Homeschooling Soars in Florida!

Encouraging news about Florida homeschooling! Here is an article that was in the Orlando Sentinel.

Homeschooling Soars in Florida

Five months ago, Rebecca Arms joined an army of parents pulling their kids out of school to teach them at home.

In Florida, home schooling is seeing its biggest increase since 2005. And in Central Florida, its growth is even more pronounced.

In Brevard County, for example, the number of kids sitting for lessons in their kitchens and living rooms surged 20 percent last school year. It jumped 15 percent in Seminole and Polk counties, according to a recent report from the state Department of Education.

While there has been no formal study, education leaders, private-school principals and home-school advocates nationwide say much of the increase was likely fueled by families who can no longer afford private school but don't want to put their kids in public school.

Florida private-school associations have estimated their enrollments are down 7 percent to 12 percent.

For Arms and her husband, the decision to home-school their children happened after she lost her job.

Arms said she had been wanting to teach her 9-year-old son, Charles, because he had become bored and misbehaved at his Brevard County public school.

Arms decided to keep Charles and his 10-year-old sister, Amalia, at home when school started in August. So far, they love it, she said.

"He doesn't have to be bored and wait for everybody else," said the former administrative assistant from Titusville whose husband is a pastor for a local church.

Although only a fraction of Florida's 2.6 million students take their lessons at home, the number soared from 47,151 in 2003-04 to 60,913 in 2008-09 even as the state was losing population.

Last school year alone, it jumped 8 percent.

Dan Lips, a senior policy analyst for The Heritage Foundation, a research group in Washington, said Central Florida's increases are dramatic when compared with the rest of the nation. But they reflect a rising national interest in home schooling among parents, he said.

About 3 percent of students — 1.5 million — were being home-schooled when the U.S. Department of Education last counted in 2007. There's evidence the tally could be much higher, though, considering some home-school families don't register with their school districts and some even register in Florida as private schools.

"Home schooling is definitely reaching a tipping a point in terms of popularity," said Lips. "As more families do it, I think we can expect to see even more families follow that path."

More families also are learning that teaching their kids at home is easier these days, thanks to the ever-growing network of support groups and the increasing availability of high-tech programs such as Florida Virtual School, which allows public- and private-school students and home-schoolers to take classes or complete an entire school year online.

News of star football quarterback Tim Tebow's experience with home schooling has shined a spotlight on the option. Tebow, who recently graduated from University of Florida, learned at home but played football with a public high-school team in the Jacksonville area.

"Since Florida is friendly to home-schoolers who want to participate in extracurricular activities, and Tim Tebow shows what can be achieved through a home education, he may be giving parents the confidence to home-school," said Ian Slatter, a director for the Home School Legal Defense Association, a nonprofit advocacy group with headquarters in Virginia.

For whatever reason, Judy Hamilton said her home-school consortium in Brevard County is growing monthly. This school year, more than 130 families are part of the North Brevard Home School Association, a mechanism for parents to offer one another support and organize larger groups of students for activities such as science experiments.

"We just put our new Web site online last year, and I noticed we had over 600 hits in one month — I was floored," said Hamilton, who has been teaching her kids at home for nearly a decade. "Over the Christmas holiday, I was getting a lot of e-mail through the Web site from people wanting to pull their children out [of schools] midyear and start to home-school for the second semester."

Early estimates for this school year suggest home schooling numbers rose again. The Orlando Sentinel did an informal survey of Florida's largest districts and found that home schooling is up about 17 percent in Duval County in Jacksonville and 14 percent in Hillsborough County in Tampa.

In Orange County, home-schooling is up just slightly. But in Lake County, it was 21 percent higher this month than in January 2009.

While that growth may be good news for taxpayers — costs go down when kids leave public schools — the school districts have to pick up the slack when home schooling doesn't work out.

"We do have, every year, students who have been home-educating that return to us," said Jay Marshall, Lake County schools' director of student services. "Some return to us and stay and do very well and some do not do as well."

Osceola County is among Florida districts bucking the home-school trend. Although home-school registrations jumped 10 percent there last school year, they have fallen dramatically this year. Early estimates show that hundreds of students aren't doing it anymore.

Osceola Schools Superintendent Michael Grego said some of the home-schoolers probably moved to the public schools, which have made headlines since he took over the district in 2008 with their big gains in test scores.

In Volusia County, Alicia Sandoval is seriously thinking about home schooling her daughter, Alex, a first-grader at Forest Lake Elementary in Deltona. Sandoval said the home-school students she has encountered in the community seem much more advanced academically.

Many studies show home-schoolers often excel on standardized tests.

"I was just really impressed by how much education they're getting with the one-on-one [lessons]," she said. "In the public schools, they're in there for a long period of time but so much time is being wasted."