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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.

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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.

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