More families turning to home schooling

By John Peters
Editor

For decades, and over three, maybe four generations, it’s been the same. Across the land parents rouse their little ones from bed with the rising sun, feed them, pack up their lunch (or dole out some lunch money), then send them off on the big yellow buses.

That is the way of life for many parents and children today. But, increasingly, that daily ritual is being replaced by children rising from their beds, preparing for the day, then pulling up a seat at the family dining room table for their schooling.

Across North Carolina there are an estimated 70,000 to 80,000 children who stay home every day for their schooling, according to Ernie Hodges, president of North Carolinians for Home Education.

Locally, there were 228 students being home schooled in Halifax County during the 2006-2007 school year, according to the North Carolina Department of Education. In Warren County, there were 131 students being home schooled in the same period. Figures for the present academic year are not yet available.

Tanya Reese, secretary of the Roanoke Valley Association of Homeschoolers which meets at Lake Gaston Baptist Church, said she knew she would home school her son, Steven, even before he was born.

She decided that while she and her husband were living in Michigan her friends who had children were not at all happy with the local public schools. After moving to Florida, which is one of the most active states in America for home schoolers, she discovered the home schooling movement. When she had her family moved back to the Lake Gaston area, where her husband grew up, she said she knew home schooling was her best option for educating Steven.

“I knew the school system my husband graduated from, the school system my step children had graduated from, and I was not impressed,” she said.

“And, it’s worked out very well. Steven has no desire to go to a public school, or to be in a classroom setting.”

That flexibility of not having a traditional classroom setting is one of the major advantages home school families tout when discussing their lifestyle.

Legia Brown, who home schools her four children in Roanoke Rapids, said the flexible schedule allows home schoolers to spend time where they need it, and to not waste time on areas where they are already strong.

Her oldest daughter, Nancy, started attending school and brought home virtually straight A’s, but was also not garnering good reports from her teachers when it came to paying attention in school. It turns out she was finishing her work, then sneaking reads from various books hidden in her lap.

“Our children they simply were not being challenged in the public schools. They were bored,” Legia said of her kids.

Now, after several years of home schooling, Nancy has opted to try attending high school, but with mixed results. While Legia said her daughter enjoys the musical classes there -– she wanted to go back to school for choir and band --– she is again getting bored with some of the coursework.

“If it takes them 20 minutes to get an assignment done, you can do it and then move on to something else when you’re at home, she said. “But, if you’re in a class, you’re stuck in that class whether you’re getting anything out of it or not.”

Not that home schoolers have trouble adapting to class schedules. According to proponents, it’s merely a matter of wanting to be productive with the time.

“Colleges seek them out,” according to Hodges. “According to the U.S. Department of Education, the numbers for academic results are very consistent. Homeschoolers, on average, are one to two years above grade average.”

A decade ago, officials at colleges such as the University of North Carolina, Virginia Tech, and even Harvard said in their experiences, home school students tended to adjust better to college life than their non-home schooled counterparts, at least in part because they were already used to some independence in their lives and their academic schedule. Officials there said a higher percentage of home schooled students stayed in school beyond their freshman year.

Now, however, those same colleges say that home school students seeking admission are no longer a novelty, thus the schools don’t track how those students do compared to the rest of the student bodies.

Many of the state’s colleges do accept home school students just as they do students from public and private high schools.

“The application process is no different for any other applicant,” said Sam Carpenter, an official with the admissions department at Duke University. “We’re going to need a sense of the curriculum the student has taken, grades, recommendations, the student is going to have to submit an essay, we’re going to want to know what other activities outside of school they are involved in.”

Claudia McCann, with East Carolina University, echoed those sentiments. “We look at their general SAT scores, their grade point averages. A lot of what we do is rely on what’s reported by the home schooler.”

At Halifax Community College, there are home school students who have yet to finish high school work taking college courses, just as they have public and private high school students taking dual enrollment courses, according to Barbara Bradley-Hasty, dean of student services

“They have to be at least 16 years of age, or be identified as academically gifted and have that documented,” she said. “They have to take a placement test or have SAT scores with 500 or better in each SAT category. …I can only speak of the home school students I come into contact with, and they are excellent students.”

Although academic achievement is one reason many parents give for home schooling their children, it is not the only one.

Sometimes, it’s simply for religious belief purposes. And, other times, it’s so the family can be closer-knit than is often the case with traditional schooling.

“It’s a tremendous amount of work,” Legia Brown said. “Sometimes you have those moments when you think ‘Wow, look at all I could be doing if I wasn’t spending my time on this.’ But, I am glad, I’m grateful we’ve done it. I feel like I have a relationship with my kids most parents don’t have. It’s fun to watch them learn, to be part of that, and our feel like our relationship, our closeness, is something that’s not there if you send them away for most of the day.”

“Many families like home schooling because of the family cohesiveness that comes with it,” said Hodges. “Parents are excited when their kids learn to walk and talk. Well, home school families are people who want to be there to see the gleam in their kids’ eyes when they learn their multiplication table, or when they get a new concept.”

As for getting started in home schooling, it’s really not that tough, most home schoolers say. There is a lot of groundwork and study beforehand, and the legalities of home schooling are different in Virginia and North Carolina. In the tar Heel state, home schools are treated much like individual private schools, while in Virginia, which is more flexible with home school families, there are at least four different statues under which parents can home school their children.

Anyone interested in home schooling or learning more can visit the North Carolinians for Home Education Website at http://nche.com/ or its Virginia counterparts, the religiously oriented and larger Home Educators Association of Virginia or the smaller Organization of Virginia Homeschoolers, which has no religious affiliation, at http://www.vahomeschoolers.org/