Home schooling is attracting mainstream families
By Kavita Kumar
St Louis Post-Dispatch
Sunday, Nov. 28 2004
Traci Hodges works about 30 hours a week running her own consulting business
and managing a small production company. She recently finished a master's
degree in human development counseling.
On top of it all, she finds time to home-school her oldest daughter. Make that,
she and her husband, Harlan, who is an emergency room doctor at
DePaul Hospital. The Maryland Heights couple split the responsibility.
As two working parents, the Hodges are a far cry from the stereotypical
home-schooling family with a stay-at-home mom, ultra-conservative moral and
religious values and a fierce belief in the right to keep government out of
their lives.
Traci Hodges likes that she and her husband can shield 9-year-old Amoree from
exposure to drugs, alcohol and sex - at least while she's young. But Hodges
also likes that she can spend time with her daughter and that Amoree can learn
at her own pace, advancing beyond her grade level in math.
"Everyone has their preconceived notions of what a home-school parent is like,"
Hodges said.
Including herself. She stepped gingerly around other home-schooling families at
first, worried that she wouldn't fit in. "But then you learn that they come
from all walks of life," she said.
Indeed, these days, the ranks of home schoolers are becoming so diverse that
few generalizations can be made about the burgeoning movement. There are as
many reasons for home schooling as there are families. The only thing that
truly unites home-schooling families is that they have decided to take control
of their child's education, whatever the reason.
Home-schooled children include gifted students, teenage mothers, Olympic
hopefuls, children with special needs - even people with peanut allergies. Many
are Christians, but people of other religions are involved as well, including
Muslims, Jews and Hindus.
Some of the home-schooled children fell through the cracks in public schools or
move around a lot in military families. Some are children whose parents are
worried about violence or bullying in the schools, want to instill certain
religious or moral values in their children, get into fights with school
districts, and can't or don't want to shell out money for private schools.
Sometimes, home-schooling parents come from unlikely camps - such as Nancy
Schaaf, executive director of Dayspring Centre for Arts and Education in
Maryland Heights. She was a strong believer in public schools and volunteered a
few days a week at her son's school.
But she says that her son, now 12, who was well-behaved and a quick learner,
didn't get much attention in the classroom.
"The teachers in the public schools are becoming very, very swamped with a lot
of paperwork and dealing with special-needs kids who are being added to the
classroom," she said. "My child was going to school for seven hours a day and
not getting any attention. He was losing his excitement for learning."
Still, she wasn't sure she could devote herself to home schooling.
"I never really thought I could do it," she said. "I have graduate degrees and
stuff, but I didn't think with my older children I could really do it."
Hodges also worried that home schooling wouldn't fit into her own career
aspirations. But she found a perfect compromise at Dayspring, where Amoree
attends an academy for home-schooled children two days a week. Hodges is now on
the board at Dayspring.
Schaaf's son also attends the academy, and she home-schools him in her office
and at home at night.
Indeed, as the people who home-school become more diverse, so do the ways in
which they do it. Some teach the old-fashioned way - at home. Others supplement
home lessons with classes, band, choir, bowling leagues, and sports through
home-school associations or community centers or colleges. The most structured
are places such as Dayspring, which mimic a school setting a day or two a week.
At the other end of the spectrum is "unschooling," an unstructured type of home
schooling that is directed by the child.
Some parents home-school for just a few years, often sending their children to
a traditional high school so they can get a standard diploma, play on varsity
athletic teams and reap other benefits. Some home-school one child, but not
others.
Growing support
As home schooling moves from the fringes closer to the mainstream, it is clear
it has gained many supporters - but exactly how many is difficult to measure.
Many home-schooling families fiercely resist documentation and have fought in
Illinois and Missouri for laws that do not require such families to notify
their school district or the state where they are teaching their children.
"Looking at the number of calls I get, the amount of interest is just soaring,"
said Margaret Porch, who leads the St. Charles Christian Home Educators. She
gets about 10 calls a week during the summer from people thinking about home
schooling, she said.
Estimates from various groups reinforce that home schooling is on the rise.
According to estimates from the National Center for Education Statistics, about
1.1 million students, or 2.2 percent of school-age children, were home-schooled
last year. That is up from 850,000 students, or 1.7 percent, in 1999.
The National Home Education Research Institute, based in Salem, Ore., estimates
that 1.7 million to 2.1 million children were home taught during the 2002-2003
school year, up as much as 13 percent from 2000-2001. The institute says that
home schooling has grown about 7 percent every year for the past four years.
Whatever the numbers, the movement is fueled in part by the Internet and the
easy access it provides to thousands of resources. Just a decade ago, parents
had to order textbooks through mail-order catalogs. These days, home educators
can find curriculum guides and workbooks at Sam's Club and Wal-Mart as well as
on the Web.
As home schooling has grown, its infrastructure has become more sophisticated.
There are home-schooling magazines, thick newsletters, thousands of Web sites,
class rings, bumper stickers, T-shirts, senior banquets, graduations, proms and
yearbooks.
Outside institutions are beginning to recognize home schoolers as a consumer
group and are reaching out to them and their needs.
The St. Louis Science Center holds Homeschool Days - science workshops on
different topics - once a month. The St. Louis Zoo is working on starting its
own series this winter. Six Flags and Silver Dollar City both hold special days
or discounts for home schoolers.
Lindenwood University in St. Charles has advertised in some home-schooling
publications. The school is seen as a good fit for many students who were home-
schooled with its single-sex dormitories and values-centered campus.
John Guffey, Lindenwood's dean of admissions, said he's seen applications from
home-schooled children take off in the past six to seven years. He receives a
couple dozen a year, he said.
"From our end, we see these students as very bright students, very capable of
college work," he said.
At Washington University, the admissions office used to get just a handful of
applications from children who were home-schooled, but now it gets 40 to 50
applications a year, admissions director Nanette Tarbouni said by e-mail.
That's still a small sliver of the 20,000 applications the university receives,
but a growing sliver, she said.
"Very rewarding"
"There have been times when it's a little hard to be different," admits
19-year-old Katie Wightman, who is studying nursing at Missouri Baptist
University. About 45 of her fellow students are also being home-schooled.
But these days, she gets fewer stares and questions when she tells people she's
been home-schooled, she said. Still, she wouldn't trade being home-schooled for
a traditional school environment, especially given the stories she hears from
her cousins about the public schools.
It's been an adjustment being in class where everyone is the same age, and
where students pass notes to each other and play tricks on teachers by changing
the clocks. She's baffled by one of her fellow students who brags every time
she gets a low grade.
Wightman's mother, Kris, said she never thought she would home-school when she
started 15 years ago.
"I thought it sounded like I fell off the turnip truck," she said.
But she decided to try it when she was living in a rural area where she didn't
think the schools were up to par. She expected she would eventually send her
children to traditional schools.
Then she got hooked.
Now she and her family run the Homeschool Sampler in downtown Kirkwood, near
their home. It is one of about a dozen stores geared to home-schooling families
across the country, she said.
Inside, the bookshelves are filled with curriculum guides and workbooks - many
of which Wightman has tried out over the years. Cheery, popular Christian music
and a strong smell of potpourri infuse the store. The family's golden
retriever, Sam, often lies by the counter.
In the nearly three years the shop has been open, it's had 10,000 customers,
many of them repeat, she said. Some come from remote rural areas in Missouri
and Illinois.
"When I opened, I expected to see a singular type of person walking through the
door," she said. "But I tell you, one person is not at all like the next."
The store opens at noon, so Wightman can devote the morning to home-schooling
her children. The eight Wightman children, except for the youngest, often help
out in the store. It's part of their education, learning computer skills,
accounting, invoicing and more.
At home, Wightman runs a veritable one-room schoolhouse, teaching children ages
3, 6, 8, 12 and 13. Her older two take classes at colleges.
"If anyone's looking for the easy road, this isn't it," she said. "But it is
very rewarding."
Wightman loves the flexibility that home schooling provides her family to take
vacations, the quality time she can spend with her children, the camaraderie
built among siblings, the ability for them to learn at their own pace, and the
thousands of dollars saved on private school.
"I am one of those people who are truly sold on it," she said.
And with a 1-year-old, she knows she still has a long way to go.
"So I'm going to be doing this for another 20 years. And I don't get
retirement," she said.
Why do parents home-school?
An analysis released this year by the National Center for Education Statistics
of the U.S. Department of Education gave the following breakdown based on a
survey from last year:
31 percent said they home-schooled because of concern about the
environment of schools.
30 percent said they wanted to provide religious or moral
instruction.
16 percent said they were dissatisfied with the academic instruction
of other schools.
9 percent gave other reasons, such as family unity and
individualized teaching.
7 percent said their child had a physical or mental health problem.
7 percent said their child had other special needs. |
