For us in NSW (at least) in Australia, we have no middle ground - it's either full-time mainstream attendance, or full-time home-schooling. I do know of cases where a kid needed a partial attendance option and although our SD told me for years that such an option didn't exist at all, they finally suggested it for difficult child 3 for beginning high school. I tore strips off them - high school is not set up for partial attendance in the early years, AND the high school we would have had to use was an hour's drive away from home. No way could he attend partially, but it COULD have been tried while in primary school, five minutes' walk from our home. I still believe they only made the suggestion when they knew it wouldn't be taken up, and only then after strong political pressure.
For our schools, partial attendance is only a very short-term option, such as a child recovering from surgery being eased back into a full school day.
We chose an option called Distance Education, which is still state-based (ie public education) but managed by mail, phone and email. I am not difficult child 3's teacher, I am his supervisor. He has teachers in the city at the school (which is entirely Distance Ed) and who are available on the phone if he has a problem. His work is posted out by his teachers, he does the work (all on written notes and worksheets), I flip through it to make sure he hasn't missed anything, sign it and date it and post it back.
This was originally designed as an education option for kids who live too far away "in the Outback" to get to a regular school. My late father in law and his brothers studied with Distance Education as they lived in the Outback.
But more and more, it's also used for kids who can't attend a normal school, for a wide range of reasons. Some are performers or athletes; some are gypsies. Some are not well. Where the reason is psychological or medical, as in difficult child 3's case, the enrolment has to be renewed every year with a fresh medical certificate. The SD hates it and tried to block difficult child 3's transfer; Dist Ed welcomed him with open arms. SD wouldn't even inform me about this option, but thanks to my part charity work I had heard about it before and got difficult child 1 into this to finish his high schooling.
I tell you this to help you see that there can be other possibilities. I believe you may have access to a computer-based (or Internet-based) school. While we have the home schooling option as well, I chose to not go that way for a number of reasons:
1) I would have to write the curriculum myself, or buy one somewhere.
2) I would have to be regularly inspected by SD to make sure I was doing a decent job; I didn't want to have anything more to do with them than I already had, after the way they treated us.
3) By writing my own curriculum, I would be subject to constant "negotiation" from difficult child 3, while he nagged me to modify something he was struggling with. This way, if he is having trouble doing a particular subject it's not ME he gets angry with. I'm still his facilitator, not his jailer.
We work well as a team, but we had to put strong ground rules in place. Thanks to difficult child 3's regular absences from school over a number of years, we already had these rules in place. The main rule is "school work during school hours". Even if he is sick. If he is too ill to do schoolwork, then clearly he is too ill to do anything other than go to bed and sleep. If he is well enough to be awake and sitting in bed, he's well enough to read a schoolbook or do some schoolwork.
And now for the rule that 'sold' this to difficult child 3 - NO HOMEWORK. We do ALL schoolwork during school hours. If by chance he slips up and obviously slacks off, AND there is work still outstanding, I negotiate (ie bribe, at times) to get him to do SOME work on weekends. But not too often and not on a regular basis. I'm currently re-negotiating school hours with difficult child 3 - we originally matched it to normal high school hours so when he's done he's free to go and play with his friends who live nearby. His friends are all very much younger than him - about five years younger. Kids his age he just can't relate to, except on a superficial level, unless they're talking about computer games.
I've noticed that difficult child 3 works better with an earlier start and earlier finish - he gets little work done after lunch but can knock over a huge amount with one long morning work session. I reckon that by using his time more efficiently, I can give him time off and then negotiate for maybe a homework hour on Saturday mornings, while it's still too early for him to go visiting.
But we work it out between us. This is difficult child 3's education, he has to own it.
If you take this on, there are some things to consider:
1) It will eat into your personal time. Any projects you might have - don't expect that you will have uninterrupted time to work on them. He needs you available, even if he is working on his own. You need to be able to walk past very quietly (ie sneak up) and make sure he's on task. I find that I have to stay with difficult child 3 to get him started, then I check every half hour or so. Getting him started can take time because if he's obsessing about having the correct pen, or a computer game he didn't quite finish, I won't get a thing out of him until he settles. So it saves time to help him get settled without too much nagging.
2) You need to be able to support his learning without him feeling nagged. And something I found - he doesn't value my opinion, nor does he want me to help because then he can't claim the work as his own. Example: last week his geography teacher wanted him to write a list of words and their meanings. He complained that it would take him ages to look them all up in the dictionary, so I offered to read the meanings out to him. He said that unless he did it, it would be cheating. It had to be his teacher telling him that my dictating to him while he typed was perfectly OK, because by typing it out he was learning it - and learning was the task, not already knowing it.
3) This is a GOOD point - you will have more freedom, in some respects - no more being limited to school hours or school terms for a lot of activities. We're about to go on holiday during school term - the schoolwork comes too. We've modified some of it, with teachers' blessings, to incorporate difficult child 3 keeping a photo journal of our trip. I talked about our schedule this morning with difficult child 3 - he will begin schoolwork 1-2 hours earlier each morning (including weekends) and then at about 10 am we will all get into the car and do the tourist thing, with difficult child 3 typing everything in as we go, on the Alphasmart (very portable word processor).
We're going shopping tomorrow morning, during school hours. mother in law has a doctor's appointment and I gave difficult child 3 enough warning so he worked extra hard today to earn the privilege of coming shopping. We will still bring some schoolwork with us (his easier stuff) but I'm not expecting much to get done.
3) Social exposure.
A HUGE argument against home schooling in any form is, "But he will miss out on all that valuable social interaction." This was really worrying me, too, and it almost tipped my decision back to normal school, until I stumbled onto the website of James Williams, a remarkable young man. This high-functioning autistic teenager gave HIS take on "social interaction" and pointed out that the school environment is very artificial - where else will you be assigned to a group of young people all around your age, with a much older authority figure out the front. How normal is this?
Contrast this with a shopping centre, for example, where we encounter a wide range of people of varying ages and abilities. It was an interesting point - difficult child 3 copes better in a more natural public situation, than he ever did in school.
Bullying is far more common in the school grounds and if you ever encounter it out in the real world, it's generally easier to walk away, easier to deal with and there are strict laws governing behaviour as well as legal strategies in place to resolve any conflicts.
And you can manufacture social interaction opportunities as needed - a lot of homeschooling groups organise meetings, get-togethers, study days and so on. You needn't be home-schooling in isolation. And when these groups DO get together, it is a much more 'normal' grouping of supervised children with a number of responsible, parental adults present along with a much wider age range of kids (smaller numbers, too) and a wider range of abilities. Some kids are home-schooled due to physical disability - your child gets the chance to get to know these kids at study days. There will be other kids with similar problems, anxieties etc and I've found friendships like this are very loyal and long-lasting, as well as generally valuable. Far less chance of bullying, far more chance of positive social interaction.
For difficult child 3, mainstream school was a place of horror where he was bullied every day, and not only by other students. He was learning to be afraid; to hit back because it's OK, other kids do it; that whatever he tried to do he would never be valued and would always get punished; and was getting to the "Why should I bother?" stage.
difficult child 3 is now much more relaxed. As a result, his interactions are more natural, he's less impulsive (because he's not so anxious and therefore his brain is freer to think before he speaks or acts) and the flow-on from this is that his interactions are generally much more positive, which reinforces the ongoing success. Out in public people comment on what a well-mannered young man he is. People find it hard to believe that he is autistic, but if we put him back into the school environment then the cracks begin to show again very quickly.
Marg
