Online preschool programs have been growing in recent years, and thousands of parents have signed their children up. The programs offer everything from educational games to a full preschool curriculum complete with boxes of activities that are shipped to a student’s home and a teacher’s guide for an adult. Most online programs are offered by for-profit companies, although perhaps the fastest-growing is UPSTART, which was developed by the nonprofit Waterford Institute and is advertised as a kindergarten-readiness program. That program has been used by children in Idaho, Indiana, South Carolina, rural Ohio and Philadelphia, and is used by 30 percent of Utah’s 4-year-olds. In 2013, the Waterford Institute received an $11.5 million federal grant to expand the program to rural children in Utah.

In Mississippi, most children who participated in a pilot UPSTART program during the 2015-16 school year used it to supplement an in-person preschool program. Nationwide, many parents use the program as the sole preschool program for their children. This year, UPSTART, partnering on the pilot with federally-funded Head Start centers in Mississippi, will provide the program to 1,000 preschoolers. Children will use the program at home in the evenings and attend Head Start during the day.