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11 Mar
Should Arkansas Homeschool Laws be Changed?
There has been discussion about changing the current homeschool law in Arkansas. This is driven mostly by the school administrators and District Superintendents. They want to punish those that fail to take the mandated tests in April and they want to prohibit public school children from enrolling in homeschool once the semester begins.
I personally oppose changes to the homeschool law regarding testing and withdraw from public school. The law is clear on what is to occur if a family fails to abide by the mandatory testing law. The problem lies with the local superintendent’s offices being unwilling or unable to properly follow-up on who tested and who did not. The law does not need to change, the enforcement of the law does.
Parents should be allowed to withdraw their children from public school as they see fit. There are situations where a child is being harassed, teased, bullied, or just not adjusting well that require parents to take decisive action and remove a child from a bad situation. Changing the law to something more controlling is denial of parental rights.
There are changes that would be welcomed. I would love to see the notice of intent and waiver forms sent to one central location at the Department of Education’s homeschool. Instead of having each individual school district’s superintendent handling the forms and approving or denying at will, have a central office that knows and understands the homeschool law handle the decision. A centralized system would make life easier for everyone.
11 Mar
Homeschool help workshops for March and April
Homeschool help workshops for March and April
Posted using ShareThis
2 Feb
Update on Lincoln ACE
It is mid-year and I have mixed feelings about the Lincoln ACE online school program. The elementary school has changed the way it is handling conferencing and work samples. Last semester all elementary students in the Lincoln ACE program had monthly conferences with a teacher assigned by K12. At times this assigned teacher was snotty and abrasive to students, she was located in Florida and had no first hand knowledge of how Arkansas homeschools work. Until I contacted the administration at Lincoln ACE all I heard was benchmark, benchmark, benchmark. I thought she was going to faint on the phone when I informed here I did not care about the benchmarks. Now it appears we will have monthly conferences with the administrative assistant at Lincoln ACE. Our first conference is on Wednesday, I’ll post how it goes. Work samples may be only on a quarterly basis. I hope so, sending out monthly samples was a chore. The specifications were vague and the feedback was minimal.
High school is another story. For my 9th grader it was a real challenge to make the switch from traditional school to a virtual school. We had a number of technical issues at the beginning of the year and he got so far behind in his classes that he could not catch up. My 12th grader adjusted better but had issues at first semester finals. K12 had maintenance to perform at the end of the semester and several of the high school classes had finals on the same day as the cutoff. This led to problems with one of the classes when we could not open the final exam. It was in a format that our word processing system had issues converting. By the time the issue was resolved and the file was converted into a format WORD could read the deadline for submitting the test had expired. The end result was a failing grade in the class for the semester.
This semester seems to be going better for all 3 of my students. All of the teachers changed, even the full year courses have diffrent teachers than last semester. We have a couple of field trips to look forward to. So far grades are much better this semester and the technical glitches have been worked out. I finally understand the conveluted K12 system for viewing grades and amount of time spent in each class. The system is not the same for high school and elementary school. There is a third system for foreign languages. K12 should have offered training to the parents prior to the start of school. I am rather computer savvy and it was difficult for me to figure out the system. My biggest complaint is the amount of time I have to spend checking on grades and work. If I was doing this without K12′s system it would be less time intensive.
Keep reading for more updates on the Lincoln ACE online Academy
