Western Slope Vision School Digs A Dry Well

According to the Grand Junction Sentinel, the Colorado Department of Education has approved a "vision" school on the Western Slope. Mesa Valley Vision Home Community Program Contract School "would provide home schoolers [sic] a network with teachers, a set curriculum, instructor employment policies and a home-school director," as well as "give the district the opportunity now to have more ability to track students that are home-schooled."

Colorado school districts are not supposed to be tracking which students in their district are homeschooled. The homeschooling law in Colorado is written in a way to separate homeschool students from the districts they live in. As I understand it, parents can file their notice of intent to homeschool with any school district in the state.

I find the following quote more ominous. Cindy Enos-Martinez said, “Right now, they can go in and sign up, and there’s really not a good way to track them." Why isn't "signing up," as Ms. Enos-Martinez calls it, a good way to track homeschoolers? The last part of the article makes the reason for the CDEs approval of the school abundantly clear:

“It’s a terrific challenge,” said Lu Vorys, who is on the board of the Lamborn Vision School in Paonia. “To work out the finances was a huge challenge.”

What was good about it for the school district, she said, is it was losing enrollment, but it got paid by the state per child, “so when all these Vision students came on, they [the school district] had much more state funding.”

It's obvious that they're happy about solving their declining enrollment, but why was enrollment declining and why did they look to bring in homeschoolers to bring in much more state funding? I believe the two questions are related. Western Slope parents are coming to the same conclusion many other Colorado parents have come to, which is that public schooling is no longer a viable solution to their educational needs. As a result, the school districts are looking for solutions that will continue the flow of money from the state.

While I welcome any option that increases the parents' choice between educational models, I can't help but feel this is a back door approach to funnel money out of state coffers into a struggling, outdated and hopelessly inefficient method of education. Having 1 teacher to 25, 35 and even 45 students fails to give children the attention they need in their schooling. Placing them in an artificial environment with unwritten codes of conduct enforced by a caste system made up of their peers doesn't prepare them for the real world. Forcing all students to learn from curricula that are designed for a pedestrian pace serves neither the quick nor the slow students among them.

Rather than force my child to suffer these ills of the public schools, I believe, along with many other Colorado homeschoolers, that homeschooling is a superior and efficient method for educating my children. I have yet to see how providing homeschoolers "a network with teachers, a set curriculum, instructor employment policies and a home-school director" would assist most homeschooling parents. Instead, it seems to me that they are looking to imbue homeschoolers with the same failed policies of class-based instruction, unswerving commitment to a single curriculum and school district bureaucracy. What's worse, when that approach fails a student, I fear that the parent might think that it's their own fault and shuffle the child back into public school instead of tasting the true freedom offered by homeschooling without the district's "help." For the thirsty, the vision school offers a bucket, but the well is dry.

Parents need to know their options. They need to know that they have a choice in where their child spends time every day. Most importantly, they need to know how some students aren't merely surviving their schooling, they're thriving in homeschool! Rather than pour more money into broken schools, lets help promote public awareness of parents' options and their irreplaceable role in the education of their child, whether they're public, private, or homeschooled.