We homeschool our children. We haven’t always homeschooled them. We started our first two children in Kindergarten at public school, like most people do. We had issues here and there, but told ourselves that homeschooling was a last resort—something to fall back on if we had no other options left.

We started having more and more issues with one child in particular. Our confidence in our local elementary school was quickly declining. And then, we adopted a nine and a half year old girl from Ethiopia. Just getting her registered in public school was a joke. I wanted to start her a grade below her chronological age. The school was not so keen on that at first. Then I wanted her to receive some sort of English as a Second Language (ESL) course. Our elementary school did not have an ESL program. The best they could do for her was put her in a class with a teacher trained to help non-English speaking children. Basically, that meant the teacher had taken a course at some point. Then we had the issues of our daughter’s medical health. They wanted her fully immunized before beginning school. I tried to explain that she was starting from the very beginning with her immunizations, and that there is a schedule that can’t be rushed when getting immunized. I had to sign a paper that she was in the process of being immunized. There was one hassle after another, but we finally reached the point when she was registered for school. That is when the real fun began.

Our daughter, Beth spoke and understood very little English. She had come from a country that spoke, read, and wrote Amharic, a Semitic language. She was very confused in her new environment. She could not communicate. She could not even learn. The teacher’s response was to assign her a buddy. Beth sat next to her buddy all day and copied her schoolwork. She wasn't learning anything, except how to copy things in English. She did not have any one-on-one time with her teacher. She was thrown into the pot and expected to swim. As the weeks passed, I felt more and more concerned for Beth’s education. I felt that she was going to fall through the cracks of the public school system. And, that wasn’t our only problem.

We live in a predominately white town, in a predominately white state. At first, Beth was a novelty. The kids at school enjoyed listening to her speak Amharic and loved the idea of a classmate who had just arrived from Africa. After a few weeks, she started coming home quiet. Then she began to dread going to school. She would sometimes cry as she left for the bus in the mornings. As her English improved, she was able to share stories about how some of the kids at school were treating her. She was made fun of, pushed into desks, taunted, had her hair pulled, etc. She began to hate school.

Between Beth’s problems at school and our son’s, we knew that we had to make a decision. I began researching homeschool and within a few weeks, I had pulled all of our kids from public school, so that they could learn at home. Our children thrived at home. Beth especially began to blossom. It was one of the best decisions we have made for our children.

Continued…