We are currently in TX where the rules for home school are simple.
Are you a member of the Home School Legal Defense Association? HSLDA is a great resource of readily available information. Including the rules for all the states and form letters to use for notifications, etc. They also provide legal aid if a member family's right to home school is questioned. It happens often enough to be worth the money.
Other states are more of a problem than Texas and if you sit still for a month or so, you seem to fall under the rules for where you are parked-- which can make home school a pain.
Our plan is simply never to park for that long! And follow the laws of whichever state has home base. TX is good for that, but CO is a place we both love. Right now, we are debating pros and cons.
There are a LOT of good home school programs. And quite a few School At Home programs. I home school, I do not school at home.
Home School is when the parent designs or selects each part of the curriculum, or reviews and chooses a program that they then purchase. Timing, pace, and records are kept by the parent or the parent pays a fee to the curriculum provider to keep those records. Either way, it is the responsibility of the parent to see to it that records exist and they have all the freedom to design a curriculum that serves their particular child's needs. We used some materials I purchased, and we did other subjects in the form of home made unit studies and unschooling.
School at Home is when the family simply does the public school program by computer and they fall under the authority of the public school system as to what is covered for school. It is easier, little decision making needed from the parent, and the child earns a public school diploma. The down side is the materials used are not selected by the parent and there is little ability to tailor the materials to the learning style of the student.
I home school because I spent enough time teaching to recognize that my kids, as quirky as I am, would never be served properly by the public systems. So in the past, I had kids who were several grade levels ahead in some subjects and struggling with learning disabilities that kept them behind in other subjects. The local schools could not handle the combination of gifted, high IQ, and LDs in the same kid.
Home School is a godsend for us. I'm looking forward to new challenges with my youngest two. I can already see their learning styles are quite different from their older siblings. I'm already exploring pre-K materials with an eye toward individual needs.
I have friends who loved the School At Home which allowed for adapting to odd parental work schedules and did not require over-worked parents to figure out what to use, they just signed up with their school district, got the passwords for the computers and did school from home at whatever hours best fit their schedules and allowed them to have quality family time in spite of wildly divergent work schedules.
RVing and doing home school will be an interesting situation for us. It could be that we will be in one state at the start of school each year and spend several months in another state in the winter. If we keep moving it will be OK, otherwise... well, this will be an interesting issue to work out.
According to HSLDA if you park for a month you have to change to the local laws for home school. Which would require notification of more than one district each year, and notifying each district as you move--so my guess will be that we simply cannot allow ourselves to stay put too long and thus avoid the paperwork.
Like most home school parents, my standards are very high, I insist on retention of material, mastery learning and steady improvement no matter if they have a learning disability or are gifted in that area, no resting on old laurels! Even my LD kid does well on standardized tests and went to college.
But I didn't get to travel much with my older kids and it is so exciting that we may be able to travel a lot with our younger ones.
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