Home-schoolers persist in hard times

When hard times reached the Schneider household in central Oregon, the longtime stay-at-home mom got a job at Subway to offset a drop in her husband’s earnings. What she didn’t do was also notable - she didn’t stop home-schooling her three teenage children.

Colleen Schneider works evenings so she’s home for her favored morning teaching hours. But an inflexible 9-to-5 job that would force her to quit home-schooling was not an option.

”I would fight tooth and nail to home-school,” said Mrs. Schneider, 47, a devout Roman Catholic who wants to convey her values to her children. “I’m making it work because it’s my absolute priority.”

Other families across the country are making similar decisions - college-age children chipping in with their earnings, laid-off fathers sharing teaching duties, mothers taking part-time jobs - with the goal of continuing to home-school in the face of economic setbacks.

Before the recession, the ranks of home-school students had been growing by an estimated 8 percent annually; the latest federal figures, from 2007, calculate the total at about 1.5 million.

While some families are giving up because of a stay-at-home parent’s need to get a job, the recession overall will likely be a further boost to home-schooling, according to parents and educators interviewed by the Associated Press.

‘We’re going to see continued growth,” said Brian D. Ray, president of the National Home Education Research Institute in Salem, Ore. “The reasons parents home-educate are not passing, faddish things.”

Christopher Klicka of Warrenton, Va., senior counsel for the Home School Legal Defense Association and co-teacher along with his wife of seven home-schooled children, says hard times enhance home-schooling’s appeal as private-school tuition becomes unaffordable and some public schools contemplate cutbacks.

“People are looking to home-schooling as an alternative more now in light of economic circumstances,” he said, citing its low cost and potential for strengthening family bonds.

At Allendale Academy in Clearwater, Fla., which provides resources for home-schoolers, enrollment has risen 50 percent over the past two years to about 900 students as families desert private schools, says academy director Patricia Carter.

“Often one parent has been laid off,” she said. “That makes private-school tuition impossible, and they don’t want to send their kids back to public school.”

Her academy charges $65 per year to support students through 8th grade, $95 for high school students, compared with private-school tuitions often running many thousands of dollars per year.

For frugal families, home-schooling can be a good fit. Used academic material is available at low cost, while free research resources are on tap on the Internet and at libraries.

“Home-schoolers are pretty self-reliant,” said Judy Aron of West Hartford, Conn., who has home-schooled three children. “They’d rather cut back on other things. … They very vehemently don’t want to see themselves as victims.”

Michael Marcucci, of Middlebury, Conn., is president of the Connecticut Homeschool Network, which has about 1,500 member families, including 34 who signed up in January alone.

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