Facilitation – History Pt. 4: Back to the Basics (Part 33)

Categories: Léo’s Insights 2023-2024, Back to the Basics

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Once private schools were given the right to sponsor home education, yet another new educational phenomenon came into being in Alberta.  Most funded private schools knew little about home education, yet were attracted by the possibility of increased income.  This is when third party contractors with home education expertise came into being, allowing schools to register the home educating without needing to be directly involved.  Home educators now had many more options for enrolling their children, which resulted in spreading the limited numbers across even more schools.

By now, some parents, including ourselves, had come to understand that they had the authority in the education of their children.  School supervision took on a different approach through the use of third party contractors who, wanting to appear more home education friendly, started referring to their home education supervisors as facilitators.  This did not really change anything except that parents felt they were more in control of their children’s education if someone “facilitated” rather than “supervised” or “assessed” to ensure government expectations were being met.

There were already a few of these third party contractors when we created Education Unlimited in 1999.  EU was contracted with a private Christian school for our initial 16 years, then with another for 6 and one more for our last year before we attained our own independent school accreditation in 2022.

Essentially, third party contractors borrowed an accredited school’s authority to enable the enrolment of home educating students, then acted as though they were the school while offering a friendlier service to parents.

Third party contract arrangements eventually became the target of an individual government worker who despised these arrangements and who worked tirelessly to terminate them.  As a consequence, there are virtually none of these agencies left.  Although some of the original names have survived, like Education Unlimited, these agencies have either become schools themselves, been assimilated by existing schools, or have completely vanished.

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