I get quite a few questions about our schooling choice and why we chose this option. I'll cover the details about how our current school works in another post, and just explain how we ended up here. For a long time, we sent our kids to our local public school without really knowing what else was out there. It was an easy choice - I've always been a supporter of public schools and felt like the best way to make sure your school is a good one is to stay involved. We couldn't really afford private school, so that wasn't much of an option. I didn't want to homeschool and have the kids miss out on socialization and extracurricular opportunities. I wanted them to have the experience of going all through school with same group of local kids. We had looked into a few local charter schools and hadn't been all that impressed, and they were not located very near to us.
In spite of all of that, I felt a little trapped in the public school system. I realized pretty quickly that every kid is different, and my two are no exception. It's really hard for any teacher with a classroom full of kids to provide exactly what each of them might need. The monotony of schedule was depressing to me. I'm not a morning person, and getting up at 6:30 am to get the kids off to school every day for 8 years straight was a sobering thought. I tried to supplement what my kids learned at home, but you can only spend so many hours of the day on school work. Even though I was volunteering as many as 400-500 hours a year at the school and PTA, I really didn't feel like I had any part in their education in the classroom.
It became clear early on that my son is not your typical kid. He's highly creative, NOT a people pleaser, and he thinks very much outside the box. Although he's incredibly creative, his favorite subject is science and he's a regular encyclopedia of knowledge about all things science and nature related. School has always been a bit of a challenge because he is so different from the other kids his age. By 2nd grade, he was really struggling with a variety of issues like boredom in the classroom, lack of motivation, difficulty relating to the other kids on their level, and an overall disenchantment with school. Over the next couple years, we watched his love of learning slowly being extinguished. After exhausting our options in the local elementary school to challenge him and push him to work harder, we felt like we had to find a schooling option that would better meet his needs.
When he was in 2nd grade, a fellow parent had recommended Calvert homeschool curriculum to us. We researched it and learned that it cost about $1500 for a year's curriculum. At the time, Calvert was looking for school districts to partner with them and offer a virtual school as a free public school option. They had not yet found a partner in Texas, and so we submitted a letter to our school district asking them to consider this option. They declined. When my son was completing 4th grade, he had already completed 5th grade math. If he stayed in public school, I was going to have to drive him over to the middle school after lunch every day to get the next level of math. We didn't think that would work well for any of us, so we took another look at Calvert. We learned that they had found a partner district in Texas - Texarkana ISD. We now had the option to use the Calvert curriculum for free through the Texarkana ISD Virtual Academy. We decided to try it with him.
After so many years of questioning if we were doing the right thing for our son and wondering what else we could do to make it better for him, this past year with virtual schooling has been the first time since he started preschool that I truly felt like we had made the best possible choice for his education. It has been such a burden lifted to feel that he is exactly where he needs to be for now, and to watch him get excited about learning again. I had concerns about making such a big change, but now I just feel like we have gained our freedom. This shift in attitude is part of what made me decide to travel with the kids - I want to open their eyes to the possibilities in the world, teach them that it's okay to stray from the normal beaten path, and help them see beyond what they already know and are familiar with. It's easy to get caught up in what most people do and expect others to do, but we all have the choice to explore other options. I don't think I'll ever forget that again, and I hope that by sharing some of our experience, we can open more eyes to the possibilities that exist.
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