Utterly Meaningless

Homeschooling out of spite? Interesting. “If you don’t do what I want I’ll raise my kids myself!!!” hahahaha

We had our share of board meetings and getting a chance to have our say before we decided to homeschool our brood ourselves. It wasn’t spiteful in any form, it was loss of confidence in the board’s abilities to grow the charter school the way it was originally planned. Instead of growing in 4 years, we had year after year of declining service, declining educational expectations, and horrible budget shortfalls.
The final straw was not renewing the contracts of 11 out of 19 teachers, planning on increasing class size so they could hire fewer experienced teachers to take on the student load, and refusing to pass a balanced budget for the upcoming school year while facing an already burdensome $30,000 prior year shortfall.

Alot of veteran families left, some to persue private school, some back into the regular public school system, and a few of us to homeschool. Homeschooling isn’t an easy choice, and we both agonized over choices all summer, finally making the decision and withdrawing the kids from that school the week before classes began this last year. It was a choice we’d thought about off and on since the kids were born though, so I’d already had years of research done, trying to weigh my options and get over doubts that we’d be somehow depriving the kids of something by doing it ourselves.

I see snap decisions like that made on a lot of homeschool email groups I belong to though. It’s not just school closures, it’s over anything and everything. Granted it’s easy to become emotional over your own children’s welfare, so I always wish them lots of luck and reply with lots of links. Hopefully enough will succeed at it that there will be true educational reform.