I have a student who will be homeschooled this year. I am very interested in having her continue with her musical studies and she has been an asset to our program here. Her parents reside in and pay taxes to Fairfax County.
I've been reminded of some things, and learned some new ones:
1. Homeschooled students can only take courses at public schools if they are enrolled full-time. The only "a-la-carte" courses are night classes.
2. Parents who homeschool are given no tax credit, let alone a refund, for the money they save the local and state school systems by not having their children using resources they've already bought.
3. Free and Appropriate Public Education doesn't seem to be too appropriate.
4. 53% of Fairfax County's disbursement of funds this year will go to the public schools. The amount is $1,448,902,240
5. Fairfax County will take in $1,623,843,927 in property taxes this year.
6. The average Fairfax County real estate tax is over $4,000.
7. A person so grievously taxed should doggone well be able to allow his child to play in the band or on the field hockey team if he wants to. (I know the argument - private-school students would opt to play sports with the public-school teams. So what?) He's paying for it.
8. Finally, a quotation from FCPS policy:
The standards for Accrediting Public Schools in Virginia (July 2000) requires each enrolled student in grades 1 through 12 to maintain a full-day schedule of classes.Home instruction is a full-time alternative to school attendance.
Home instructed students shall not be permitted to enroll on a part-time basis or participate in academic or extracurricular activities, except as required by law.
Yeah, the law.
My liberal friends all use as a last line of defense against home-schooling that the child in question will "lack social skills" from lacking the social interaction in public schools.
Yet they would probably also back up this policy forbidding social interaction of home schoolers with others their age in athletic and educational extracurricular activities.
Shows you how spiteful the Left can be.
Frankly, despite my many years of public education (grades 1-12, public college and grad school at a public university), somehow I STILL lack social skills.
How can this be???
There are quite a few social skills at large in the public school system that I DON'T want my kids to pickup!
My cousin put it best: "High school is more about socializing than education anyway."
And ah, the social skills one can acquire at a Ffx County --oh, excuse me, that's County of Fairfax -- public school. I never saw so much snobbery and bullying in my life as I saw in my five and a half years in FfxCo schools.
Peony, I spent almost 13 years in Fairfax County schools, and I saw a lot of snobbery and bullying, too (though a lot more of the former.) My brother, a county music teacher like Bryan, has some choice words about the "educators" who have long outlived their usefulness, yet still show up to the classrooms.
What I think is amazing is that teachers who have 28 or 29 students per class are "producing" over $280,000 worth of education, yet they get paid maybe a fifth of that amount.
Most of my high school teachers taught like they were being paid with a Fifth.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: the problem with teacher's salaries is that they decided to unionize. And we all know what an evil the NEA has become.
Those of you who know my politics also know that I'm anything but liberal. Still, I have to wonder about the whole vouchers thing. Self-appropriation for taxes has never really been an American ideal. If it were, we'd open ourselves to the argument, "I don't use social service x, so why should I pay for it?" Or for the older/single guy, "I don't have kids. I've never had kids. Give me my school tax money back."
I do agree that homeschoolers should be allowed to take classes at the public schools. This would end a lot of my gripes, one of them being that my (purely anecdotal, and not to be taken as a "rule" in any respect)time as a teacher and student in public schools, as well as my activity with the Boy Scouts, left me with the classic socialization impression of homeschoolers. But still, I think any activity that gets a homeschooler out there and in to a diverse population of their peers is a step in the right direction, and certainly can't hurt anything.
There definitely needs to be more financial accountability in schools, and I think we can all agree there.
I agree about the targeted tax problem. My point here is that people ought to be able to use the services for which they pay, which is not the case in Virginia. This is like telling someone who commutes on surface roads that he can't drive on the Beltway on Saturdays because he doesn't use it exclusively. And what is this "all or none" line of thinking, anyway? Who's the primary educator of the child?
The primary educator? You say that as if it isn't Senator Hillary Dennis Rodman Clinton!