Home schooling on the rise in Virginia
The number of home-schoolers in Virginia has increased by more than 50 percent over the past decade, to more than 32,000 children. If they were a school district, it would be the ninth-largest in the state–with almost as many students as the Norfolk Public Schools
By Allison Landry and Amber Shiflett | Capital News Service
Amy Wilson says she didn’t choose home schooling; her son did.
“My son chose home schooling when he was about 3. I didn’t realize that’s what was happening at the time. We tried having him go to preschool, and it was not a good fit for him,” said Wilson, the government affairs director for the Organization of Virginia Homeschoolers. “Once I started questioning preschool, I suddenly found myself in this land of home-schoolers.”
Across the United States, a growing number of parents like Wilson have chosen home schooling as an alternative to public schools. In Virginia, the number of home-schoolers has increased by more than 50 percent over the past decade, according to the Virginia Department of Education.
There are now more than 32,000 home-schoolers in Virginia. If they were a school district, it would be the ninth-largest in the state – with almost as many students as the Norfolk Public Schools.
Why Families Choose Home Schooling
A variety of factors push parents to try home schooling. They include flexibility, concerns about the quality of public schools and the freedom to teach without boundaries.
Ann Zeise is a home-schooling expert and owner of A to Z Home’s Cool Homeschooling, a popular website that provides resources and guidance on the subject. Zeise said many factors influence the growth of home schooling, such as:
- The perception of whether the public schools in a state are good or bad
- The ease of complying with the state’s home-schooling laws
- The availability of a support network for home-schooling parents and students
Home schooling gives parents the opportunity to choose the schedule, curriculum and teaching style that best suits the needs of the child and the family, according to Parrish Mort, president of the Organization for Virginia Homeschoolers (usually called VaHomeschoolers).
“It’s a great gift to really be able to fine-tune your child’s education to their learning styles,” Mort said. “What home schooling gives you is the freedom that you just don’t have as much of when you choose school.”
Moreover, home schooling allowed Mort to accommodate her son’s specialized learning needs. “It became a lifestyle for us, and we loved it,” Mort said.
Susannah Foster, a home educator for 10 years in Fairfax County, says her three children–ages 5, 11, and 15–have all benefited from home schooling.
“We’ve been able to move at each child’s individual pace, choose a curriculum best-suited to their individual learning styles and needs, and pursue their interests in a way that, I hope, allows them to enjoy education rather than dread it,” Foster said.
Christina Caffi is a former home educator in Fairfax County and office manager for a holistic family practice. She said home schooling helped bring her family together.
“We were able to enjoy more time with our child, getting to know her and to tailor her education to her needs and interests,” Caffi said. “We were able to avoid the stress of the public school schedule and take advantage of the freedom of our schedule.”
Caffi said she began considering home schooling after observing the conditions at her daughter’s high school.
“When our first child entered high school, we were dismayed at the lack of discipline in her public high school,” Caffi said. “Remembering our own experiences in high school just 20 years before, we had concerns for the negative peer pressure she was facing and for the erosion of the moral values that we had tried to instill in her.”
Home Schooling: Doing the Math
Nationwide, there are more than 2 million home-schoolers, according to the National Home Education Research Institute.
During the 1994-95 school year, Virginia had 9,623 home-schoolers (including children kept out of public schools for religious reasons). By 2001-02, the number hit 21,121; and by 2011-12, the most recent year available, it climbed to 32,064. They represent 2.5 percent of all school-age children in Virginia.
The school divisions with the most home-schoolers are Fairfax County (2,929), Loudoun County (2,119), Chesterfield County (1,954), Prince William County (1,345) and Virginia Beach (982). That’s not surprising, because those are highly populated areas, and the home-schoolers there represent a tiny fraction of the school-age population.
But in Floyd County, in Southwest Virginia, the 269 home-schoolers represent nearly 12 percent of all school-age children, according to data analysis by Capital News Service. In Surry County, in the Hampton Roads area, home-schoolers represent 11 percent of all school-age children.
In 25 school divisions in Virginia, more than 5 percent of all school-age children are home-schooled. They range from Fauquier County and the city of Staunton to Powhatan and Warren counties.
Virginia’s Home-School Rules
Virginia makes it easy to home-school. Parents don’t need a college degree or any special academic qualifications. All they must do is:
- Notify the local district of their intent to home-school
- Provide a general curriculum, which can be a correspondence course or distance learning program
- Provide evidence of progress of the child’s academic progress each year
During the VaHomeschoolers Conference and Resource Fair in March in Glen Allen, Stephanie Elms, a member of the organization’s board, held an introductory session on the paperwork and legalities behind home schooling. Elms explained the different options under state law for evaluating a child’s progress.
“Home-schooled children,” she said, “do not need to follow the Standards of Learning”–Virginia’s standardized testing program that critics say is too rigid.
Instead, she said, home-schoolers could take an alternative standardized test, such as the California Achievement Test, the Iowa Test, or the Stanford Achievement Test.
“For those kids where standardized testing is not a good reflection of their abilities, there is an option two,” Elms said. “Under this option there are alternative methods for evaluation.” They include written documentation showing evidence of progress, a portfolio of student work, report cards or transcripts.
What about Socialization?
Foster said home schooling is not the best option for every parent, but she believes it is the best option for preserving her individual family values.
“Great teachers are a blessing, but even the greatest teacher can’t possibly care for the development of a child as much as a parent does,” Foster said. “This is not a lifestyle that is appropriate for every family.”
One concern about home schooling is that children might not learn social skills from associating and working with students in a traditional school setting.
Missy Edwards, the former vice president of the Parent Teacher Association at Lanier Middle School in Fairfax, expressed that concern. She has three children, who have all attended public schools. Edwards said she has been actively involved in her children’s academic paths throughout high school.
Like many public school parents, Edwards believes home schooling cannot provide the type of benefits that public schools do.
“I don’t believe that home-schoolers can benefit from the social and academic capabilities of dealing with real-world issues,” Edwards said. She said public school “has provided my kids with socialization skills that I wouldn’t be able to give them if I had them at home with me every day.”
While Edwards said that she could never be a home-school parent, VaHomeschoolers leaders Amy Wilson of Prince William County and Parrish Mort of Cumberland County said public schools have always been an option for their children.
“If they told me they wanted to go to public school, I would let them give it a try. So far, they both prefer home schooling,” Wilson said.
Mort agreed: “Every year, we’d re-evaluate. It’s one child, one year at a time. If they chose to make a different choice, it was fine.”
As the number of home-schoolers has grown, so have the opportunities for home-schoolers to socialize with each other.
“With so many people home-schooling, it isn’t difficult to find a group of like-minded families with which to socialize,” Caffi said. “There are many opportunities for fun or learning experiences with groups and service opportunities abound.”
Caffi pointed out another advantage of home schooling: Parents know whom their child is socializing with. “That is a responsibility that is difficult to maintain in the away-from-home school setting.”
photo by Randen Pederson
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“What about socialization?” Please. That’s a tired cliche. Homeschool kids do just fine in “real world” situations. If I’m supposed to send my only child to public school just so he can learn how to be bullied and taught values I don’t want him to share, then I reject that. My son is in high school, has been home-schooled since 2nd grade, and he’s already traveled to England and Ghana by himself on music trips. I have plenty of friends with children in public schools as well as schoolteacher friends, I wish them all the best and support them with my tax dollars. But it’s all about the right fit for your child, something public school simply cannot do.
Thanks for your input, Norm. It’s helpful to hear from parents who’ve experienced home schooling with their child(ren).
I could be wrong, but I feel like opinions are shifting about home schooling. It seems like a much more viable option these days, at least in my social and professional circles, than it did when I was growing up. I don’t hear the “What? Homeschool?! Ugh, why would you DO that?” as much anymore.
“taught values I don’t want him to share, then I reject that.”
Being exposed to many different points of view and values are part of socialisation that school provides. What you’re doing sounds a bit like brainwashing.
So. Many. Feelings.
I teach public school. The teacher in me is thinking: “Oh so I spent 4 years in college to become somewhat of an expert in my field’s knowledge and pedagogy, shouldn’t that be worth something? Wait, you want to pull your kid of school so you can teach him/her the same thing with no understanding of the content? The state says that’s fine? Awesome. I will now throw my degree and teaching license into a fire.”
The Person in me is thinking: If you think you can do a better job, kudos to you. It’s your kid after all and you know him/her best.
The reality of it is that a lot homeschooled students get just as good as or better an education then their traditional schooled counterparts due to the information sharing from the internet. There are a lot of teaching tools out there for home instruction teachers, as well as support/education groups to help with issues like socialization. To me it’s not a question of curriculum or knowledge.
I do (as a teacher and Person) object to homeschooling when it is done to insulate the child from the big bad world where ‘anti-christian’ values and/or ‘rampant bullying that literally affects everyone all the time always’ . I think, or at least hope, that the right mindset of home education parents is “let’s TRY public school first and see if it works” as opposed to “well I had a bad high school experience so all schools are evil.”
I’ve had students that have been in and out of public/home schooling for various reasons and they were generally less socialized than their counterparts but just as if not more intelligent. If you can homeschool and you have the time and resources (trips, tutors, etc.) to make it WORTH it? I say go for it. Just don’t keep your kid out of school because you want to hide the world from them.
As a somewhat recent public school student i can completely understand the need for homeschooling. As a high school student, my time was not used efficiently by the public school i attended. Let’s just be honest here, public school is glorified daycare..and you may glean some information along the way. My senior year of high school was spent skipping, napping, and doing small amounts of work in between. It was a total waste of time. Would had been much better off not going at all and entering the workforce or starting on college credits. It did little to prepare me for the real world, other than teaching me some historical factoids and ensuring i knew basic math. I actually took THREE art classes my senior year, LOL.
I have friends who home-schooled 3 of their 4 children. They are all bright, articulate, well-traveled, kind children. When I see this family, it reinforces the good that home-schooling can accomplish. I am not a parent but I think if I was and had a choice, I would home-school also.
When aren’t parents home schooling?
I understand the concerns expressed in the comments here about isolating children from the world. Here’s my own take on how we handle it in our family. I believe it is important to give children a solid foundation in the formative years. But equally important to give them experiences out in the world so that it doesn’t all come as a shock once they leave the nest. We do read and talk about other points of view, other political philosophies, other religions and other interpretations of history. My children have been involved with scouts, sports, music, classes at the local rec center and countless hours of running around with other kids in the neighborhood who are not homeschooled. We’ve also had the opportunity to spend time with extended family during the normal school year because we have the flexibility to adjust our schedule. This is more like the real world that artificially-imposed, age-segregated learning where everything moves at the sound of the bell.
Home schooling may be fine for some, and I agree with the earlier comments against it for the insulation reasons. I only know one home schooled child well, and that child is socially awkward. I have seen that before years ago.
That said, I would never have considered home schooling because I my wife and I both work, and we do a lot of home schooling at night anyway (Bopst is right) making sure they do their homework (art class my ass), get their projects done, check grades on line, email teachers, meet with teachers, schedule sports and other activities.
I agree with the teacher above, that it really can be more effective with a professional. That said, NEA, VEA and REA need to go away. The lobbying organizations do little but protect ineffective teachers. Good teachers are amazing, but we still have too many bad ones. Good teachers don’t need to be protected, they need to be supported and given autonomy to do what works for thier class room.
Finally, what about those at the bottom of the income ladder? Those that have to hold down more than one job to survive. Grandparents that are raising thier grandkids. They need a public education system they can rely on, and though many do fall down on the job, I doubt seriously that home schooling is a viable option for them.
It has to be about the kids, not the adults (administrators and parents).
I didn’t know (and still don’t know) a single home schooled kid that didn’t have epic problems adjusting to the real world.
@bopst….. I find it hard to believe you have ever really known many home educated people and here is why I believe that. I not only have taught in both public and private schools, but I also home educated my own kids. I have known hundreds of home schooled kids over the past 30 years and overall they are incredible people. Are some socially awkward? Why yes they are. Just like many public school and private school kids I have worked with. Most of that awkwardness is due to personality differences, not how they have been educated. The home educated kids I know are involved with all sorts of things in the real world, not just classes (music, dance, drama, art, sports, etc), but also with volunteering at shelters, working abroad, creating their own businesses and getting to do craft shows, and much more. While their peers are in same age classrooms all day, home educated kids are out in the world with people of all ages. They tend to communicate with adults much better than others. They tend to think for themselves and are often more articulate. To some, that may translate to being “socially awkward” because they are not like, you know, like, talking like kids their own age, and you know, whatever. (I hope you see my point here). My own kids had friends who went to different schools. They went to football games and prom, they had sleepovers and trips with friends to the beach. They both went to college and had zero trouble with that experience, when ironically enough, every one of their friends from public school had all kinds of issues adjusting to the college environment. Both are married now with kids. One is an admissions director at a university the other owns his own company. That is the norm, not the exception for those who have come out of the home education environment. Academically and socially most are well adjusted people, not much different from the percentages coming from public and private schools (one just needs to look at how many of kids in public/private schools have been labeled with problems, are on medication of some sort, or in therapy to ask how well adjusted THEY are). My point is that everyone needs to find what works for their families, and to be able to do so without judgement. Is home education for everyone? No. But neither are the public schools or the private ones that may not be affordable to many. Let’s drop all the outdated socialization nonsense and look at the real picture of home schooled kids. Those I have met are funny, smart, creative, giving, people who happen to learn at home. They are not weird, they are not being insulated from the world. They in fact are living out in the world every day. The world is their classroom.
You present a wonderful point Harlee. Perhaps in a lot ways the public school experience closes off many opportunities for kids and young adults. There’s so much more to learn in the world outside of the classroom. Kind of makes traditional classroom schooling seem very limiting to the growth of our kids.
Every person I’ve known who had epic problems adjusting to the real world was a product of compulsory public schooling.
I never considered homeschooling a viable option, but when my daughter began high school, I did feel like it wasn’t meeting her needs. She wasn’t challenged and was definitely ready to move on. When I began to check out the alternatives to high school I came across early college as a model that really works for gifted students, while still leaving teaching to the professionals. After checking out the options, Emma was very excited about Simon’s Rock at Bard College. She is thriving there.