The other thing that I would add is: school administrators don’t want to do things that will make more work for them. So the key to getting something like an independent study is to set up so that there is nothing for the administrators to do except to sign off on it, and that the teacher who supervises the independent study will not have any significant increase on workload. When my daughter studied abroad, she arranged for independent study with the honors English teacher at her school. He worked with her to create a list of books to read – I remember it included Nabakov - and assigned essays to write about the books. They communicated by email – it worked so well that they continued with the independent study for the spring semester after she returned in the spring. Obviously the teacher had the work of reading and grading … but my daughter would have made even that part easy by timely turning in A quality work.