For an Increasing Number of Vermonters -
There's No Place Like Homeschool

By Cindy Ellen Hill

"When I was teaching in public schools, I had to say, 'Okay, it's time to stop reading,' even if the kids were totally engrossed in their books, or 'No, you can't do another project on Greek history, because we have to get to these other things we are required to do,'" says Rebecca Yahm, an elementary school teacher who provides homeschooling families with tutoring support and individualized classes through Open Path Homeschooling in Plainfield.

The problem, Yahm says, is that educational institutional structures teach to standards rather than focusing on children's natural enthusiasm for learning. "With No Child Left Behind, the pressure starts at the national level and works its way down. And even the best and most experienced teachers, even aided by tons of enthusiastic parents, will not be able to get around that. It's hard to create authentic, interest-based learning experiences when the focus is on standards."

Kids learn best when they are following their interests, she says. "Mass education is just limited in what it can do. When you are tailoring things just to the kids in your own family, it is so much more naturally evolving and at the right level for your child."

A growing number of Vermont families agree. According to Vermont Department of Education Home Study Consultant Karen Agnew, Vermont had 92 kids enrolled in home study in 1981, a figure which has grown steadily by 100 to 200 new students per year. Today, of about 100,000 school-age students living in Vermont, 2,200 are enrolled in home study. About 90,000 are in public schools, and the rest attend approved private schools. And with a 2006 change in Vermont's home study law that reduces the paperwork difficulties for families who have successfully engaged in homeschooling for two or more years, the number of homeschoolers is destined to keep rising.

Those 2,200 home-study-enrolled children span every corner of the state and participate in 2,200 different approaches to education. Generally, though, the unpaid work of educating children at home falls to the mother, and the homeschool option tends to favor families that can afford to exist on a single income.

It Was Really Nice to be Home

Seventeen-year-old Tirzah Hescock jestingly calls her older sister, Harmony, a 'homeschool dropout'. "It started with band classes, and then my sister got sucked in by the social aspects of high school," Tirzah explains on the clapboard porch of the Elysian Fields Farm in western Addison County. But Tirzah was never tempted by high school.

"Was I missing out on school? What with the two-hour bus rides, silly social circles, and bad food? No!" she says with an infectious laugh. Most of her cousins who lived on surrounding farms were also being homeschooled. "One aspect that kind of made sense was that we're on a farm here, and it was really nice to be here."

Tirzah's mother Kathleen could not agree more. "I couldn't stand to be parted from my girls. I wanted my kids with me," she says. "Harmony went to half-day kindergarten for one year, and I couldn't believe the peer pressure on five-year-olds. She didn't need to be part of that. So when it came time to send her to full-time first grade, I said no. I loved having my kids at home with me. We did so many fun things."

Tirzah's school day included raising her own pigs, letting the cows out in the morning, and feeding the calves. The family also raises chickens and keeps extensive vegetable gardens. Tirzah takes great pride in showing cows, and in her active membership in Rural Vermont, a non-profit organization dedicated to the environmentally sound support of small-scale farming.

"My school day varied from year to year," Tirzah recalls. "When I was younger I had workbooks. I studied the lake for several years," she says, pointing past the main barn to the shores of Lake Champlain. "We went all around the lake and picked up rocks and compared them to a guidebook, and made a big map of where different kinds of rocks were found. And I remember doing a lot of timelines, one on the lake, on Indians, on French history."

Kathleen invented the curriculum as they went along. "We followed what we wanted to do. There are great resources in the community. What people know about local history is just amazing," she says.

Those resources included Tirzah's Aunt Kim who organized groups of homeschoolers for hikes, bartering days, and field trips. "It gave all the parents a chance to get together and compare curriculums and ideas," Tirzah recalls.

Despite having obtained her GED last year shortly after turning 16, Tirzah continues on with the homeschool theater group, supervising young actors and spending the summer writing and blocking a script for next winter's presentation.

When Tirzah's family reached the limits of their math knowledge, they turned to the local Community College of Vermont (CCV) campus. CCV's open admission policy sets no minimum age limit on students.

Homeschooling prepared Tirzah "surprisingly well for college. I felt I fit right in at CCV. There is a variety of ages and interests and that is what you get from homeschooling, so it felt very natural. It was a little more work, but not what I expected it to be."

Tirzah plans on finishing her associate's degree at CCV and then transferring to Green Mountain College--and then, "just maybe, if I can work it out, going on to law school."

God-Centered Learning

Monica Tillas' husband was the drive behind her Barre family's homeschooling decision. "He heard about homeschooling on the radio program Focus on Family, when our girls were about age four and one. I thought he was nuts: my hands were already full raising these girls; I didn't want to teach them, too. But I sent away for some information, and what I got was just a one-page sheet on the advantages of homeschooling. By the time I got done reading the list, I was sold. And by that point, my four-year-old was reading and just a very bright girl, and I didn't want to turn her over to someone else."

As with many Vermont families, the strength of the Tillas family's religious convictions played a large role in their decision to homeschool their children.

"Public schools are not what they used to be," Tillas says. "The emphasis has been taken off of reading, writing, and arithmetic, and teaching morality is just right out the window. By homeschooling, we would be able to control the curriculum, and choose a God-centered program of study."

Those two little girls are now married, with college degrees and medical profession careers, and the Tillases are now homeschooling their three younger children, boys aged 13, 11 and 8. Their Christian Home Education Network group provides social and spiritual support for a group of 20 or so families who meet weekly at a local church in Barre for basketball, board games, and field trips.

Tillas's husband happens to work outside the home as a math teacher - fulfilling a frequently weak curriculum link in many homeschooling households. "I am experiencing 'relearning' as a homeschool mom," Tillas says. "I went farther in math with my daughters than I had in high school. And I was more interested in it and got more out of it than they did. I have thoroughly enjoyed being a big part of my kids' life while they were growing up. I wouldn't trade that for the world. It really made us a closer family. I know what their interests are and who their friends are."

Vicky Shaw, a former public school teacher now homeschooling her children in Swanton, also finds support in a Christian homeschooling group. She supplements her curriculum with a strong dose of joyous faith - both in God and in technology. "We've been blessed that our family has always been on the cutting edge of technological things," she says. "My masters degree at St. Mike's College was on technology in education, and long before I had children myself, I did my masters thesis on supporting homeschooling using the internet."

When her eldest son's Christian school closed, Shaw knew she had the ability to use technological resources for distance learning to support homeschooling. "I just knew it was the right choice for our family. On the social end of things, we do things with the public schools, we have a big church family, we work with volunteer organizations and have done a co-op with other families, arranging field trips and community service projects both our own family and with other families. Now we are part of a highly structured group of over 60 kids that meets regularly."

Shaw has seen how varied homeschooling programs can be. "I can only speak for my own household as every home school is different, reflect[ing] each family and their values. We start around 8 a.m. and end around 2 or 3. For us it's a pretty set structure that works with blocks of time on different subjects with breaks--a snack around 9:30 and bit of break then, and a lunch break, then it's back to work. But the flexibility is wonderful. If the kids are involved in something, they don't have to break off of it."

Shaw started out designing her own curriculum, "But I discovered that there were already people who had invented the wheel," she says. "I didn't have to do it all by myself, and I could stand on their shoulders. I loved working on my own curriculum but it is overwhelmingly time consuming, and there is still all that laundry to do, and time with my husband and other things that are important." Today she selects materials from a variety of Christian curriculum resources, including downloading courses from the Bob Jones University Home Satellite network, and designs a field-trip-based arts curriculum including the Flynn Center's Student Matinee Series and area museums. She turns to talented, older homeschooling students in the Swanton area for music programs, pointing out that homeschooled kids are comfortable teaching from their own talents at an early age.

The greatest obstacle, she says, is the balance of finding enough hours in the day, and enough room for a peaceful environment. "My husband is often amazed. He'll come in in the early morning and the kitchen table is covered with science experiments, then he comes back an hour later and it's piled high with books, then he comes in at lunchtime and the table is cleared off and set for lunch. I have to leave myself enough brainspace, not just physical space."

"Time for myself is another great challenge," Shaw says, "but I have a very supportive husband and I'm blessed to have family nearby as well so I can get that time for myself. It's very important; if we don't get that, it certainly shows up one way or another."

Not Everybody is a Cookie Cut-Out

When Brianna Wilson, now 14, reached fourth grade in the public elementary school in Middlebury, her mother was gravely concerned. "Brianna was behind in her learning, stressed about going to school, even developed a tic. We met with the teachers and tried to change things but got nowhere. We would have preferred to move her to a smaller school but the superintendent wouldn't allow it," says Tammy Wilson, a para-educator who has worked in a number of different public schools assisting behaviorally challenged students.

Brianna didn't qualify for special education; she was simply falling through the cracks of the public school system. "The final straw was in the middle of a fourth grade parent-teacher conference. We realized we didn't want to lose one more year of schooling," Wilson explains. They considered a private school option but again, that would have meant Brianna repeating fourth grade there. "We decided to homeschool."

The family's goal was to return Brianna to public school at the middle school in seventh grade. Their older son, John, had gone through Middlebury's public school system quite successfully, and they didn't want Brianna to miss high school. "It came down to my husband Steve and I saying we couldn't do any worse than what was being done. Not everybody is a cookie cutter in education."

Brianna took the change in stride. "The good part was that school got done fast. I was done with my school work in, like, an hour or an hour and a half in the morning," she says. "But then I'd have nothing to do all day. I was bored."

Wilson admits that she was naive about the social aspects of homeschooling. She'd talked to a number of other homeschooling families, primarily from the church the family then attended, but once they made the decision to homeschool, the support they anticipated was not there. "We found we had to strike out on our own," Tammy says. "So we put Brianna in piano classes, the Frog Hollow Art classes, Sheldon Museum's after-school program for the winter, the Ilsley Library's after-school program. And she had her church activities, Sunday school and the church play."

Brianna struggled a bit academically at first, but made a remarkable turn-around by the time she returned to public school. "It was hard to start being homeschooled because their books were more advanced that I was," she recalls. "But now going back to public school, I was ahead of where they were. The books had a lot more direction to them than the books they were using in elementary school. And in the beginning my mom helped me a lot. Academically, I used to be failing, and now I'm acing everything. Well, most things."

Socially, Brianna looks back at her three homeschooling years as a disadvantage but, like her academic life, one which she has completely turned around now that she's back in school. "Socially, I didn't think homeschooling was a good thing. I was isolated from a lot of things, except for sports. I didn't know how I was going to do going into seventh grade. I didn't know if I'd know anyone or have any friends there. I'm not good at meeting new people. But now I'm basically friends with the whole school.

My teachers helped me a lot," she adds. "I worried if my teachers would be nice, but they were awesome."

Homegrown School Support

As the number and diversity of Vermont homeschoolers grows, so does the variety of resources available to homeschooling families. Rebecca Yahm is just coming back from maternity leave with her first child, daughter Rayna, and in addition to running Open Path, is diving into new work with the Pacem Learning Community, a homeschool center in Montpelier for 10- to 15-year-olds which provides classes and a project room for homeschool students three days a week. Under Vermont Department of Education guidelines, homeschool students can take classes elsewhere as long as 60 percent of the educational program is delivered in the home.

"Pacem means peace in Latin but is also an acronym for Peace, Arts, Community, Environment, and Mindfulness," Yahm explains. "It's an intellectually inspiring community with a lot of student-directed work. It's exciting for me to have colleagues and common visions," Yahm says. That common vision focuses on encouraging creative, responsible citizenship. "In school you learn to stand in line and wait your turn. Some of which is good and necessary, but some of which is just designed to make docile citizens."

Does Yahm plan on homeschooling baby Rayna? "Yes--unless I get involved in an exciting alternative school. She may be the kind of kid who likes to be involved with other kids all day long. There isn't any one approach to education that is good for every child."

Cindy Ellen Hill is a recovering attorney and freelance writer in Middlebury.