Special Report

“Science. Leadership. Physical Education. Cooking. Chess. Soccer. Basketball. History. Art. Music. Drama,” Melanie Thompson rattled down the list of her children’s classes and activities as if she were trying to catch up to it herself.

She’s not as busy as she could be, said the Pell City mother. After all, as a home-school mother, she stresses the value of time spent at home.

“It’s the karate class and gymnastics,” the 45-year-old said, frustrated. “When were those?”

And somewhere between shuttling her kids to class, cheering their games and putting dinner on the table, Thompson found time to work as a part-time nurse, run a home-based business and direct a small fine-arts academy.

“It’s a different kind of experience, but it is very rewarding,” she said.

Star Multimedia

Video: Tour the 2007 CHEF of Alabama Convention Family to Family Hip Hop Education My Father's World Politically Correct Guide Bob Jones University

Thompson, who has been home-schooling her three children for seven years, represents a changing social movement.

Twenty years ago in Alabama and nationwide, home schooling was a bastion for ideologues. It allowed those among the religious right to escape what they viewed as a Godless public education system, and it allowed students of the anti-establishment left to provide education without borders.

The two factions disagreed on politics, but they agreed on one principle: Home schooling was a commitment to raising children free from the influences of teachers and classrooms, said Mitchell Stevens, an education sociologist at New York University.

Today those parents, who were among the small number of Alabama home-schoolers in the early ‘80s, lead organizations of thousands across the state. While they welcome the numbers and credibility to their movement, they also grapple with change, said Chris Christian, president of the Christian Home Education Fellowship of Alabama, an organization with 6,000 member families and connections to more than 300 home-school organizations.

Many newcomers are home-schoolers of practicality rather than principle. They had a disagreement with a teacher. Another student was bullying their kid at school. Their child was failing. Their child was sick.

Others view home schooling as an educational buffet line that allows parents to subcontract education to private tutors, parochial schools, public schools and virtual schools.

In a survey conducted for The Anniston Star of 296 home-school parents at the 2007 CHEF Convention, 81 percent of families said they used education services outside of the home. Twenty-two percent said they would consider enrolling their children part-time in public school, and 79 percent of parents said they believe they should have access to public school extracurricular activities.

Growth and change

According to a survey conducted by the U.S. Department of Education, 1.1 million students were being home schooled nationwide in 2003.

The survey did not estimate specific states’ home-school populations. However, it appears home schooling has continued to grow – between 1999 and 2003 the portion of the K-12 population being home schooled increased from 1.7 percent to 2.2 percent, said Gail Mulligan, project manager for the National Household Education Survey.

“The increase between 1999 and 2003 was half a percentage point, but since the percentage was so small, that was a significant increase,” Mulligan said.

The Alabama Department of Education has no idea how many families are home educating in Alabama, said Michael Sibley, a spokesman for the DOE. Yet, home school administrators in the state say they are swamped with calls from new families wanting either to learn about home schooling or to begin the process.

In Florida, the number of home-schooled children increased from 37,196 in 2000 to 51,613 in 2006. Georgia has seen similar growth. The number of children enrolled in home-study programs in Georgia increased from 25,752 in 2000 to 36,624 in 2006.

“The movement has become almost fashionable,” said Stevens, whose 2001 book, Kingdom of Children, followed the first 20 years of the home-school movement. “It’s not just marginal and fundamental.”

What was deviant behavior is now state-sanctioned and normal, Stevens said. Its practice by affluent families and the news coverage it has received have lent it credibility. Also, Americans are more concerned about their children’s individuality and the public schools’ ability to manage it, he said.

Twenty-five years ago, textbook companies did not sell curriculum to home-school families. Now, publishing companies are catering to home-school parents and making a lot of money doing so, said Dawn Watkins, marketing director at Bob Jones University Press, the first Christian publishing company to sell to home-schoolers in 1984.

“(Curriculum) has influenced the philosophy of home schooling and the level of professionalism,” she said.

Along with curriculum, many organized home-schoolers have learned to use formal classrooms and have created quasi-schools with many of the trappings of the public and private schools they defected from.

The Innovators

In addition to classes, home-school students at Crossroads Christian School, an organization of 250 home school families in Pell City, can attend dances, act in an annual musical, work on the yearbook, sing in the choir and participate in numerous clubs.

In the fall, Crossroads will launch Curriculum Option Requiring Excellence, a program that will allow home-schooled high schoolers to take their core classes — English, chemistry, biology, Spanish, history, geometry, physical science, geography and algebra — in a formal classroom setting with teachers one day a week, said Kathi Millsaps, a CORE coordinator from Pell City.

Millsaps, who has been home schooling for 15 years, has four children she is home schooling. Along with registering in CORE, she said her children will take classes like driver education, constitutional law, Bible and art from a co-op — group classes taught by home-school parents.

“I can teach them, but sometimes it helps to have the espirit de corps of the classroom,” she said. “They respond to the competition. They learn from other (students’) input and mistakes, and those things cannot be gained at home.”

Co-ops and classes have allowed Millsaps to pick and choose the best teachers for every subject, and unlike in public or private school, she has the freedom to dismiss a teacher if she doesn’t like what he or she is doing, she said.

“The idea that you school at home in a vacuum — that does not exist now,” said Tamara Mooring, a coordinator for CORE.

Sherrie Thornton, 36, who moved to Alabama from Florida last year, just tells people that she home schools part-time.

Her two young children are enrolled in Grace Community School in Clanton, which provides formal schooling either two or three days a week for home-school families, Thornton said. Teachers develop lesson plans that parents follow on the off days, and parents spend full days in the school assisting teachers, she said.

“It’s a nice blend. Home schooling has always appealed to me, but I didn’t want to do it full time,” she said.

Around 50 students are enrolled in Grace Community School, and Thornton, who commutes from Chelsea to Clanton, said many families come a long way to participate.

Before moving to Alabama, Thornton’s children had been enrolled in a similar school in Florida, where she said part-time schools are a growing trend. In Alabama, Grace Community School is the only one of its kind.

Another way

Nearly a year ago, Greg Hodges, a 33-year-old medical physicist at UAB, decided he had attended his last parent-teacher conference at Homewood Elementary.

Viriyah, his 8-year-old son, had been accused of throwing a pencil at another child’s head.

“Our son is upset when he goes to school,” said Hodges’ wife, Souchada, 33.

Along with being reported for fighting with other students, Viriyah wasn’t reading on grade level, and he didn’t participate in classes, Hodges said. The school’s version: He was anti-social because his mother prevented him from speaking English at home, Hodges said, but he saw the situation differently.

“Kids were picking on him,” he said. “They would say, ‘punch me,’ and Viriyah would. Then they would tell the teacher he had hit them.”

When Hodges, who could not afford private schooling, began to consider home schooling as a remedy for his child’s situation, he said he couldn’t believe what he was doing. His father had been a public-school guidance counselor, and he had always championed public education as the “foundation for industrial power” and the “key to democracy.”

“My impression of home schooling was that it was the abhorrent side of society that sequestered themselves and taught their children half-truths,” said Hodges, who now teaches his son when he gets off work at night. “But I started to realize that there was a place for home schooling. I woke up and realized that public school is nothing like I thought it was.”

Hodges admits he isn’t committed to home schooling long-term. Another school system, another principal, and everything could be different.

“The system didn’t work for us, and that is a hard thing for me to deal with,” he said. “I always want to have hope that public education can work.”

Bring it home

Donna Mitchell worries about the direction of the movement. As administrator of Day Spring Academy, a home-school organization of 700 families in the state, Mitchell fields around five to eight calls a day from parents looking to pull their children out of a school system, she said.

“I see parents less committed to home schooling as a movement or as a separation from government schooling,” Mitchell said. “It’s a reaction from a bad situation in the system. There isn’t a true commitment that home schooling is better for a child’s education.”

The dynamics of home education have changed dramatically, she said. Parents are working as schedulers rather than teachers, and have forgotten the home part of home schooling, she said.

Mitchell, who describes her spirituality as a mix between Christian, Buddhist, Taoist and pagan, decided to home school the oldest of her nine children in 1982, while she was working at a health-food store in Washington and actively supporting the home-birth movement.

“It was natural to think I don’t want them away from me all day. I don’t want them taught by someone I don’t know. I enjoy their company. I enjoy watching them,” she said.

Eight of her nine children, ranging in age from 8 to 23, still live at home, and five still are being home schooled.

Though Chris Christian and Mitchell would disagree politically, Christian said he and evangelical administrators across the state agree that the values of home schooling and the power of the family unit are being lost on a new generation. This year, one of the subjects of the CHEF administrators’ meeting in Mobile was “the new home-schooler,” he said.

“They are getting everything handed to them on a silver platter,” Christian said. “It is blurred. People go in one year and then out again. People call and ask, ‘where do I take my kids to get them home schooled?’ I say, ‘your living room.’”

Evangelical parents have forgotten that the purpose of home schooling was to build the family and protect children from outside influences, said Jean Whatley, 55, of Beauregard, who has home schooled for more than 20 years.

“When you bring in peers and peer dependency, that’s not home schooling,” Whatley said. “You lose the entire mission of home schooling, which is to concentrate on the family.”