Homeschool or public school?

Families work to find the best fit for educating their children

MOSES LAKE — Marilyn Molitor had not seriously considered homeschooling as an option until her then 7-year-old son Madison approached her at the beginning of this school year about the idea.

Academically, Madison excels beyond other students his age. He is the oldest of four boys.

He likes reading J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and has already started working on multiplication tables and division problems in math, Molitor says.

Molitor credits her son's initiative in asking her about the possibility of being homeschooled as the driving force that motivated her to seriously consider it.

"I hadn't been very open to the idea initially," Molitor said.

So at the start of the 2005-2006 school year Madison was homeschooled part time and attended public school for the other half of the day at Peninsula Elementary.

It was a decision Molitor and husband Mitch made with full support of Peninsula Elementary.

After three weeks of splitting their time between public and homeschool, the Molitors sent Madison back to public school full time as they were concerned he was missing out on social activities with his peers.

More and more public schools are showing support for home-based education, a trend Family Learning Organization manager Karen Carver says has not always been the case.

FLO is a nonprofit agency established in 1983 out of Spokane under the title of the Family Learning Association. The agency works to support home-based education and advocate for parents' choices in how they educate their children.

Carver, herself a parent of homeschooled children, recalls when the 1985 Home-Based Instruction law passed. That was around the same time she began homeschooling her children.

At that time, homeschooling met with much opposition by the public education system and others, Carver said.

More than 20 years after passage of the law, she believes that outlook has changed as homeschooling develops a track record and public schools look to meet the diversity of needs present in their student populations.

"Twenty years later, these children are now adults and many of them are well-adjusted

adjusted, functioning, contributing adults," Carver said of students home schooled in the 1980s. "They should be able to maintain their homeschool status and still access these programs that are available through the public school system," she added of homeschooled students today.

Patsy Huddleston, also a mother of four boys who lives in Moses Lake, has homeschooled all of her children.

Huddleston's second oldest son Riley,16, is enrolled in the Running Start program and taking band at Moses Lake High School.

Riley was homeschooled up until last school year.

Being involved with the public high school band allows Riley to participate in the high school solo and ensemble music competition, something he wanted to do but would not have been able to unless he was part of a high school band program.

Huddleston's children used to be involved with homeschool band and music classes, but as fewer families continued to homeschool, the family looked to the public school system to fill that need.

At the beginning of this school year Huddleston questioned whether to continue homeschooling as it sometimes seems her family is one of the few continuing to homeschool.

Sentiments of doubt and frustration among homeschooling families are troubling to Janice Hedin, a member of the Washington Homeschool Organization advocacy committee who was instrumental in passing the 1985 law in Washington.

"Parents have been convinced that they can't do this, they need to know that they can do this," Hedin said of parents feeling overwhelmed about homeschooling.

For the next generation of homeschoolers and their families, Hedin's message to them is that for homeschooling to be successful they need to take responsibility for their children's education and not rely totally on the public education system and government to do the educating for them.

" … For homeschooling to survive, these young parents need to realize if you're being called to homeschooling the government way of doing it is not the way, because each child learns differently," she said.

For the Huddleston and Molitor families, the combination of homeschooling and public school has worked well.

The Huddleston children have been able to participate in activities through the public schools otherwise not available to them; the Molitors have utilized the public school system to give their son added opportunity to be with other kids his own age.

"As a parent teaching, I was never able to sharpen that peer element," Molitor said.