More than 40 families participate in a home-schooling cooperative at Andrews Air Force Base.
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
ANDREWS AIR FORCE BASE, Md. — More military parents are embracing home schooling, rejecting the age-old tradition of switching schools for their children when they are redeployed.
They are finding support on bases, which are providing resources for families and opening their doors to home-schooling cooperatives.
“If there’s a military installation, there’s very likely home-schoolers there if you look,” said Nicole McGhee, 31, of Cameron, N.C., a mother of three with a husband stationed at Fort Bragg in North Carolina who runs a Facebook site on military home schooling.
At Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia, the library has special presentations for home-schoolers on Benjamin Franklin and static electricity. Fort Bragg offers daytime taekwondo classes. At Fort Belvoir, Va., there are athletic events and a parent-led chemistry lab.
At Andrews Air Force Base about 15 miles outside Washington, more than 40 families participate on Wednesdays in a home schooling cooperative at the base’s youth center. This month, teenagers in one room warmed up for a mock audition, while younger children downstairs learned to sign words like “play” and searched for “Special Agent Stan” during a math game. Military mothers taught each class.
Military families move nearly every three years on average. The transition can be tough for children, and home schooling can make it easier, advocates say. The children do not have to adjust to a new teacher or worry that they are behind because the new school’s curriculum is different.
Some military families also cite the same reasons for choosing home schooling as those in the civilian population: a desire to educate their children in a religious environment, concern about the school environment, or to provide for a child with special needs.
Two 16-year-olds, Andrew Roberts and Christina Cagle, interviewed at the Andrews co-op, said they were happy their parents had made the decision to home-school them. Andrew said he thinks he gets more done in a school day than his peers in a traditional school, and he sees his friends at Bible study groups and during other social events with teenagers on base.
“There’s not a lot of peer pressure considering you’re mostly with your siblings and it’s kind of a relaxed environment,” Christina said.
Participating military families say home schooling also allows them to schedule school time around the rigorous deployment, training and school schedules of the military member.
“We can take time off when Dad is home and work harder when he is gone,” Ms. McGhee said, “so we have that flexibility.”
Sharon Moore, the education liaison at Andrews who helps parents with school-related matters, said that at the height of the summer military moving season, she typically gets 20 calls from families moving to the base with home-schooling questions. She links them with families from the co-op and includes the home-schooled children during back-to-school events and other functions like a trip to a planetarium.
“It comes down to they are military children, and we love our military children,” said Ms. Moore, a former schoolteacher. “We recognize that they have unique needs that sometimes other children don’t have, and we want to make sure that we do our best to serve them and meet those needs because they have given so much to this country.”
Strong support for home schooling by the military was uncommon in the 1990s, said Mike Donnelly, a former Army officer who is a lawyer with the Home School Legal Defense Association, based in Purcellville, Va. He said that changed in 2002 with a militarywide memo that said home schooling can be a “legitimate alternative form of education” for military children. Most military bases today are friendly toward home-schoolers, he said.
“Starting a new school is bad enough, and doing it twice over seemed like a lot,” said Ms. Burchette, a mother of three. “He kind of perked up after we mentioned that. The move kind of changed perspective for him.”
Her family is now preparing to move again — this time to Norfolk, Va., and she is now home schooling her two oldest children.
“I have no issues with public schools or the system,” Ms. Burchette said. “It’s just working for us right now.”
Recent government statistics show that within the general population, about 3 percent of school-age children are now home-schooled.
Mr. Donnelly said his group estimates that 5 percent to 10 percent of military children are home-schooled. An estimate by the Military Child Education Coalition, using limited research data, estimated that up to 9 percent of military children were home-schooled.
The vast majority of military children attend local public schools, with a much smaller percentage attending Defense Department schools and an even smaller percentage attending private schools or home schooling, the National Military Family Association estimates.
Like home-schooling parents in the general population, military families at home often use online curriculum and materials to enhance instruction. Some hire tutors for subjects like advanced math or foreign languages.
Home schooling, of course, is not for every military family. It requires a parent who can stay at home, and it can create an extra level of stress for that parent if the spouse is deployed, some spouses have told researchers.
For military families and others who do opt to home-school, there’s very little scientifically rigorous research about the long-term social and academic effects, said Joseph Murphy, an education professor at Vanderbilt University who wrote a book about home schooling.
“At this point, I think we would say there’s certainly not the evidence of problems with academics that a lot of people predicted,” Mr. Murphy said. “These kids do O.K., and they may do better than O.K. I just don’t want to overstate given the science of the question.”
Source: NYT October 28, 2013
Lindsay Burchette said she first considered home schooling in 2011 when her husband joined the Navy and they were living in suburban Knoxville, Tenn. Her son, then 8, feared having to start a new school in Pensacola, Fla., when they moved there for her husband’s training and then again within a year when they reached his permanent duty station at Andrews.
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