SOUTH THOMASTON — Sarah Penney, 19, a senior at Maine Virtual Academy, is about to graduate in June. The South Thomaston teenager wasn't sure she'd ever get to this day. "It sounds like a cliché but it feels like a dream come true," she said.

Up until the past two years, Penney has suffered from flu-like symptoms, and the very occasional headache, which caused her to miss a tremendous amount of school.

"I had vertigo and light sensitivity," she said. "I was constantly nauseous and couldn't keep anything down. It generally just made me feel like I had severe stomach flu symptoms mixed with the after effects of a particularly nightmarish teacup ride."

For 10 years, doctors misdiagnosed her symptoms as a sinus infection combined with allergies, due to how her symptoms appeared seasonal. All of the medications and antibiotics she was prescribed only made the symptoms worse.

Penney said she didn't get an accurate diagnosis until her sophomore year in high school, 2014.

"By then, I'd missed 120 days of school and was just completely miserable," she said. "It felt basically like having the flu 24-7 for those 120 days."

But, what Penney had in her favor, was an innate sense of motivation and drive. Even when feeling her worst, she said she would push through, trying to get her schoolwork done.

Finally, she was given an accurate diagnosis: vestibular migraines. The vestibular system includes the parts of the inner ear and brain that process the sensory information involved with controlling balance and eye movements. If something damages these processing areas, vestibular disorders can result. And the resulting symptoms are chronic dizziness and imbalance, and changes in mood and ability to concentrate.

At Oceanside High School in Rockland, where she was previously a student, a number of counselors and teachers helped her cope.

"I had a counselor who would pull the blinds down in his office so I could just get my math homework done in a quiet, dark place," she said. After every day she was home from school, she would make sure she worked double-time to complete the missed assignment.

To cope with her persistent symptoms and all of its challenges, she expressed herself through creative writing. She talked herself "up," frequently telling herself if she could just keep working hard, she could do it.

It ultimately took changing her entire lifestyle to combat her migraines. "By my junior year, I told my mother I was done being on medication," she said. "It messed with my stomach so bad. I wanted to get off of all of them."

After that month, Sarah began to see improvement. The vertigo went away, the migraines stopped and she could sleep for the first time in years. By the summer of 2015, she was considering what one more year at Oceanside would look like if she became sick again, and worried if she could make it through to graduation.

Through Oceanside, Penney's mother, Rachel, learned about a brand new virtual charter school that had started that year in Maine: Maine Virtual Academy. MEVA is an online school with built-in coaches for students in seventh- and eighth-grade as well as in high school. With a student base of 360, it serves students all over the entire state, including the islands.
"I felt like it was meant to be," said her mother.

Penney enrolled with the intent to "do over" her junior year with MEVA, wanting to be fully prepared for college, as she planned to major in computer science and English. "I had missed so much class time, and I had goals of wanting to take calculus, physics, computer science, AP English Literature and Composition, and web design before I was a senior," she said.

"We're so happy to have her in our school," said Dr. Melinda Browne, Head of School at Maine Virtual Academy. "We were able to offer her flexibility and incredible support, so if she couldn't attend a lesson in real time, like every student at the school, she'd have the option of watching the recording of the live lesson, followed by a formative assessment. She'd then be able to get credit for each class.

Browne added, "We offer a tremendous number of courses and I think Sarah has taken full advantage of that opportunity."

Penney said it has been a Godsend to be able to complete the work at her own pace. A typical week is rigorous, however, with an average workload requiring, for example, a physics lab, three physics quizzes, a calculus test, two English papers and discussions and maybe a geography project.

Browne said Penney is the ideal student for this kind of virtual school, as she doesn't mind working alone all day and is incredibly self-motivated.

"She's also gotten socially involved in helping other students here," said Browne. "She was integral in assisting me prepare recorded presentations for the senior class to motivate them in their post-secondary planning. She's really highly competent with technology so, she just jumped right in there. And she was also ahead of the game in that area; she'd already written her college essay and got her applications in."

An honor roll student, Penney will be graduating with nine more credits than she needed. More importantly, she is graduating as co-valedictorian of her MEVA senior class in 2017.

"Her GPA was 3.97," said Browne, at the top of the class with another student. She was also awarded a Maine Principal's Award this year for Academic Excellence.

It's been two years since Penney has been as sick as she was back then, she said. She said that while lifestyle and diet choices she made are influenced by her migraines, at this point, making healthy choices is now second nature to her.

"While my illness was undoubtedly a large part of my life and my growth as a person, my illness is not something I want to be defined by," said Sarah. "Maine Virtual Academy has been the school that has helped me succeed. My teachers at MEVA have supported me with everything, going out of their way to help me and to let me go outside the box, as far as curriculum goes, so that way I can learn more. They were the ones that helped me write my college essays and the ones who wrote all of my recommendation letters. Most of the time, when I think "Wow, I've had some great teachers," they're the first ones who come to mind, if only because I've never had a teacher from MEVA who wasn't amazing.

Kay Stephens can be reached at news@penbaypilot.com