Churches Bring School Choice to Every State

Until recently, the biggest challenge facing education reformers was persuading local politicians in states with powerful teacher unions to legalize what has come to be known as “school choice” — the public subsidy of multiple K-12th grade learning options. For while Americans have always had the legal right to educate their children outside the local public school, the cost of doing so at a private or parochial facility has effectively limited that freedom to more affluent families.

And while parents have always had the theoretical ability to homeschool, this too has always been easier allowed than done. Undertaking to instruct one’s own child has not only meant giving up the economic benefits of a full-time job but facing the challenge of being a novice teacher with little outside support. Difficult enough for one spouse in a two-parent household, but impossible for most single parents.

Yet today, a rapidly spreading religious movement involving multiple denominations is making it possible for more and more families to provide their children with a non-public school option, even if their state legislatures are unwilling to subsidize it.

By taking advantage of their large spaces, which go mostly unused during the work week, and enlisting the support of volunteer congregants, a growing number of churches around the country are making it possible for parents to collaboratively homeschool their children without ever having to sacrifice their day jobs. And for fees as low as a few hundred dollars a year.

The origins of this trend go back to Covid, when conventional public and private schools were closed and many parents felt compelled to form small neighborhood groups — what the media soon dubbed “learning pods” or “microschools” — to educate their children. With senior centers, YMCAs, town halls, and other venues which might normally have been able to host these improvised schools also closed, a large number of them ended up operating out of local parishes.

But as the pandemic subsided and conventional schools gradually reopened, the big surprise was how many families decided that they wanted to stick with what was effectively a new teaching model, church-sited homeschooling. Parents especially liked the freedom to personalize their child’s curriculum within the context of an environment that stressed traditional values. And at the same time, many of the clergy who had initially seen these improvised schools as a temporary measure began to regard them as a worthy ongoing mission.

“If you were to ask me ten years ago if I would be interested in starting a homeschool type program,” says Fr. Matthew Conley, pastor of the Saint Mary of the Nativity Church on Boston’s south shore, “I’d have quickly said ‘no thanks … not interested.’” But when he saw how well one of his parishioners, Malin Agostino, had homeschooled her own four children, he thought “perhaps this is something we should be offering around here” and asked her to think about starting one. (READ MORE from Lewis M. Andrews: Leftist Colleges Tend to Produce Leftist Scientific Studies)

With just five months to get ready and no advertising beyond word-of-mouth, Agostino and her church team got the Stella Maris Catholic Academy ready to open this September with seventeen K-11th grade students from the surrounding Scituate community. Charging just $1,500 a year for children whose parents help to run the three-day-a-week group homeschool and $3,000 for those being dropped off, their program is on track to double in size by next fall and seems likely to soon reach the maximum number of 75 students the church can comfortably accommodate.

Some clergy have become interested enough in homeschooling that they directly manage their own church programs. At the nondenominational Harvest Family Church in Conroe, Texas, for example, Associate Pastor Linda Roberts oversees a two-day-a-week ministry which provides 81 homeschooled children with classes on 24 subjects, ranging from pre-K basics to high school chemistry.

We try to “make homeschooling a more viable option for local parents,” Roberts says, by creating a place “where kids can build friendships, the adults can share information, and help is available for difficult subjects.” Families can choose from an à la carte menu of inexpensively supervised courses, averaging just $130 per semester, and teachers themselves have the option to be paid with tuition credits for their own children.

There are even church homeschools which have become adjuncts of more traditional parish-sponsored academies. In the Silicon Valley town of Los Altos, for example, the Saint Paul’s Anglican Church runs both the long-established Canterbury Christian School and a newer program for local homeschooled children.

The latter may not provide its students with the same amenities as the former, says headmaster Rev. Steve Macias, but it at least gives their families a public-school alternative without one parent having to quit work “in a part of the country … where even ordinary homes cost $3-to-$4 million.”

PBS News estimates that overall homeschool enrollment in the U.S. has risen a remarkable 30 percent since 2019, just before American parents first became aware of Covid. Once more, according to the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey, the trend is clearly accelerating with the number of homeschooled students going from 3.6 million to 4 million, or up 11 percent, over the last year alone.

Exactly how much of this increase is due to churches across the country combining homeschool curricula, their unused space, and congregant volunteers to create affordable venues for alternative K-12th grade instruction is hard to say. This is because only eight states – Alabama, California, Colorado, Florida, Maine, Maryland, Tennessee, and Washington – explicitly grant local parishes or parochial schools the right to oversee homeschoolers.

And while there are legal ways for houses of worship in the other 42 states to also do it, they must navigate the kind of regulatory minefield which instinctively causes many to keep a low profile. In some states, for example, churches must be careful to call their educational program something like a “learning center” or “child support ministry,” not a “school.”

Church Homeschooling Programs Surge

But as changes in the demand for homeschool curricula make clear, the number of collaborative programs, especially at churches, is clearly skyrocketing. My Father’s World used to sell educational materials just to individual families, says the company’s group schooling specialist Leah Brooks, but over the least two years “my side of the business (has) grown a ton.”

Equally telling is the number of organizations around the country dedicated to helping area churches organize their own homeschool collaboratives. In Kansas, for example, homeschool mom of six Delana Wallace runs the Heartland Education Reformation Organization (HERO), a nonprofit which advocates for 15 parish-sited homeschool programs and connects local clergy with educators interested in helping to start others.

And in Massachusetts, the Family Institute website hosts an online guide to “Church-Based Learning Center Resources,” which has already been used to create 20 Protestant and Catholic programs in the Bay State. “We are in a new age of church homeschooling,” says the guide’s author, Pastor Adam Rondeau of the Bethany Assembly of God Church in Agawam.

Working on a national level, Chula Vista Christian University president Lisa Dunne runs the Academic Rescue Mission, which provides online guidance and counseling to congregations wanting to start their own homeschool collaboratives. To date, she has helped start 34 programs in California, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Texas, and other states. (READ MORE: K-12 School Choice Will Improve Higher Education)

More recently, former Republican candidate for Minnesota governor Kendall Qualls and his wife Sheila have begun working through their TakeCharge Foundation to establish what they call Washington Academies. Using a homeschool curriculum developed by Hillsdale College, each is designed to start as a K-2nd grade church-sited school that can accommodate the next highest grade every successive year until all grades are taught. One such school just opened in Mississippi, and four more are in development — one in Michigan, one in Tennessee, and two in Minnesota.

Ever since June of 2022, when Arizona became the first state to pass universal school choice, prompting eleven other red-leaning states to follow, the frustrating challenge for school reformers in bluer states has been getting their own elected representatives to adopt a similar policy. But as churches around the country are showing, the absence of such legislation does not have to deny any state’s families an affordable alternative to their local public school.

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