Teddy Dean, left, and his sister Bitsy spend a fall afternoon riding their bicycles. Staying home with the kids is a “huge” financial hardship but “a sacrifice I’m willing to make,” their mother said. (Marvin Joseph - The Wasington Post)

By Nurith C. Aizenman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, November 8, 2001; Page HO12

When Susan Kaczmarek first moved to Columbia, she was horrified to learn that one of her neighbors taught her children at home.

"I thought, how are these kids going to learn to socialize? How are they going to get a good education?" she recalled. "They're going to grow up being outcasts and have the stigma of home-schooling attached to them for the rest of their lives."

What a difference six years makes: Now Kaczmarek has decided to home-school her 4-year-old son, Connor. And she is just the latest to join a decade-long trend that has seen the number of children being home-schooled in Howard more than quintuple, from 174 to nearly 1,000.

Once a tiny group, home-schooled children now comprise 2 percent of the county's student population. Their growth reflectsa statewide pattern. The number of home-schoolers in Maryland has increased sevenfold since 1990.

Yet the prevalence of home-schooling is particularly striking in Howard, considering how high the county's public schools regularly rank on state exams. Like many parents who home-school, Kaczmarek is unimpressed by test scores.

"I see my older children coming home bored," Kaczmarek said. Her daughter attends Harper's Choice Middle School, and her older son goes to Wilde Lake High School. The two are too attached to their friends to give up public school, Kaczmarek said. But it's not too late for Connor.

"I want him to have a love of learning for the rest of his life, and I think this is the way," she said. "We can put together a curriculum based on his interests. We can do reading about dinosaurs, history with dinosaurs, math with dinosaurs. And when he's not interested in dinosaurs anymore, we can change it."

Lisa Dean, a former attorney and Columbia resident, said she was home-schooling her 6-year-old daughter and 4-year-old sonto keep her family close-knit. "We enjoy our kids so much that we wanted the focus of our and their lives to be our family," she said.

Home-schooling certainly seems to have had this effect on 11-year-old Aubrey Myers, of Ellicott City. Aubrey has never attended a traditional school. "I like learning at home better, because I get to be home with my mom," she explained.

Other parents say they are home-schooling to impart moral or religious values to their children. "I think it would be hard for me to do that if my children [were] gone from me for so much of the day," said Lorraine McCormick, an Ellicott City resident with three children ages 8, 12 and 16. "We wouldn't have the opportunity for those little spur-of-the-moment conversations."

Indeed, it was evangelical Christians determined to guard their children from what they perceived as a corrosive secular culture who first popularized home-schooling in the 1980s.

National studies show that parents home-school today for a variety of reasons. Yet they all share a belief that a traditional classroom, whether in a public or private school, is not the best option for their child.

Another factor behind the rise in home-schooling might be the flexibility of relevant Maryland regulations. Parents who home-school don't needto be certified to teach, and their children -- like those in non-public schools -- are not required by the state to take state tests.

Instead, parents can either submit twice-yearly portfolios of their children's work to a representative of their local school district or choose to be monitored by a state-approved program or a consortium of home-schoolers.

The lack of strict government oversight has prompted some grumbling that home-schooled children are not ensured a basic education. But it has also meant that parents have been free to employ a range of teaching styles as diverse as their reasons for home-schooling.

Some follow one of the many packaged curricula for home-schoolers that have flooded the market in recent years. Dean, for instance, uses a plan produced by the private Calvert School in Baltimore that provides everything from day-by-day lesson plans to textbooks and workbooks to pencils and paper.

"I needed the comfort that I was following a curriculum that would give my children the basics that they'd be getting at a really good private school," she said.

In contrast, Aubrey Myers' mother, Dolly, a former computer trainer, designed her own hybrid curriculum, drawing from a number of packages as well as novels and biographies related to the topics she was going to teach.

One advantage, Myers said, is that she can match her teaching format to her children's different learning styles. Thus, her 8-year-old son, Jesse, gets his arithmetic instruction from Saxon Math, a traditional curriculum. Aubrey, who is more visual, uses a specially designed curriculum called Math-U-See.

However, teaching different curricula simultaneously is difficult when more than two children are involved. And it proved so overwhelming to Lorraine McCormack -- mother of A.J., 8; Megan, 12; and Danny, 16 -- that she decided to abandon curriculum-based instruction altogether.

Instead, she employs what she calls "relaxed home-schooling." Other practitioners call it "un-schooling."

For at least an hour a day, four times a week, McCormack's children work independently, using math and vocabulary workbooks and computer games. The rest of their time is spent exploring whatever topic -- whether in history, science or some other field -- happens to have captured their interest at the moment. They do this through in-depth field trips and science experiments from kits.

"It suits our way of learning better," McCormack said. "If we're interested in something, we remember it more than if somebody says you're supposed to be on Page 28 today."

McCormack concedes that, with this approach, her children, particularly her oldest son, Danny, may end up missing instruction in basic areas.

Still, she said, "I feel that he'll be able to catch up real quick if he comes across something he doesn't know [later in life]. He's good at acquiring knowledge."

In addition, like many of Howard's home-schooled children, the McCormacks supplement their home studies through outside classes. Danny, for example, has taken Japanese and astronomy and plans to study biology at Howard Community Collegenext semester. And all three McCormack children have attended courses organized by a group of Howard home-schooling parents called Homesteaders.

Homesteaders, an organization that started 10 years ago and counts 63 families as members, provides classes on such technical subjects as chemistry, taught by parents, and offers such activities as wrestling, fencing and scrapbook-making. It is one of a handful of groups that have surfaced in Howard over the last decade to help home-schooled children make friends and engage in extracurricular activities while providing their parents with logistical and emotional support.

Another such group, the Columbia Homeschool Community, organizes trips to concerts by the Baltimore City Orchestra and arranges private tours of area museums for home-schooled children. It also offers a weekly "homeroom" class, where children collaborate on art, history or science projects.

Local Girl Scout troops, dance studios -- including Kinetics, in Ellicott City -- and sports leagues, such as the Elkridge soccer league, also offer a host of activities geared to home-schoolers' schedules and needs.

Home-schooling may have been a solitary experience in the past, but today's home-schoolers have just as many opportunities to make friends as do children who attend traditional schools, their parents say.

A real challenge, they say, is money. For one thing, instruction materials cost about $1,000 a year per child. And, because one parent -- usually the mother -- almost always stays home full time to teach, home-schooling families must live on one income.

"It's a huge sacrifice," noted Lisa Dean. Not only has she given up expensive vacations, new cars and new furniture, but she is also concerned about paying for her children's college education.

Still, she added quickly, "it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make."