Who Should I Register With for Home Education? Choices (Part 4)
Categories: Choices, Léo’s Insights 2022-2023
Have you ever made a bad decision? I certainly have. However, I do believe it is better to take the risk of making a bad decision than not to make any decision at all.
I made a bad decision several years ago while enjoying a bit of warm winter weather in California. I could see the relationship with our associate school at the time was becoming strained, but I decided to wait and see what would happen. Shortly thereafter, our contract with the school was terminated and the school attempted to take over our families.
This put us into a do-or-die situation, as we had no time to apply for our own accreditation. Another school came to our rescue and we continued for another six years, during which time I did nothing toward the establishment our own school. This turned out to be another bad decision as this agency also came to threaten our demise.
Finally, we applied for our own accreditation, but I made yet another mistake. I applied for a charter school without realizing charter schools cannot support home education. This put us into another precarious situation where we needed and eventually succeeded at finding another sponsor school while we again applied for accreditation. Thankfully, we were successful at establishing Education Unlimited Academy as an accredited-funded independent school and we have the ability to sponsor home education programs. Praise the Lord!
Despite having experienced several years of difficulties, we ended up doing okay. However, we could have done better if I had made the right decisions at the right time. For whatever reason, I didn’t.
I tell you this story as an example of what happens to everyone. We either fail to make decisions or we make one too late and/or with too little information. Usually hindsight shows us what we could have done better and usually we see we could have avoided an enormous amount of grief and hassle if we had simply made the right decision based on the right information, at the right time, in the first place.
Choosing to home educate requires having to make further decisions as to how it will be done. Parents can opt to notify only, which is officially recognized as an unsupervised home education program. Knowing what I know about some home school providers, this would be a better choice, but not the best.
Notifying as a school-supervised program is a better choice for many, as it comes with help and funding. However, not everything is as it seems. To demonstrate what I am alluding to, let me go back to our pre-accreditation experience. The leaders of the last school we worked with clearly communicated their true motivation for associating with us: money. We also clearly communicated that we needed a school to bridge us from our desperate situation to possible accreditation. In a way, you can say our relationship was mutual, even if somewhat parasitic.
Our previous two school sponsors talked as though they cared, but clearly demonstrated that they didn’t. Their motivation was also money, which is why both attempted to trick our families into abandoning Education Unlimited and staying with them.
Nothing has changed! I am appalled at what schools are offering parents, especially when it comes to high school. At this level, public programming, which pays the schools upwards of four times the home education allocation, is an easy and lucrative sell. Even if the “expertise” appears to be sound, these agencies will avoid full disclosure. Students and parents are not properly informed of what happens when a child fails to meet the high school accreditation requirements, and if they do happen to successfully complete the high school program, they have really not accomplished much other than doing what everyone else has done. To fail to meet the high school diploma requirements makes the student appear to be a dropout or a failure, a much worse situation than being home educated. All without mentioning the truth which is that students do not need high school accreditation to access post-secondary institutions.
While there is no lack of home education providers offering up the same hash, there is one that advances that parents are better equipped to teach their children than schools. It is the only school that honours parental authority and believes in simplifying processes rather than tricking parents into doing what is best for the school. We are a good choice!
Welcome to Education Unlimited Academy.
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