Malika, your views are ones I held for many years - that homeschooling cannot replace the wonderful social advantages of attending a mainstream local school.
Then I got a better perspective on our particular situation and realised I'd been looking through the wrong end of the binoculars. For us.
Basically, when you have a kid who for whatever reason is not coping at school academically, what we are now doing is preferable. And what we are doing sounds very similar to a charter school - it is a government-based (therefore free) correspondence school. There are teachers, there is a physical location, students can (if they want to take up the opportunity) attend the school roughly once a month for "study days" in a particular subject (and at such times get to interact with other kids under careful supervision where needed). We even can go in to the school for a one-on-one lesson. We can telephone teachers any time, we can email them any time and increasingly, the work is available to do online. Historically, the work comes via snail mail and we make sure the kid does it then a parent checks it is done, signs off on it ("student's own work") as a formality and we post it back. The SpEd department at difficult child 3's school is marvellous, I must have been such a pain to them this year with the will-he-won't-he do his HSC exams (and therefore need special provisions to be applied for) but the SpEd has been on the ball, always sounding chirpy and friendly even when I feel if it were me, I'd be wanting to throttle me.
Back when we were first proposing that difficult child 3 needed to transfer to Distance Education, I was actively blocked from this by the district education office. Their reasons for veto - "difficult child 3 is autistic, autistic kids need to be in mainstream in order to receive the social interaction so vital to their development."
I finally stumbled across the website of a young man called James Williams - he gave his personal perspective on the all-important social skills and made me realise - getting bullied at school every day and learning to be reactive, hypersensitive and oppositional is NOT good social interaction, nor is it natural. These kids are already struggling to pick up social stuff, they do NOT pick it up by osmosis, like the rest of the world. If you have a kid who has lived in isolation (as we get in Australia, kids whose families live "out in the donga" thousands of miles form the nearest school) and that kid gets an opportunity to go to a mainstream school (family moves to the city; sends kid to boarding school) then there will be an adjustment period, but a 'normal' kid will pick up the social stuff quickly just by being around others. But an autistic or Aspie kid, even one who has been socialised from very young (as difficult child 3 was; as all my kids were) will still struggle.
Think about what is normal for a person. We spend most of our lives as adults, interacting with other people as adults. When in our lives, apart from school, will we be expected to fit in with a group of children the same age as us, in an environment where we sit together all day under the supervision of one adult whose job it is to tell us what to do? Occupational Therapist (OT) even in a typing pool, is it quite like this. School is an artificial environment, and while learning to fit in at school can be valuable for a 'normal' kid, it is just one more useless thing to learn, for an autistic or Aspie. Of course they need to learn social skills, but school social skills, for autistics, do not help them learn adult skills later on. What works best is for the kids to learn adult skills from the beginning. And for a lot of them, it is how they NEED to learn their social interactions.
Absence of Theory of Mind has meant, for difficult child 3, that he does not distinguish between children and adults. This is despite intense work with him in mainstream, both at school and at home. With autistic kids, with ANY kind of difficult child, if they are not able to do a certain task or learn a certain way, they will not respond positively to any attempts to force the issue. And for difficult child 3, mainstream was forcing this issue to intolerable levels. Some autistics will cope with this; some will not. It is very individual.
So what happened when we made the change?
First I'll tell you about difficult child 1. We did this first with him. He was in his final year of school and failing. Mainstream. Socially, he had his friends (the weird kids) but academically, his ability to stay focussed on schoolwork and pick it up the way it was presented (mostly verbally, in a distracting environment) meant he was not hearing anything. He would therefore come home from school with piles of homework - all the work he had been unable to do that day at school. He would then sit at home into the evening and the night, struggling with the work as his ADHD medications had worn off. He was permanently grounded due to lack of homework being done. "You can go to your friend's place when your homework is done" meant that he never got to go to his friend's house.
We made the change. His mainstream SpEd was also his English teacher and a former Distance Ed staffer. She liaised with Distance Ed English department to help pull him through his English HSC exam that year. We dropped half his subjects and he worked hard on what was left. He had a lot of one-on-one lessons and they got him through. He then had to do the remaining half of the HSC, over the next two years.
What about social stuff? Well, now he was working on his schoolwork at home, teachers on call over the phone (I had to make the phone calls, he could not initiate a phone call to save his life) and all DURING SCHOOL HOURS. He was getting the work done. No more homework - it was ALL homework, and all getting done while he had his medications on board. So socially, difficult child 1 would work on school stuff all day and when school hours finished, he had got his work done. Time to play. Neighbourhood kids would drop in on their way home from school to find difficult child 1 ready to play a computer game with them, ready to go visit, ready for anything.
So socially, things improved out of sight. Meanwhile he kept up his friendship with "the weird kids" from mainstream. They are all still good friends 10 years later.
difficult child 3 - he spent a lot of time home with me anyway, because school was either not coping and sending him home, or difficult child 3 was vomiting at school (undiagnosed mystery illness, turned out to be severe anxiety). It was unpredictable; I cancelled many medical appointments and other stuff I was involved in, because I would get an urgent call to collect my child. I learned to keep him home if I had a specialist appointment, bring the kid with me. I was packing educational materials I had bought for this sort of situation. Meanwhile I was fighting the district education people who insisted difficult child 3 could not be in Distance Ed.
What we found - difficult child 3, when he came out with me (doctors, shopping, meetings etc) he learned to interact with a wider range of humanity. He talked to shopkeepers. He took himself around to his favourite shops and window-shopped for what he wanted. He asked for help from shopkeepers. "Can you price-match this product for me?" I kid you not, it was amazing. When shopping I would set him a task - "go get these items on the shopping list. Try to choose the most economical size or brand." As a result, he got some practical mental arithmetic lessons (we now have unit pricing - didn't back then).
Basically, when we switched away from mainstream, both boys improved their social skills. It took difficult child 3 a few years to stop being dangerously reactive to other people, he still can be prickly with husband. But he unlearned all the bad stuff from mainstream, while in my care and supervision. I was on the spot to help him learn the adult way to interact. All the lessons we had tried to teach him in mainstream began to bear fruit - "don't hit back. Don't start anything. Walk away. Tell someone. Ask for help."
My boys learned to interact as adults, with adults. Still a learning curve with difficult child 3, but he has a better understanding now of the broader spectrum of humanity. In school you sit with kids your age, you play with kids your age (or get ignored by them). You deal with their immaturities and pettiness. But when you interact with adults, it is safer. You learn the variety, you learn to adapt your own responses according to the situation. But you don't have to deal with the extreme nastiness that kids are capable of, especially to someone who can't understand it well enough to survive it.
I'm not saying this is the best way for all kids. If a kid can handle mainstream, it is one of the best ways to learn. But if a kid is not coping, all the usual arguments against any form of home schooling just do not apply.
We need to change our thinking on this and recognise that for some kids, learning adult skills is actually the best shortcut. And home schooling can be socially enriching!
Marg
