More Lessons From The Home Schooling Front

[ciroccoj]

You scored as Christian. </td> Christian 85% Buddhist 70% Jewish 70% Anarchist 65% Cult 50% Catholic 50% Religion created with QuizFarm.com

Huh. Wonder why it doesn't have the options "Atheist" or "Agnostic".

Things I Learned At The Homeschooling Meeting Yesterday

• Home schoolers can get discounts at many places because we bring our kids in during 'off-hours'
  
• Ottawa University not only has a dude who, as part of his job, liasons with home schooling kids who wish to attend Ottawa, but they are trying to market themselves as "The University Of Choice" for home schooled kids.
  
• If you are a teenager who has not gone to regular high school, universities want you to show good SAT & [other acronymical test] scores, and hopefully a couple of evaluations that were not done by your mom (eg good marks in a correspondence history course), but that last is not necessary unless you're applying to a specialized or competitive program (eg engineering)
  
• If you never sent your kids to school, you don't have to tell anybody they're home with you.
  
• If you pull your kid out of school, you have to send a letter to the Board telling them so, and a nice man from the Board will contact you to make sure you're following some kind of curriculum and to try and gently coax you to return your kid to school.
  
• Nobody knows why I was not told either of these things, nor why I had never even heard of the nice man. I just filled out the ticky boxes on the forms that came home with the kids at the end of last year ("for staffing purposes, please let us know your plans for next year"). I ticked Justin's [X] Returning Next Year and Daniel's [x] Not Returning. And on the line that said "reason for not returning" I wrote "home schooling."
  
• There are somewhere around 20,000 - 30,000 kids home schooled in Ontario. We think.
  
• In Alberta, the gov can reimburse home schoolers for educational expenses up to $1200, providing you have receipts and are willing to provide the gov with paperwork detailing your curriculum.
  
• In Ontario the gov spends about $7500/year for each student in public school.
  
• Exchange re. playgroups for the little ones:
  Mom 1: I'm out in Orleans. We're the weird ones on our block.
  Mom 2: Me too.
  Mom 3: We're all the weird ones on our blocks.

Comments

[ciroccoj.livejournal.com]

I have no idea how much it costs to educate a child here in Oregon, only that my municipal school district is doing a piss-poor job of it. We have no librarians in any of the schools,
Yeah, the educational system here in Ontario was gutted by ten years' worth of a Conservative government that slashed spending to the bone. Went "back to the basics" and got rid of before and after school programs, full time librarians, field trips, teacher's assistants (especially with learning disabled kids), testing for various learning disabilities (I guess if they weren't going to help them, why even figure out if they needed help - makes sense, in a way), 'extra' (AKA 'enough') textbooks, yadda yadda yadda. We're slowly starting to get back some of what was lost, but it's really sad to see what's there now compared to what was there when I went through public school.