Many choose homeschooling over public schools for protection, moral values

ST. LOUIS, Mo. — 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 homeschool her oldest daughter. Make that she and her husband, Harlan, who is an emergency room doctor at DePaul Hospital. The Maryland Heights, Mo., couple split the responsibility.

As two working parents, the Hodges are a far cry from the stereotypical homeschool family with a stay-at-home mom and ultra-conservative moral and religious values.

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 she 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 homeschool parent is like," Hodges said.

Including herself. She stepped gingerly around other homeschool 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 homeschoolers are becoming so diverse that one can make few generalizations about the burgeoning movement. There are as many reasons for homeschooling as there are families. The only thing that truly unites them is that for some reason, they have decided to take control of their child's education.

Homeschoolers are gifted students, teen-age mothers, Olympic hopefuls, children with special needs — even people with peanut allergies. They are predominantly Christian, yes, but also Muslim, Jewish and Hindu.

They are children who fell through the cracks in public schools and who move around a lot in military families. They 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 they come from unlikely camps —people like 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 couldn't ignore the fact 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."

"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 homeschooling wouldn't fit into her own career aspirations. But she found a perfect compromise at Dayspring, where Amoree attends an academy for homeschoolers two days a week. Hodges is now on the board at Dayspring.

Schaaf's son also attends the academy, and she homeschools him in her office and at home at night.

Indeed, as the people who homeschool become more diverse, so do the ways in which they do it. Some homeschool the old-fashioned way _ at home. Others supplement home lessons with classes, band, choir, bowling leagues, and sports through homeschool associations or community centers or colleges. At the most structured are places like Dayspring that mimic a school setting a day or two a week. At the other end of the spectrum is "unschooling," an unstructured type of homeschooling that is directed by the child.

Some parents homeschool 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 homeschool one child, but not others.

As homeschooling 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 homeschoolers fiercely resist documentation and have fought in Illinois and Missouri for liberal laws that do not require homeschoolers to notify their school district or the state that 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 homeschooling, she said.

Estimates from various groups reinforce that homeschooling 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 homeschooled last year. That is up from 850,000 students or 1.7 percent of students 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 homeschooling has grown about 7 percent every year for the last 4 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 homeschooling has grown, its infrastructure has become more sophisticated. There are homeschooling 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 homeschoolers as a marketable 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 homeschoolers.

Lindenwood University in St. Charles has advertised in some homeschooling publications. The school is seen as a good fit for many homeschoolers with its single-sex dormitories and values-centered campus.

John Guffey, Lindenwood's dean of admissions, said he's seen applications from homeschoolers take off in the last 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, but now it gets 40 to 50 applications from homeschoolers a year, admissions director Nanette Tarbouni said by e-mail. That's still a small sliver of the 20,000 applications Wash U. receives, but a growing sliver, she said.

"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 homeschoolers are dually enrolled there.

But these days, she gets fewer stares and questions when she tells people she's been homeschooled, she said. Still, she wouldn't trade being homeschooled 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 students who brags every time she gets a low grade.

Her mother, Kris, said she never thought she would homeschool when she started 15 years ago.

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.

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 homeschoolers 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 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 homeschooling 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, 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 homeschooling 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.

"So I'm going to be doing this for another 20 years. And I don't get retirement," she said.

Approximately 1.1 million children in the United States are being educated at home.

The number is growing 10 times as fast as the general school-age population, the U.S. Department of Education recently estimated.

Illegal in almost every state 25 years ago, home schooling today is virtually unregulated and unscrutinized.

Some home-schooled students score higher than public-school peers on standardized tests, and some are admitted into prestigious universities. They shine as musicians and athletes. As soldiers, they have died in Iraq.

However, there are other stories: tales of truancy and poor academic achievement, parents who abduct their children and live on the run, and families who use the cloak of home schooling to help shroud neglect or abuse that has led to murder.

While the triumphs far outnumber the tragedies, the evidence is anecdotal for both. There is no genuine government effort to collect information and study the phenomenon.

Only a few states require that home-schooled children be tested. The nation's second most populous state, Texas, and many other states require nothing _ no registration, and no academic accountability.

Friction exists between home schoolers, who see their movement as a fundamental parental right, and the social workers, school officials and others who try to monitor the children.

While the triumphs far outnumber the tragedies, the evidence is anecdotal for both. There is no genuine government effort to collect information and study the phenomenon.

Friction exists between home schoolers, who see their movement as a fundamental parental right, and the social workers, school officials and others who try to monitor the children.

They just couldn't make it a positive story. They had to end it with this crap.

I've known several homeschooling families, and they are exceptional. The kids are above average in socialization, openness, and intelligence. The ones I know are achievers, and I am impressed.

Our kids went to parochial school in the neighborhood, then parochial h.s. I think that today, I'd homeschool...

It was such a positive article until the end.

It looks like they had to make the article look more "objective" or "unbiased", so they added the last few lines at the end as an afterthought.

Really, the line, "Approx. 1.1 million children are being educated at home," is just a repeat after the article already stated that. Maybe an editor told the writer to add those lines at the end... Or maybe the writer read it over at the last minute, thought the article sounded too pro-homeschooling, and added the lines.

Just a thought. :-)

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