Astronomy Buff

Getting School District Permission to Homeschool Science

by Tony on August 17th, 2007

I’ve written before about my disappointment with the science class my seventh grade son had last year. I was so disappointed that I decided I would teach him science my self this year. I have found Boulder Valley School District science education to be amazingly sub-standard considering the number of scientists and engineers living in the area.

There really doesn’t seem to be a correlation here in Boulder between the population of scientists and the quality of the public school science curriculum.

Anyhoo, the school year has started here in Colorado and I’ve been getting ready to start. I roughly designed my curriculum and put together the few month’s worth of lessons.

While I was doing all that, I had to get permission from the school district. This turned out to be surprisingly easy. I called my son’s school, Monarch K-8, and told them what I wanted to do. My son’s counselor told me that would be fine, that I could pick up my son and his best friend (whom I will also teach) at 2:40pm, the beginning of their last period every day.

The counselor also told me I had to call the main school district office telling them of my intent to take responsibility for my son’s science education. After 10 minutes on the phone, I was done. That was all I needed to do.

I thought about doing this for my older son as well but he started high school this year and that turned out to be a little more complicated. Besides, he wasn’t all that interested in the idea to begin with, as you can imagine, he has a different set of priorities.

An interesting thing happened over the summer as I was developing the curriculum and making plans to teach. Word got out that I was doing this among some of my wife’s writing clients (she teaches and mentors kids in creative writing and often gets paid to homeschool kids in language arts), and they asked if I was willing to take more kids.

I thought about it and decided that I could probably handle up to five kids total without a lot of extra work; teaching five should be about the same amount of work as two.

For that to be true though, they would need to be highly motivated kids. My son and his friend are science fanatics, they want to learn any and everything about science, I have no motivation issues with them. I want this to be fun for me too, so there’s no way I’m spending my time disciplining or motivating a kid that doesn’t want to be there, I wanted self-motivated young scientists.

I told the parents this and I selected three kids I felt would fit the bill. I’m also charging them for the class, if there’s one thing I’ve learned at this stage in my life, it’s that my time is valuable. I told each parent that it would cost $50.00 per session, twice a week. No one flinched, in fact several parents were upset I stopped at five.

So now I have five kids I’ll be homeschooling in science this year. We’ll be meeting on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 3:00 - 4:15pm with homework and other things to do on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday on their own with help from me when they need it.

This schedule will be flexible of course because I travel a lot and we’ll need to tweak it for the kids as the need arises.

I’ll post more on my curriculum and the activities I’ve developed, I think it could help other parents trying to do the same thing.

I’m a little irked that I have to do this, I wish my school district was better, all they seem to care about are passing standardized tests.

Technorati Tags: homeschooling, homeschooling science

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