Single Mom Joins The Home Schooling Trend

ReviewJournal.com:

Christine Plaisted said she is lucky because she works from home. A telecommuter, she writes permits for oversized-load bearing trucks. Like their mom, her 14- and 12-year-old sons are working from home, taking their classes over the Internet.

When Plaisted worked outside the home in the past, she relied on her mother and sister for help, but the advantage of home schooling is that class time need not take place between 8 a.m. and 3 p.m. on weekdays. There’s always the weekend and weeknights. It’s a flexibility that many people like about home schooling.

Single-parent home schooling “can be done,” Plaisted said. “You just have to be creative.”

Chuck Hurst, executive director of the Home School Foundation based in Virginia, acknowledged that a single-parent home school is “such a difficult road. It takes so much energy to home- school, even where there is another spouse.”

It can also be lonely. Many do it “in the face of families and friends who don’t share their same values,” Hurst said.

Although single parents who home-school are relatively rare, they represent a “small but noticeable trend” as home schooling becomes mainstream and options such as online classes have made the endeavor easier, said Brian Ray, president of the Home School Education Research Institute.

From 1999 to 2003, the number of single-parent households that home-school increased by 7 percent, according to the national statistics. Single-parent households represent about 18 percent of all home-school families.

Because those figures are five years old and home-school support services have grown since then, some believe the numbers are even higher today.

“Single parents are getting more and more common,” said Carl Lucas, the vice chairman of the Nevada Homeschool Network. “They find ways to do it.”