STORY NO.

39

Home School Partnership

by Cindy

Our plan

It was 2004, and Cindy Fadel's teenage son was off taking advanced classes at a local community college. Finding herself with an excess of free time, Fadel decided to address a problem she'd noticed in the decade-plus that she'd homeschooled her child: the relationship between the home-schooled community and the public school community is wrought with tension. Fadel decided to address the issue by attempting to create a way for the two systems to work together, and the Home School Partnership was born. Fadel found out about the Homelink program in Washington state, a service that specializes in helping bridge the gap between resources available to homeschooled students and publicly schooled ones. Building on some of the ideas of the Homelink program, Fadel began to come up with ideas for a similar program in her home city of Battle Creek, Michigan. Fadel knew that she wanted to work with local public schools to share resources and connect students with opportunities, but she also knew that such connections would be hard to come by if she didn't know how to present the schools with proposals that would be mutually beneficial. The first problem she discovered related to standardized tests, the measuring stick Michigan uses to dole out state funding to public schools. Since home-schooled students don't tend to participate in such tests, schools that provided opportunities for home-schooled students could end up receiving lower average test scores, reducing their funding. When Fadel studied up on Michigan laws, she discovered that if the home-schooled students enrolled as "half-time" students, they wouldn't have to take standardized tests that counted towards school totals. Problem solved. Next Fadel researched ways that schools could help their new half-time students. She discovered that the public schools had access to a variety of high-quality internet education databases, including NovaNet, Plato and Discovery Learning. If schools would share these rarely-used databases with the home-schooled students, it would mean schools would get value for the money they expend on database subscriptions and the students would get extra resources.

What we did

Fadel began to approach local schools, gauging interest in her program. Her local school passed on the idea, so Fadel went to Battle Creek Public, where she immediately found a team of administrators eager to help out. Together with the alternative education department, Fadel got the Home School Partnership off the ground. Six home-schooled students participated in the first year, using NovaNet, Plato and Discovery Learning to supplement their educations with two online classes a piece, qualifying them as "part-time" students according to Michigan law.

Our results

The reaction to the Home School Partnership has been overwhelmingly positive. Since 2004, the number of participants in the program has swelled from six to 157, and parents and students are very happy with the opportunities offered to their kids.

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Minyoung Huh
Kensington, CA