ROSEMARY: Public/Home School Hybrid Part I – The Problem

Before I begin expounding on the notion of a public/home school hybrid, I have to register my happiness, no, DELIGHT, at the resignation of Senator Thomas Gaffey.  He has been a thorn in the side of anyone interested in education reform for many years, with homeschoolers being the bottom of the barrel as far as he’s concerned.  A friend of mine from his district once arranged a meeting with him, along with other constituents who also happened to be homeschooling parents.  Deborah Stevenson, the NHELD lawyer, accompanied the group of constituents as far as the door.  Upon entering the meeting room, the parents found that Gaffey was flanked by two Department of Education lawyers for the occasion, and when his constituents asked if their lawyer could also be present, he said “No” and Attorney Stevenson was made to wait in the hall. The Gaffey maxim: Lawyers for me, but not for thee.  And now he’s going to need a bit more lawyer fire-power than esquires from the Department of Education.  Here’s the CT Mirror article on this most happy of developments.  Now we just have to pray that something more ominous does not develop to replace Gaffey.  One cannot count on “clean margins” when it comes to the politics of education in the Constitution State.

Public/Home School Hybrid – The Problem
It’s quite ironic that I am co-writing a blog on education reform when I have been homeschooling my children since 1993.  My active years in the public school system were 1982 to 1992.  During those ten years, I was active in the PTO, taught an afterschool enrichment class at the middle school and volunteered at the elementary school during school hours.  I did all the things a young mother ought in terms of involvement, and then my oldest child started having trouble in fourth grade.  It was 1985, and my second child, a boy, was an infant at the time.  The older child had skipped second grade as a result of the cessation of the TAG program and was now having trouble socializing with children, in some cases, two years his senior.  (It must be noted that these were the early years of keeping boys back a year, starting them in kindergarten at six rather than five.  My son was a young five-year-old with a June birthday when he started kindergarten.)

At any rate, school became a burden to the entire family.  My son hated school, was having difficulty with socialization issues, started to get bad grades and I was now visiting the school as a parent of a “problem child”, meeting with the school psychologist and his teachers on a regular basis. One finds out rather quickly that when word gets out your child is a problem, folks will talk about you and yours behind your back and in a small town it has ramifications beginning in school that spread to town-run sports to birthday parties to playdates with classmates. The only place we found refuge was the hockey rink, where the team was comprised of kids from several towns and dad was the coach.  When our second son began having similar problems in school in third grade (and please keep in mind, there are eight years between the brothers …)  it was 1993, and we decided we were done with public school.

At this point, I have to applaud the K-2 teachers my boys had.  School had been almost idyllic up to that point with both of them.  My older boy only had the K-1 experience because of skipping second grade, but his brother had a second-grade teacher named Mrs. Pearson, and she was wonderful.  This second son was having trouble reading, as were a couple other boys in his class.  Whole-Language was the absolute rage at the time, and these boys just weren’t “getting-it” and although they were able to “pretend” to a certain point in first grade, the jig was up.  Mrs. Pearson instituted a phonics back-up plan for the kids in question, and in less than a month’s time, all the boys were breaking through and becoming comfortable readers. By the Christmas break, my son was reading well beyond grade level.  Thank you, Mrs. Pearson. Third grade commenced to be an utter disaster, starting and ending on a bad note in the 1992-93 school year.

So began our homeschooling experience, and we have never looked back (okay, maybe a little bit when our second son wanted to play high school hockey in 1997 – the answer wasn’t merely “no”, it was “no, no, no!!!” according to CAS and CIAC, CAPSS, CEA, and CHSCA, to name just a few of the covered wagons. Our son, as a result, became quite a good golfer.  Golf tournaments don’t have the jackboot of CIAC at their throats. Oh, and we did look back again a wee bit … orchestra … and that was “no, no, no!!!” as well, because that was under the auspices of CSMTA.  So we crossed the state border into Massachusetts and thanked God for the Western Massachusetts Young People’s Orchestra.  It is an outreach of the Springfield Symphony Orchestra, which could give four flying busted violin strings whether or not a kid was educated at home or in school.

So, we see the problem confronting any kind of accord between public and home schooling … a noxious, arrogant, exclusive, intolerant and nondiverse array of alphabet soup, a plethora of organizations that circle around one another whenever a challenge presents itself.  The problem, in its essence, is that education itself is not a choice.  It’s compulsory (as it well should be) yet it’s the parents who are compelled to educate their children, NOT the state … yet the state is fast becoming the entity which regulates every aspect of education and creates the illusion that parents have no say, no recourse and no choice … just pay your damned taxes and shut up.  Next installment:  Part II- The Stealth Option.