About a decade ago, after three school changes in five years and another looming for her then fifth-grader, Paula Horne said she’d had enough.
She and her husband had been discussing home-schooling their children for years. They had moved to Sugar Hill because the Gwinnett County schools appeared pleasing. And they wanted continuity for their children in education.
The redistricting pushed them to try teaching their own children. That’s a choice more Georgia parents are making.
“It has been the best thing we have ever done,” she said.
One of Horne’s children graduated from Virginia Tech, another from the University of Kentucky. Her third graduates from high school later this month. He’s headed to Furman University on a full scholarship, she said.
She's become more than an advocate for home schooling, starting a company with Belinda Keenen that provides resources to others seeking to home school their children.
The number of Georgia students registered as home-school students has increased by just more than 2,000, to 59,831 since the state began reporting data in 2012. The home-school growth rate, 3.5 percent, is slightly higher than Georgia's public-school student population growth, 2.7 percent, for the same timeframe.
About 2.2 million students are being home schooled across the country, according to Kate Whiting with Educents, a marketplace for educational products with a focus on home schooling. According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, that is double the 1.1 million being home-schooled in 2003.
Home-schooling fans say it allows individualized teaching and more family time that results in well-rounded scholars and people.
Several studies indicate that home school students with structured curricula outperform public school students, but much of that research is sponsored by home school advocacy groups.
Experts say home schooling has its negatives, too. Some parents cite the cost for curricula and the lack of social interaction, depending on the program. Many moms, who typically take on the teaching role, have talked of feeling burned out and of the impacts on marriages.
“It can be a hardship,” said Whiting, the CEO of Educents. “A lot of time, home schooling can be looked down upon.”
The methods parents use to teach vary. Some students are home schooled full time, while some take classes at home and in traditional classroom settings for specific topics. Some traditional students receive after-school supplemental teaching to add to what they’re taught at their traditional school, Whiting said.
Home-school students in Georgia must be evaluated at least every three years after third grade through some form of standardized testing, which would give insight into how the student is progressing.
Whiting said that for years students were home schooled mostly for religious reasons. These days, more people do it out of convenience, when their children learn at a different pace. Horne said she did it because she felt her home district did not have her children’s best interests in mind.
She believes the time together strengthened their family bond and made them better students.
“The teacher can only teach to a certain portion of the class,” she said. “The majority of people are doing it … so that they can provide personalized attention to their children.”
Former State Rep. Sally Harrell’s son and daughter returned to traditional classrooms this year after being home schooled. The teens, both sophomores at Lakeside High School, had reached an age where they wanted more freedom from parental oversight, making it harder for her to be their work evaluator, she said.
She started home schooling about seven years ago she said, after realizing her son wasn’t happy with traditional instruction.
She also believed the children had so much school work it was impacting the time they spent as a family. Both thrived under the nontraditional instruction, she said.
“I felt the school was reaching too far into the family,” she said. “Home schooling gave me my family back.”
She benefited from use of the Georgia Cyber Academy, a statewide charter school, which provided an online curriculum and a teacher she used to supplement her in-home instruction.
Vantage Point Education does the same for those seeking to home school, offering group lessons, advanced placement and SAT testing, as well as counseling, to parents considering or currently involved in home schooling their children.
Keenen home schooled her children for at least eight years, she said. They began after arriving in Georgia, their 11th move in 16 years. She saw a change in her daughter after the move, with Gwinnett County Schools being her third school district in a single school year.
“She was a very outgoing, gregarious child,” she said of her daughter at the time, about a decade ago. “For those last few weeks, she became very withdrawn and cried a lot. Her academics started to suffer.
“My husband and I had talked for years about home schooling and decided that was a perfect time to start.”
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