The Homeschooling Handbook_ From Preschool to High School - Mary Griffith [39]
Some Real-Life Examples
How do homeschoolers decide how much homeschooling help they want? How do we figure out whether we need assistance getting started? How do we know what will work for our own families? For most homeschooling families, the choices are never easy and are continually reevaluated. The easiest way to begin to see how the process works is to look at a few families to see how they handle things.
My children are now nineteen and fifteen. We’ve been homeschooling for sixteen years, if you count the preschool years, and have lived in three different states over those years. For twelve of those years we homeschooled on our own, without using any formal curricula or umbrella school; we are unschoolers. Four years ago we moved to Florida, a state which requires annual evaluations. This move also coincided with our daughter’s reaching high school age.
We chose to enroll with Clonlara then for several reasons. Overall, I guess, was my insecurity. I didn’t want our decision to homeschool to have a negative impact on our children’s futures. If paying out tuition for a few years would give them a transcript and high school diploma from an accredited school, it seemed like a small price to pay. I wanted the doors to be open should our daughter decide to go to college. Then there were those annual evaluations required by the state. Our son is a “special needs” child and does not do at all well on standardized assessments. I also wanted to keep an extra layer between my family and the school district so that the district would have no way of identifying him as “different,” and Clonlara’s philosophy avoids labeling students. We enrolled with them for four years, until my daughter graduated. We are now using West River Academy in Colorado for my son’s remaining high school years because he has outgrown the state-required evaluations that Clonlara had handled, the costs are far less, and the philosophy more nearly fits my own.
For us, the advantages were: (1) It appeased my mother, since she then thought we were doing things in a more traditional way; (2) We didn’t have to change what we were doing, just how we recorded it; (3) Clonlara provided the annual evaluations (although I did most of the work for that in the form of a narrative report and providing a portfolio of work); (4) My daughter had no difficulty with college applications and in fact was accepted by all the schools to which she applied. I didn’t have to write her recommendations as guidance counselor, nor did we have to justify what we did in our homeschooling; (5) I could avoid dealings with our local school district; (6) She has a transcript and normal-looking high school diploma (“dorky” is her description, but what diploma isn’t?), and she will always have the choice of not explaining her homeschooling in the future if she so chooses.
As for disadvantages, cost was a big one. The tuition went up dramatically over the time we were enrolled, and we saw no corresponding increase in service. Each family was assigned to what was first called a “support teacher” and later a “contact teacher.” Our first one responded rapidly—within two weeks—and generally had good suggestions. However, we had three different teachers assigned over the four years, and it felt as though I was constantly retelling our story. I disliked the lack of continuity. Our later teachers were much slower to respond to my inquiries (months, at times), and I found their suggestions trivial—things I’d thought of long before and already tried. My daughter especially resented having to keep track of the time she spent on various activities in order to document her “credit hours” and the mandatory “community service hours.” It wasn’t that she didn’t want to do volunteer service; she did and still does. It was the mandatory aspect of it. In the end, though, she earned substantially more credits than the required minimum (she had more than 40; 22 were required).
In the end, I felt like a traitor to the unschooling community for having used Clonlara