The 2022-2023 School Year has looked vastly different than any other year before. For starters, we moved 2500 miles, I’m not working a full time job – only consulting, and I’m homeschooling my three school aged kids and learning to be a parent to an adult-child living with us. Huge changes in so many sectors of my life.
When I was a teenager and in college, I worked as a nanny even living with a few of the families. I really thought that I would be a pro at parenting because I had experienced so much. Oh, the naïveté! After 20 years working in education, I wasn’t as naive to think I could homeschool like a pro my first go around, but I really thought it would be easier than it is. This is my journey of becoming a homeschooling parent.
The nuts and bolts of our year included figuring out what the homeschool laws are in Texas. It was really straight forward for my two younger ones, we signed up for a Classical Conversations program near us and jumped right back into what we were doing since January. That felt like an easy one to check the box on.
For my oldest son, he wanted to go to public school for his senior year continuing to take dual credit classes and meet people in the community he could build friendships with. That plan was burdened with multiple roadblocks. First of all, there were some credits the ISD was struggling to transfer which caused him to be in both an Algebra 1 course and Calculus class. He took Algebra 1 in 8th grade, but since it was not on his high school transcript he was required to take it again…I know it seems crazy and we went through many hoops, but there were road blocks with each creative solution we tried. Ultimately, I suggested he take the opportunity to be the cool Senior helping the freshman in this course. He gave that a try and unfortunately a kid in the class had the answer key and was passing it around during the teacher’s instruction so no one needed help. By the 8th day of school, he came home and explained how heavy hearted he was each day going to that school, he also acknowledge how much I was already doing for our family, and so graciously asked if I could homeschool him. It took us almost as many days to get the school to unenroll him, but we finally untangled and he was enrolled in Veritas Scholars Academy. It is a lot more work than he’s used to, but in this season it is working out well for him. Watch for a future post on our experience at VSP.
We’ve just passed the six week mark, we have all found our stride and the school year is solidly underway.
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