How Do I Home School?

The answers to all your basic homeschool questions can be found at a wonderful site called You Can Home School www.youcanhomeschool.org

You will receive clear, consise, facts and answers to the following questions--

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For more information on Homeschooling and support sites please see our resource link on Homeschooling.

Below is an artile that appeared in the St. Louis Post Dispatch http://www.stltoday.com/, November 28, 2004, on home school families who share their experiences with homeschooling.

Home schooling is attracting mainstream families
By Kavita Kumar
Of the Post-Dispatch
11/28/2004

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.


Legal requirements


Missouri and Illinois have liberal laws regarding home schooling. Neither state requires parents to notify their school district or the state if they are home-schooling, and so does not monitor or track home-schooled students. And neither state has any education requirements nor mandates any testing of home-schooled students.

Missouri laws say that parents who home-school should offer 1,000 hours of instruction during a school year, with at least 600 hours in the basics - reading, language arts, mathematics, social studies and science. At least 400 of the 600 hours should take place in the home.

Statutes say that parents have to maintain a plan book, diary, daily log or other written record indicating the subjects taught and activities engaged in with the student, a portfolio containing samples of the student's academic work, and a record of evaluation of the student's academic progress, or other equivalent evidence.

In Illinois, no statute exists about home schooling. But according to the state courts, home schooling falls under the laws governing private schools. There are no academic requirements for private schools in Illinois, except that children are taught in the branches of education taught to children of corresponding age and grade in public schools. And they must teach in the English language.

For more information about home schooling in Missouri, check out http://www.dese.state.mo.us/schoollaw/HomeSch/ . Illinois does not have any information about home schooling on its state education Web site, but more information is available at these advocacy sites: www.illinoishouse.org,
www.home-school.com/groups/IL.html .


Reporter Kavita Kumar
E-mail: kkumar@post-dispatch.com