arena.
A monthly counselor check-in sits over the top of those two halves. Each month the four-year plan opens, any drift in grades or course pacing gets flagged in writing, and the route updates when the family schedule changes. Direct messaging to teachers replaces the campus office-hour model, so a teacher who actually answers is baseline rather than premium. Families who want to watch that cadence before committing can ask for last month’s check-in summary for a comparable student on the first call.
Online high school across Florida
Families across Broward County and the rest of the state choose the same independent program. See the Florida online high school hub for the statewide view, or our K-12 online home school hub for younger grades.
Where the diploma travels after the last credit
The CEEB code at the top of the transcript is the part that travels. Once it lands in a college admissions portal or an HR onboarding tool, the school surfaces in the same College Board lookup that a campus diploma would, and the credential reads as a standard high school diploma rather than a certificate of completion. For a recognized online high school, the verification routine is the same routine, and the doors that open are the same doors.
Locally the path runs through Broward College and its Sawgrass-area presence, the Florida State University System across twelve universities, and the twenty-eight institutions of the Florida College System. Other graduates step straight into the corporate park itself as entry-level treasury or customer service hires at Citibank or American Express, into the hospitality work that wraps around the mall and the arena, or into the Florida National Guard and the active-duty military. A counselor sketches the route a student names early in junior year, then revisits the sketch as senior decisions narrow.
Filing the Notice of Intent with Broward County, in plain steps
Starting the enrollment is a short conversation, typically a quarter of an hour. The first call is verbal and zero-commitment: grade, situation, and what the household is working around. Step two reads the transcript against the diploma map and names the actual starting credit. Step three is the paperwork, and the student account opens with lessons populated within a few business days of signing.
Florida’s home education statute sits over the top of those three steps. A one-page Notice of Intent travels to the superintendent of Broward County Public Schools, and the family picks an annual evaluation method from the five Florida statute options. Broward is one of the largest school districts in the country, with a home education office in Fort Lauderdale that handles thousands of filings a year, and the process runs through their portal with a paper backup option. The whole exchange wraps inside the first week, with both deadlines marked on the student’s calendar from day one. Meeting them keeps the household inside Florida compulsory-attendance law without ever enrolling the student in a Broward campus.
Kreyol at the dinner table, an English transcript on the desk
The city carries one of the largest Haitian-American populations in the county, alongside Jamaican and Cuban communities, and the multi-generational household is the norm rather than the exception.
Kreyol or Spanish at the dinner table, English at school, and a grandmother who runs the household calendar while two parents work two jobs each is a configuration counselors here see every week.
Incoming transcripts from Port-au-Prince, Kingston, or Havana need a careful read, and the school handles the translation and credit-mapping inside the standard intake. Verification letters go back to a college or an employer in clear English. The credential is the same one any Florida campus issues: a school-issued diploma, an official transcript signed by the registrar, a CEEB code in the College Board lookup, and a counselor who answers a phone when a household needs verification sent to a university, an employer, or a recruiter. Households that want a clearer picture of what stands behind the diploma can request the standing document on the first call.
One annual tuition, payment plans, no graduation fee
The whole year is covered by a single annual tuition figure. Qualified teachers, the counselor’s time, the official transcript, and the diploma at the end are inside that number, and nothing else gets billed at graduation. Payment plans break the figure into monthly pieces for households that prefer not to write one annual check. A counselor names the tuition in full on the first call, openly, rather than gating it behind a form. A local family that prefers to read the number before talking can email and a written reply lands with the same figure inside one business day.
Earn your high school diploma online in Sunrise
Three things close the diploma out at the end of senior year: a complete core-credit sequence on the transcript, a cumulative GPA above the floor, and a passed senior exit review. The Florida home education law names how an independent school student is recognized statewide, and a counselor walks every local family through that statute on the first call.
Underneath the checkpoints, the subjects climb their own ladders. Math runs Algebra 1, Geometry, Algebra 2, and on into Pre-Calculus for students reaching for the harder track. English carries a writing thread from grade 9 composition through a senior seminar. Lab sciences, social studies, and world languages each run their own sequence, with honors options available where they make sense. Every course title and prerequisite sits inside the full course catalog, in one place.
A ninth grader without any prior credits starts at day one and builds from there. A senior arriving from Piper, Plantation, Boyd Anderson, or an out-of-state campus picks up at the credit actually finished, not at a school-year reset. The credential at the end is recognized the same way regardless of starting point, and most households clear the enrollment paperwork inside the first week.
Sunrise online high school: what Broward families ask
Our teen closes at Sawgrass three nights a week. Will the school day work around that?
We just relocated from out of state to a Sunrise corporate-park job. How fast can a student start?
Our incoming transcript is from Haiti, with course names in French. Will the school accept it?
How does Broward County Public Schools handle the Notice of Intent for a Sunrise family?
What does the school do during a hurricane week?
Send the transcript across, we mark the route from Piper to the diploma
Upload whatever the last campus filed and a counselor reads it the same business day, marks the credits already on the record, and writes back with the route through senior year. The exchange is no-obligation, and most Broward households leave with the plan inside the first week.
Walk the route from till to diploma in one short call
Bring whatever the last campus filed and a counselor walks the credits, the calendar, and which diploma lands at the end. The first call is enough to know whether the route fits the household before any paperwork moves.