Jena, I assume SD means School District.
For us, the choice was something I had been pushing for, for some years. But our SD was actively blocking it. In our case in NSW, Australia, we have the choice to home-school, or in special cases we have Distance Education. I knew about Distance Ed although it is not talked about much; the Dept of Ed can't afford it becoming too well-used because it IS expensive for the government, since it is labour-intensive but government subsidised.
I think your rules for home schooling are similar to ours - any parent can choose to home school their child, no reasons needed. But for us, if you choose to home-school, you have to be able to prove that your child is getting an education equivalent at least to what they would get in school. You can't pull your kid out of school and say, "We're home-schooing form now on," then have your kid working out in the fields or down the coal mines, with no access to an education. Home schooling parents have to submit a program and outcomes to Dept of Ed.
But Distance Education - it is a school with teachers, with a principal, with students. But the students do their work remotely, either on paper or via email (or similar). It's also not available on demand, you have to qualify. In order to qualify for Distance Education, the student needs one or more of the following:
history of bullying
school phobia
school avoidance
physical illness
physical distance (ie "School of the Air" which is a specialist Distance Ed school for kids living in the outback)
inability to attend a mainstream school due to other timetabling issues. This last category is for the vocational students. These are the potential elite sportspersons, the dancers, the singers, the circus kids. Some of these are private fee-payers - unlike kids like difficult child 3 who meet the above criteria and therefore qualify for state enrolment, anyone can choose to pay the full fee and enrol anyway, usually attached to a dance school or sports academy. They pay thousands in fees, while we might pay $100 a year.
So to all intents and purposes, difficult child 3 is home-schooled. But I don't have to provide the schoolwork. He has teachers he can email or telephone. He even has a SpEd teacher!
We've been doing this since he was in 6th grade. We had a fight on our hands with SD to allow the Distance Enrolment, even though he met all the criteria. The SD argued that difficult child 3, being autistic, had to stay in mainstream in order to have social interaction, especially vital in autism. They ignored the fact that any social contact in mainstream was negative and damaging. No contact is better than bad contact.
As I said, I'd been fighting for this for years. It was joining this site that gave me the background, the added resources and the confidence to win this battle. One site which helped me a great deal, especially with answering all the "But what about his social interactions?" arguments (and there were a lot of them, constantly, all seeming to try to undermine our choice) was the website of James Williams. The content of this website changes a lot, but what I read back then were the writings of a teenager with autism (or Asperger's) who was pointing out, from his own point of view, that social interaction at school is not what it is cracked up to be and really doesn't do that much towards equipping our kids to learn the social skills they will use later in life as adults.
And this is what we in fact did find - when first difficult child 1, then difficult child 3, started Distance Education, their social interaction IMPROVED. difficult child 1's case - he was in his final years of high school. In fact, he was due to complete his high schooling within a few months (only we knew if he stayed where he was, he was going to fail everything). difficult child 1 would spend all day at school then come home with a mountain of work to do - all the work he had not been able to complete in class. And he had to then do this work in the evening, with medications worn off and his ability to concentrate out the window. He spent his weekends trying to catch up on schoolwork as well. So there he was, a mainstream student, with no friends, no social visits, little decent social interaction. Even at school, his friends were the weird kids, the nut jobs. The had cases that all the 'normal' kids avoided. So at school, difficult child 1 did not have normal social interaction anyway.
Then we pulled him out and started Distance Education. Because he was over 16, we did not have the same battle. But we found that difficult child 1's schoolwork wads all done at home, in an environment we could control and with fewer distractions. He worked much more effectively, and this mean all his schoolwork got done during school hours.When the other kids were getting home form school. difficult child 1 had finished his work and was free to go visit friends. He had a reputation around town as being good for computer games, so there were a few kids who would drop in on their walk home from school, to invite themselves to our place for a game, or invite difficult child 1 there. He had MORE social interaction as a correspondence student, than when he was in mainstream! Plus he was doing better with his schoolwork!
Fast-forward to difficult child 3 and the problems we were having with him. At school in mainstream, he would spent free time (lunch and recess) walking around the playground. Round and around. Walking along the white line that marked the edge of the basketball court. He had no friends who would play with him regularly, he was a loner. I had organised one afternoon a week (later, lunchtimes) to teach chess to the kids at the school. There were tournaments one day a week and difficult child 3 was generally on the team. Or along with us anyway. These kids were all socially 'normal' and difficult child 3 increasingly was not. It was ongoing battles getting worse and worse, to teach difficult child 3 to not hit back, to not get defensive, to learn to walk away. There are rules in society and when we went out in public in general, difficult child 3 was pretty good at those rules. But school was different, a battleground for him. At school he was a captive who had to endure unpleasant social situations often handled badly by the adults involved. I was not there to try to teach, supervise and control the interactions.
So when we pulled him out, a lot of flak was thrown our way about "He needs social interaction; how will you meet his needs if he's learning at home?" Frankly, by then I had had enough of mainstream and said, "I don't know; but it's got to be better for him than what he's had."
What I found - I need to go out now and then, to see doctors. To do shopping. To attend meetings. Correspondence also means "the kid is portable". The very first thing we did, the first week of correspondence, was take a holiday in Tasmania. difficult child 3 had a book he had to read, he had Maths worksheets to work through, he had a travel journal to write. So we would spend about two hours each morning, beginning at breakfast time, working on his Maths. When he had done enough, we would load up the car with difficult child 3's laptop, the digital camera and the family, and go out for the day. difficult child 3 took photos and also made notes on the laptop about where we were, what we were seeing and what the significance of it was. Example - we were driving through the Huon Valley. "What is the main crop of the Huon Valley?"
difficult child 3: "I don't know."
Us: "Look out the window. Better still - let's stop the car. Get out. Go stand under that tree. Look at the orchard. What is growing on that tree?"
difficult child 3: "Apples."
Or we would stop at a roadside stall and buy apples. There is nothing like having a bite of an apple that tastes better than any apple you've ever eaten, to really help you understand why Tasmania is called the Apple Isle.
difficult child 3 has often come shopping with me. When he does, I often send him to get this or that from the aisles. A good Maths lesson that also helps him in life can be, "We need baked beans. Go find the most economical brand and size of baked beans." He interacts with the shopkeepers, he interacts with other customers. I would often find difficult child 3 waiting outside a store for me, engaged in animated conversation with a grandmotherly type.
At school, socially it is an artificial environment. It's all kids, not well supervised to ensure sufficiently appropriate behaviour at all times, and the adults there often are seen by kids as adversarial. It is stressful for a lot of kids, and the social skills learned, that social situation, is not one that we as adults ever have to deal with again.
Outside school during the school day, a child is exposed to a more normal range of humanity, as people carry on with their lives and doing what they do to perform their function. It's not society in waiting, it's not society as we try to learn to practice it, it is society as it is lived. Humanity. This is what we have to learn to live with and there is no time like the present to begin to learn it. But a child who is under your parental control in this, is a child who is more able to leave if he is not coping. How often do we say here, "If my child throws a tantrum at the mall, we leave."? As our difficult children get practice living life and being part of normal household function, they also learn to walk away when they need to, because they CAN. Unlike school.
If you feel your child needs more social interaction than they are currently getting, you can provide this. But do not think necessarily it has to involve other children. Yes, your child needs time to be a kid too. But sometimes much younger kids are the way to go, especially if your child is socially immature. Or older ones who are more mature and able to mentor a younger difficult child more effectively than peers who may choose to bully. But make sure whatever it is, you stay connected in order to assist your child to leave if he/she feels it's all too much.
Here is a list of what we have done, to provide more social interaction for our boys:
1) We enrolled him in an extracurricular class or group. Sports, drama. Chess club. Other kids the same age also involved, lots of chance to interact socially with peers. What I found - other kids are also learning how to behave and also get it wrong. When your difficult child sees other kids get it wrong, your child learns the wrong way to behave. Often your child may not handle the experience well especially if in return they add to the inappropriate behaviour. This is not always as successful as you would think. To reduce the problems, I always stayed nearby to be on call and to step in if I needed.
2) Shopping. I've already discussed this, in this thread and others.
3) Travel, holidays. We go to new places, we do different things, we study an area, we eat different foods, we get the child to write a report of some form and to take photos. We meet new people, we talk to them, we ask them about themselves and about the area. It is all good social interaction. We take tours to places, around places and ask questions. We learn about different cultures. It has been very useful indeed to teach cultural diversity to the difficult children as well as to teach tolerance. Not just racial tolerance, but tolerance of anything challenging (such as change, or something new).
4) Special one-off "excursions" with other home-school friends. We've done this a few times - A friend home-schooled her boys for a few years because she wanted to. She's a laid-back hippy who I think thought her boys would learn by osmosis. I knew difficult child 3 liked the hands-on approach especially to the environment, and we live in a perfect place for such a lesson, so I invited my friend and her boys (younger than difficult child 3) to come on an all-day local excursion. I did a bit of research first and made notes for her boys (also notes for me, to remind me!). It took me all of half an hour the night before - easy. We then began at the local mangrove swamp and just walked around it. Her boys asked questions. difficult child 3 answered what he could (consolidating his knowledge as well as getting him to instruct younger kids). I answered the rest. When WE felt the kids had learned as much as they could, we got in the car and drove to the next stop - rainforest. Along the way we drove through several other different forest types and talked about it as we drove. If the boys asked, we stopped to look at something more closely. We explored the rainforest and the stream (upper reaches of our river that floods us in occasionally!). The boys especially noted the contrast between the mangroves and the rainforest. From there we drove further south to the sandstone cliffs above Wollongong. We discussed erosion, especially the way sandstone erodes and falls away in vertical blocks. We showed the kids the new bridge that had to be built offshore, because the old road was dangerous from falling rocks. We stopped for lunch at the beach, then kept going. We finished up on a rock platform, looking at the various sea creatures that live there and the way water erodes the rock. There were fossils in the nearby cliff, and coal. We drove past several coal mines and further south we could see the steelworks. it was one huge all-day lesson and the boys were al helping one another learn by experiencing it. It was an opportunity we (the parents) made, and we all had a wonderful day.
Easy to do. If you think about it, how many places of interest are there, within an hour's drive of where you live? How many of them have you actually been to? When you go on holidays, do you go looking at all the sights in the holiday area? Then why do we not do it in our home range?
Whenever we leave the sanctuary of home, we meet other people. This provides valuable social opportunities, but brief and controllable. Even negative experiences can be turned to advantage - difficult child 3 has seen some bad behaviour from adults we encounter, but he then sees how we handle it, and thereby learns the best way himself to cope in that situation.
A very simple example - I used to go to a weekly writing group. My son used to come along too and would sit in the corner with his worksheets and work. When we finished our writing class, we would all go to a nearby cafe for lunch. difficult child would come too (originally difficult child 1, then difficult child 3 in his turn) and order something he as prepared to eat. He had to display good table eating manners as well as good dinner-table social manners (ie not talking about anything grotty or squishy). He had to learn to listen to the ebb and flow of conversation and if he wanted to say something, he had to learn how to insert himself into the conversation. This is a surprisingly difficult skill for a lot of difficult children, and the weekly cafe was good practice and good exposure.
If your child is doing better studying at home, this is not surprising. A lot of kids do better. But there are new skills they need to acquire, to make this work. Self-discipline. Self-focus (when it comes to learning to identify your own weak areas, and deliberately zoom in on them to fix them). Along the way, social interaction still happens. You can increase the amount quite easily if you feel it's needed.
One of the most socially astute young people I know, is SIL2. And he was home-schooled. Yet he is able to insert himself into any group of people holding a conversation, and apparently feel at ease. He is especially good with troubled teens who otherwise can be rude or belligerent. He is studying to be a youth worker and I think will be brilliant.
There are a lot of scary propaganda stories about the perils of "social starvation" which is seen as almost inevitable for home-schoold kids, to the point where we as the parents are made to feel as if we are neglectful and abusive parents for having chosen this route. However, have no fear - it's all scaremongering and misinformation by people who are merely mouthing the party line, generally put about by SDs who do not like to let student numbers dangerously drop.
Here is the website for James Williams.
http://www.jamesmw.com/
I found his writing so helpful for us, and so empowering, that I wrote to him and thanked him. I haven't read his work for a while, there appears to be a lot of new stuff there which I need to catch up on. But I think an autistic young man who is sufficiently socially skilled to be able to go out and address public conferences, is a very good ad for home schooling, and also clear demonstration that concerns about social starvation are greatly over-rated!
Marg
