Ifyp. (Obviously way different denominators.)
Fwiw she is in a charter now. Again, I’m less worried about the government and more about her being weird.
If I can find a particularly flexible private school might do that. But money does matter. Minimally we’d be talking $1k/month for 12 years = maybe she’d rather have a house.
It’s great that you’re taking a active role in helping her develop. I highly recommend staying involved (and try to find the delicate balance of not becoming a helicopter parent), advocating for her, and more importantly teaching her to advocate for herself and finally being open to other education alternatives.
Thanks. I really do appreciate encouragement, particularly right now, when it feels somewhat futile.
Fit with a particular student is very important. A small school might be great for a child who tends to get lost in the crowd, but might feel cramped and limiting to a more outgoing and competitive child.
Some schools are just better than others, and some schools are just bad, but in practice it is usually better to talk about a school being a good or bad fit for a particular student rather than good or bad in more absolute terms.
I could say that homeschooling went fine until daughter #2 hit 9th grade and then it was bad. We didn’t start from the beginning tho.
If anyone is really interested, I could tell that story, but it doesn’t help with OP’s decision.
I’m interested.
ditto
I know several. Not as many as the other way around since public school is sort of a default for a lot of folks and you wouldn’t put your kids in private school in the first place if you were a fan of public schools.
Usually it’s a kid-specific issue. They sent all their kids to private school and then pull one into public for a particular reason while leaving the others in private schools.
Possibly relevant is that I grew up in a heavily Catholic area with a LOT of Catholic schools that range in quality from exceptional to mediocre. These are mostly Catholic schools I’m talking about, but some that are considered excellent. But a lot aren’t great with learning disabilities.
One case was a gifted child with autism. Catholic school with top reputation for academics basically didn’t believe that a kid who got good grades and wasn’t a behavior problem would need special services.
Overdue homeschooling story:
For reasons relating to older kid, we started homeschooling when they were in 7th & 11th grades. With co-ops and dual enrollments and older kid’s work ethic we got her thru high school. Younger kid did ok in 7th & 8th—got her work done.
When she was in 9th we had co-op for about half her classes. I used an online program for geometry (same as I’d used for algebra) and put together an equine science class for her using a college textbook and counting her barn job & lessons. I forget what else she was supposed to be doing at home.
Mr aj was supposedly supervising her schooling but we were pretty distracted that fall. She got her co-op work done bc there were weekly deadlines. She got her equine science stuff done (even the textbook stuff) bc she liked it. But she got no math done. I felt like the worst parent ever, taking her word that she was on schedule and never actually checking her computer. She also totally neglected another whole class—I just don’t remember what it was.
I was working of course. Hubby was at home & doing co-op stuff. We had a foster kid for several weeks & he was taking the boy to & from school. And our elder kid was in the midst of a major mental breakdown and flunking out of college.
Bottom line is we dropped the ball on younger kids school. We made some adjustments 2nd semester but she still ended up starting over in geometry the next year. I was gonna make her work all summer to finish, but decided she wasn’t really gonna learn geometry that way.
Thankfully some of what she did in 8th grade counted for high school so I was able to write up what we did in 8th & 9th & get her a year of high school credit from the online school she transferred to in 10th grade.
She continued to struggle with completing her work in online school but she had teachers and that helped. Also she lost riding if she got too far behind.
She spent a year after high school working at a barn, then 2 years doing missions stuff and working, met her now husband, and decided to become a pastor. She’s working and doing school online and I don’t have to pay for it (although I will contribute in some ways).
So we crashed and burned as homeschool parents but no permanent damage.
Thanks, I appreciate the story. We have hardly anything going on in our lives, so it would be theoretically easy, but maybe practically difficult because neither of us are… well… particularly nurturing either.
I skimmed a lot of homeschooling stories on reddit, while in general they seemed all over the place, I think falling behind in math was a common issue. Because it can be so boring and hard at the same time. (It is also something I’ve mostly put off teaching my kid, despite having the aptitude.)
I would not have had a problem teaching math if I weren’t working full time. The curriculum did it for me and was pretty good, and I helped with questions, same as traditional school.