It’s August, and that means many homeschoolers are getting ready to get back to the books. As a homeschooler, I would have started up our school year in early July, just about the time the weather gets unbearably hot and the beaches are unbearably crowded. I would have started researching new curricula back in May, and waited impatiently for it to arrive box by box throughout June.
But I’m not a homeschooler anymore. This year will look different because all five of my school-aged kids are attending school for the first time in their lives. Instead of boxes of homeschool books, we opened up packages of school uniforms. Instead of spending hours laminating schedules and planning reading lists, I read books just for fun and took my kids to the pool.
This decision to stop homeschooling was a few years in the making. It was a hard decision. Being a homeschool family wasn’t just abut how my kids were educated, it had become my identity. And it wasn’t easy to give up that part of myself. It took the Pandemic Summer of 2020 to finally make me realize that I can’t homeschool anymore.
That summer we started school in July like we always do, but this year things were different… we were fostering a needy toddler, and had a 6-year-old special needs child who couldn’t sit longer than two minutes before getting distracted by a sound or an itch; an 8-year-old with ADHD, severe dyslexia and dys-everything-related-to-learning (along with attachment issues that made trying to teach her incredibly hard on both of us); a 4-year old begging me to teach her to read; a 7th grader, and a high schooler.
Add on to all of that a pandemic which made it impossible to go anywhere fun, constant heat waves, and nearby wildfires that brought pending evacuation orders.
In September we went on a road trip to Idaho to visit friends, fell in love with their town, and learned about a school there that teaches special needs children. So we decided to move and put our kids in the school the following school year. Just like that.
We probably sound a bit crazy when we tell people that we moved just for a school, and on the surface it sure does sound crazy. But we didn’t have any education options in California. I wasn’t able to homeschool my special needs kids independently anymore. The charter school that I homeschooled through didn’t offer any homeschooling help for special needs students. In fact, after going through a several-month evaluation process with our homeschool charter, all they could offer was… sending her to public school. The special education department at our local public school is notoriously terrible.
Public school wasn’t an option for our other children because of the social and spiritual clean-up we would constantly be doing with their exposure in the California schools. Sadly, the local Christian schools didn’t have any learning options for special needs students. (Shouldn’t Christian schools be at the forefront of helping these special kids??)
So here we are in Moscow, Idaho, looking forward to a new school year starting in a few weeks. It is such a relief to know that someone else will be teaching my children this year. It is no longer my job to study my children, figure out their strengths, weaknesses, and learning styles. To track down special curriculum and learning methods to help them learn. And then to figure out how to fit it all into a day, along with a preschooler and toddler.
My children will be taught by people who, just like me, care deeply about education and Christian values. And they are trained in teaching methods for special needs children and in their sensory needs. My girls will be getting one-on-one tutoring for reading. They will be around other kids just like them and other families just like ours. We have met many of the staff members and families at our new school and felt so welcomed by them. I feel amazingly lucky to be in this new community. I’m looking forward to a great year of learning for all my kids!
Autumn's Writing 