ReviewJournal.com - News - SCHOOL OF ONE: More teach at home

PRINT THIS Popular

Jul. 05, 2008
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

SCHOOL OF ONE: More teach at home

Single mom joins growing trend as home schooling's stigma fades

By JAMES HAUG
REVIEW-JOURNAL

Home-schooler Logan Swanke, 12, center, conducts a science experiment as his mom, Chrissy, sister Abbie, 4, and friend Andrew Dellos, 12, watch Wednesday in their Las Vegas home. Chrissy Swanke, a single mom who works at home, also schools her son at home.
Photos by K.M. Cannon.

Logan Swanke reads about a science experiment in a magazine.

When her 12-year-old son, Logan, was struggling to understand fractions, Chrissy Swanke ordered an unsliced pizza and demonstrated the meaning of one-eighth and one-fourth by cutting sections from the pie.

Arithmetic became the dinner-time discussion, Swanke recalled from her home.

Share & Save

What is this?

Most Popular Stories

NORM: Penthouse wants piece of the Strip

RAMPAGE ENDS IN SUICIDE: Man runs amok in Las Vegas

ROBBERY-HOMICIDE CASE: Juror sent flirtatious messages

Father mourns his daughter

NORM: 'Joe the Plumber' too booked for LV

Judge asks court to release son arrested after crash that killed girl

NORM: Strip club owners, 'Vinny' part ways

Anger over cuts reaches fever pitch

Working beneath Lake Las Vegas

DISCIPLINE COMMISSION: Halverson removed from bench

"That's the downside of home schooling," said the Las Vegas mom. "They never get away from it."

As a single mom, Swanke is half of the usual number of parents who educate their children at home. According to the U.S. Department of Education, home-school children are 80 percent more likely than public school children to have two parents at home.

Although single parents who home-school are relatively rare, they represent a "small but noticeable trend" as home schooling becomes mainstream and options such as online classes have made the endeavor easier, said Brian Ray, president of the Home School Education Research Institute.

From 1999 to 2003, the number of single-parent households that home-school increased by 7 percent, according to the national statistics. Single-parent households represent about 18 percent of all home-school families.

Because those figures are five years old and home-school support services have grown since then, some believe the numbers are even higher today.

"Single parents are getting more and more common," said Carl Lucas, the vice chairman of the Nevada Homeschool Network. "They find ways to do it."

Lucas is a single parent himself, educating his 17-year-old son, Arie, at their home on a cattle ranch north of Reno.

Single parents show a lot of interest in home schooling, said Laura Siegel, an officer with the Nevada Homeschool Network. "It's one of the most popular questions I get."

Siegel said Las Vegas might be more conducive to single-parent home schooling than most cities because of the flexible work schedules.

"There's a lot of shift work here," she said.

Christine Plaisted said she is lucky because she works from home. A telecommuter, she writes permits for oversized-load bearing trucks. Like their mom, her 14- and 12-year-old sons are working from home, taking their classes over the Internet.

When Plaisted worked outside the home in the past, she relied on her mother and sister for help, but the advantage of home schooling is that class time need not take place between 8 a.m. and 3 p.m. on weekdays. There's always the weekend and weeknights. It's a flexibility that many people like about home schooling.

Single-parent home schooling "can be done," Plaisted said. "You just have to be creative."

Chuck Hurst, executive director of the Home School Foundation based in Virginia, acknowledged that a single-parent home school is "such a difficult road. It takes so much energy to home- school, even where there is another spouse."

It can also be lonely. Many do it "in the face of families and friends who don't share their same values," Hurst said.

Swanke said neither her son's father nor his paternal grandparents are very enthusiastic about home schooling, even though her ex was raised in a North Dakota town with fewer than 200 people and his teacher lived down the street.

"So he was, effectively, home-schooled himself," Swanke said.

Home schooling has been beneficial to their joint-custody arrangement, since Logan can visit his father in North Dakota for a month at a time without running afoul of school attendance requirements.

Because of child support, Swanke doesn't need to work outside the home but said she makes a lot of sacrifices.

"We don't go out to movies, buy a lot of new clothes or eat out," she said.

The Home School Foundation has set up scholarship programs for single parents as well as for widows and widowers. The grants, which are awarded on a need basis, are used for instruction and family emergencies. Because of the donor's request, however, the grants for single parents are limited to Christians.

Ray, the president of the Home School Education Research Institute, said scholarship programs for home-schoolers "didn't even exist 10 years ago." Home schooling is becoming more socially acceptable as "home-schoolers win spelling bees and get accepted into Harvard," he added.

There's much less stigma for parents who want to home-school.

"I would say the adult peer pressure for being different is lessening," Ray said.

He said children from single-parent home schools are performing just as well academically as their peers in two-parent households.

Frank Schnorbus, chairman of the Nevada Homeschool Network, noted that dissatisfaction with public schools has become the most common reason for home schooling, surpassing the desire to have a religious curriculum.

He said Nevada has about 4,000 home-schooled children, with 3,000 in Clark County.

Swanke became a home-school parent because she was concerned about overcrowding in the public school system. Logan was struggling with reading. Teachers were pressuring her to hold her son back a grade.

"I didn't want to stigmatize him," she said.

Since Logan left public school four years ago, he has tested at high school levels for reading and math.

"He is brilliant at math," Swanke said. "He has a very engineer-oriented but artsy mind."

Plaisted chose home schooling because she didn't want the "20 kids in a classroom" to have more influence over her kids than she did.

Plaisted, a self-described pagan who blogs about home schooling and mystic experiences on the Internet, said the stereotype that home-school parents are Christian fundamentalists is "very dated." Home schooling has "branched out far and wide," she said.

Contact reporter James Haug at jhaug @reviewjournal.com or 702-383-4686.

Leave Your Comment	18 Reader Comments
Terms & Conditions The following comments are provided by readers and are the sole responsiblity of the authors. The reviewjournal.com does not review comments before publication nor guarantee their accuracy. By publishing a comment here you agree to abide by the comment policy. If you see a comment that violates the policy, please notify the web editor. Some comments may not display immediately due to an automatic filter. These comments will be reviewed within 48 hours. Please do not submit a comment more than once.
Please enter your name Name: Please enter your email Email: Please enter a comment COMMENTS : (word count limit is 300) You have reached the maximum number of words allowed Current Word Count: mammato4boys wrote on July 07, 2008 02:13 AM: Great article. I would really like to know her blog address. barry morse wrote on July 06, 2008 10:19 AM: FREE WRITING PROGRAM FOR THE HOME SCHOOLED www.theeasyessay.com is a free site that can teach almost anyone how to organize an essay in 5 min. and is ideal for SAT, ACT, FCAT or essay exams, reports, or in any situation where you need to logically prove an idea. M wrote on July 05, 2008 09:40 PM: The socialism argument is flimsy at best. http://homeschooling.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?zi=1/XJ/Ya&sdn=homeschooling&cdn=education&tm=33&f=00&tt=14&bt=0&bts=1&zu=http%3A//www.homeeducator.com/FamilyTimes/articles/10-1article1.htm Many homeschoolers have play days, park days, ice skating days, P.E. days, with other homeschoolers, and parental supervision. I'm not religious and I have homeschooled my 16 year old daughter since she was in 4th grade. I will admit that my daughter has a difficult time dealing with kids her own age who only want to talk about boys (2 of her friends from grade school were pregnant by 15), the latest fashion, what party will be the best to attend this weekend, and who is on the "D" list, and who is on the "A" list this week. Instead of being in a classroom where she is spoon fed an education, she has her high school curriculum that she has to Google to find the answers, and decide what's fact and what's not and will know if she made the right choice when she gets her test results from some unknown teacher that she mails her tests to. She volunteers approximately 20 hours a week. She not only listens to the people she's around (not just us, but also while volunteering), she can debate facts with them, current events, politics. She blogs with people around the world and debates American issues with them. I'm glad I yanked her from the public education system. Every time I meet an older volunteer (30 to 80) and they say you're "x" mother, your daughter is such a delight and incredibly smart. Is she "smart" education wise, I couldn't tell you ... but I have met so many people who are incredibly impressed by the fact that she knows what is going, knows her facts, can communicate her opinions in an intelligent way, etc. I'm glad I yanked her. middleroader12 wrote on July 05, 2008 06:38 PM: Mama Bear: Carolyn Goodman's school has become an elitist's-only classroom, giving new-money Vegans bragging rights: "MY kid goes to The Meadows School" but after 12 years of $10,000-$15,000 tuition, plus the pass-the-hat fundraisers, most of the kids don't scholarship into college. Another $50,000 - $100,000 for college and after all that? STILL NO JOB! Isn't that what an education is ultimately supposed to do? Create functioning, self-supporting, responsible citizens? Our education system has certainly contributed to the mortgage mess: people that can't do simple math sufficient to understand adjustable-rate mortgages or debt/equity ratios, or even balance their bank accounts. It has created the Entitlement Generation, the thinking that everybody is "entitled" to a $400,000 mortgage for a $500 monthly payment, a new car in the driveway, and all the latest electronic gadgets. Oh, and PRIVATE schools aren't private. They just aren't GOVERNMENT schools, supported by the taxpayers. If the homeschoolers lack the so-called "social skills" of most kids these days (skanky dress, bullying, materialistic, promiscuous, entitlement-minded) I'll hire a home-schooled kid before a government-school educated kid any day. Mama Bear wrote on July 05, 2008 06:11 PM: "Carl G" ~~ your type of attitude is the reason that there are more and more PRIVATE schools being established to allow children to gain a real education that understands the entire world in which they live - Christian, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, etc. Get some insight before you ever write on a blog again. The world was created by one God. End of story. Okay, "education" - your intentions are admirable! But let your wife teach the grammer and punctuation, and you step up and be the good guy that promotes her. Yay! You rock! But for my daughter and her friends who spend too much time volunteering in the schools and supporting the homework Nazis at distinguished schools, I think they should agree upon home schooling with a co-op angle. The mom's are successful and educated, the dad's are casino executives, and each of the parents (moms and dads) have strong aptitudes in many academic disciplines. Maybe Las Vegas needs to take another look at professional home schooling. Either that, or pool their resources and start yet another private school. It worked for Carolyn Goodman. And, she is nobody's fool! jnlv wrote on July 05, 2008 05:25 PM: LOL- my daughter asked about homeschooling, to which I replied what it was, she then got this strange look on her face, so I quickly responded.. "Honey you know I would suck at it, so we can't do that..." Her reply was a quick-witted, "Yeah you would!" I love that kid!! To those who can and do a good job, more power to you! To the rest of us, well - I'm happy to have a great, smart kid with a fabulous sense of humor who seems to be doing just fine in the public school system. Bo Ring wrote on July 05, 2008 05:14 PM: Zzzzzzz...... another great story by the RJ special ed wrote on July 05, 2008 02:43 PM: Some of the most socially inept people I know were home schooled. They may be able to recite the Declaration of Independence by heart but they have no common sense or social skills. Education is not just sending your kids to school or bottling up a bunch of facts at home and spitting them out at the kids. Parents need to be much more involved in their kids' education and not treat schools like tax-funded daycare. If the parents supplement at home what their kids learn in school, their kids will most likely grow up to be educated and have the social skills required to make it in the real world. education wrote on July 05, 2008 01:02 PM: No my dear freind brian i will not be teaching my little ones. That jobs is for the wife who has an english degree. I will stick to my profesion which is writting code and streamlining geodatabases.I went to school to support the fam, she went to school to teach the kids. If i were to teach my kids they would know nothing but sports and computers :o) State worker wrote on July 05, 2008 11:12 AM: GOD,GOD,GOD,GOD.Finally,that feels sooo good. Read All Comments