Why I chose to home school part 1

First off, my sister, now the mother of seven, started home schooling five years ago, and has been progressively working on me about it ever since.  She started homeschooling when I had my first baby, so it has been somewhere in my mind all along.

I went to college to be an art teacher, and the further I got in the program, the less I liked the way things were going with American education.  I decided to change my major to visual art, and completed my degree online after having my first baby.  I decided my dream job was really to teach art lessons for home school kids.  I could do my own thing and only have to worry about the kids and their parents and not bureaucrats.

As I started having more children and they started getting older and closer to school age, my oldest was developmentally delayed and qualified for services in a public preschool program (half day five days a week with speech therapy twice).  After her first year she was diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) however she was on the High Functioning (HFA) side of the spectrum.  I thought this meant I couldn't meet her needs through home school.  But Public School (PS) was a nightmare.  Every time there was an irregular day off she threw a fit wanting to go to school.  Then if there was a long enough break, (Summer, Christmas, Spring) when school started again she threw a fit not wanting to go back.  This was very hard on her, me, and her various bus drivers.  One day I just kept her home, because she refused to go and I felt like a terrible parent trying to force her to go away from home to socialize, just so she could have a good attendance record.  She did learn a lot over her two years of preschool, but next comes all day kindergarten, and I just don't think five year old children need to socialize all day five days a week.

I looked for other home school parents of children with HFA.  Many others like me, had bad experiences with sending their children to public school.  When they pulled their kids out and home schooled their HFA child thrived in the one on one teaching and more predictable environment their parents were able to create for them.  This gave me hope.  Yes, it will take more effort to make sure she has sufficient opportunities to socialize, but it will be worth it.  So I told my husband about the research I had done, and together we prayed about it, and felt right about home schooling.