Mariah Whitman works full time during the week, drag races on the weekends and will be graduating from high school this June thanks to online classes through Insight School of Washington.

Starting in April she’ll be running her dad’s 1969 Chevy Nova in the Pro class of the National Hot Rod Association’s Summit Series at Pacific Raceways which is just a short drive from her home in Maple Valley.

Whitman, 19, says she began racing in junior dragsters when she was 12 or 13 years old after watching “Right On Track,” a Disney movie based on the early career of Erica Enders, a Pro Stock racer who has competed in the NHRA’s professional Full Throttle series.

The movie featured junior dragster racing which appealed to Whitman.

“I grew up with my dad doing the oval racing,” she says. “Dad had a college friend who did the juniors and I got into drag racing that way.”

Her dad raced the Nova before she was born and Whitman says there are pictures of him in the car.

But, Whitman wasn’t so sure she was going to continue with drag racing after her younger brother, Spencer, died in 2007.

She finished that season during her sophomore year at Hazen High in Renton, but Whitman says she realized then she couldn’t deal with the grief over her brother’s death, school and drag racing, so she stepped away from the track.

Work had begun on rebuilding the Nova in 2007 and her dad raced it in 2008 and 2009.

After taking time off from racing, Whitman tagged along to see her father race last summer “because we finally fixed up the Nova.”

“I decided I could run in the high school class so I took our old Expedition and raced that,” she says. “It was just going to be that one race. It was cheaper, too, $10 for the high school race (entry fee). But, then I won.”

The bracket racing Summit Series at Pacific Raceways was about one-third complete at that point, but she decided to keep it up with the Expedition.

“I won the next three races after that,” Whitman says. “I had my grandparents come out and watch. I lost that one, then I picked up and came in second in the last two races. I went to the finals of six out of the seven races I went to.”

This season she’s going to run the full bracket racing schedule in the Summit Series at Pacific Raceways, which is 12 events, and if she can find time in her schedule she may go race at Bremerton, too.

When she’s not racing, she works part-time at a pre-school and part-time at Ivar’s, and at night she does school work to complete her high school diploma through Insight.

Nick Hawley, a spokesman for Insight, said the online school makes it easier for Whitman to chase her dream to drag race while completing her diploma at the tuition-free public high school.

“Each student receives a laptop and in some cases an Internet stipend,” Hawley says. “Each student is also assigned an i-mentor.”

Students with Insight are “looking for alternatives to a traditional school.”

“Some are full time wage earners,” Hawley said. “We have a lot of students who are pursuing dreams in athletics or the arts.”

Insight school is in its fourth year in Washington state and Mariah has been attending for two years now. There are about 2,000 students going to school through Insight.

The school offers a full range of courses, Hawley said, including honors and Advanced Placement classes.

Whitman says she found out about Insight at the end of her sophomore year after seeing an ad on TV.

“I was having problems with the school situation and the loss of my brother,” Whitman says. “With this online school, I don’t have to take the full six classes, I’m taking five.”

Currently she’s taking Web design and Flash, subjects she’s learned about on her own time, as well as business communications and creative writing.

Last Friday, Whitman was sipping out of a coffee mug while working on her laptop at the dining room table at home, knocking out some work with poems for her creative writing class.

Once she finishes the coursework for this last handful of classes, Whitman will earn her diploma, and come June she will be a high school graduate.

All while working full time during the week and racing on weekends.

Insight has allowed Whitman to not just finish high school, which was challenging enough after her brother’s death, but work full time and race.

Whitman says she would not have been able to juggle everything without Insight.

“It teaches you how to be motivated and on time,” she says. “You have to be responsible.”

All three feed into each other. Online classes allow her to work which means she can help with the costs of racing.

“I’m going to be paying for the entry fees, the gas, and if a part breaks, most likely that, too,” she says. “It’s going to be harder in the Pro class but I think I can do it, but, there’s going to be a lot more cars.”

This season she’s moving up from the high school class she ran in last year to the Pro class in the Summit Series. There are three classes, Sportsman, Pro and Super Pro.

In the high school class there wasn’t cash prizes but this year in the Pro class she will have an opportunity to win cash which will probably help Whitman and her dad break even.

The Nova can run the quarter-mile drag strip in just over 11 seconds, Whitman explains, and she’s seen the speedometer hit 102 MPH.

Since her family no longer has the Expedition, Whitman says, her dad agreed to let her race the Nova “because he likes seeing me racing and happy.”

“I’m racing it in the bracket races,” she says. “He’s going to race it at the end of the year in the challenge races.”

Her next goal is to get a car she saw in an episode of “Pinks” taped at Pacific Raceways and so she’s saving up for that.

Someday she’d like to follow in the footsteps of John Force, the most successful funny car racer in NHRA history, and run an 8,000 horsepower nitromethane-fueled car down the drag strip at 300 MPH.

For now, though, she’s got a high school diploma to earn and bracket races to win.