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Traditional marketplace
discovers growing home-
school community
By MICHELE M. MELENDEZ
NEWHOUSE NEWS SERVICE
Home schooling is hot.
With more kids getting their lessons from Mom and Dad, the marketplace is responding. A vast range of products and services to create a learning environment at home have cropped up, from science kits to home-school consultants. So have the trappings of traditional school: home-school yearbooks, class rings, T-shirts.
Home-schooling parents say such offerings, no matter whether they contribute meaningfully to the educational experience, show increasing awareness and acceptance of home-grown scholarship.
"We know we're a valuable market, because we spend money on our kids," said Shay Seaborne, president of the Virginia Home Education Association, who home schools her two children.
The National Home Education Research Institute in Salem, Ore., figures that 1.7 million to 2.1 million children were home taught during the 2002-2003 conventional school year, up as much as 13 percent from 2000-2001. The federal government makes a different calculation: 1.1 million children home schooled in 2003, up 29 percent from 1999 and representing 2.2 percent of the school-aged population.
Either way, the fraction of kids means money.
"It's a small percentage of our sales, but we have seen nice growth each year," said Rich Stoebe, spokesman for Jostens Inc. of Minneapolis, the well-established maker of school keepsakes.
Stoebe said Jostens started marketing to home schoolers in 1998 at the urging of one of the company's sales representatives, herself a home-schooling mom. The company custom-makes class rings, yearbooks and diplomas for home schoolers.
This year, Marjorie Veatch, 41, of LaGrange, Ga., and a group of other home-schooling mothers threw a graduation ceremony for their children with all the customary fixtures, including diplomas, caps and gowns, which they bought from Jostens.
"Even though we had chosen a non-traditional way to educate our children, I wanted a special commemoration of his graduation," she said of her oldest son, Jason, 18, now a freshman at Georgia Southern University in Statesboro.
"I wanted more than a party, which we also did, to recognize the hard work he had done," Veatch said. "We were able to have a nice graduation ceremony. It just seemed like the most appropriate way to acknowledge a milestone."
Jason Veatch admits he didn't consider a traditional ceremony important initially. But afterward he was glad he had participated, receiving a diploma, dressed like a graduate.
"During the ceremony, the trappings certainly added to the feel of the occasion," he said. "The items did have something of a special meaning; they were symbols of the fact that we were finishing a part of our lives and moving on to another part."
While those artifacts aren't inherently educational, they can be significant.
"There's an identity to them," said Laura Derrick, Austin, Texas-based president of the National Home Education Network and home-schooling mom of two. "Most kids go to school. They have a teacher and classroom. And there's a culture around being in a school."
Kids in school can buy T-shirts, pencils, bumper stickers and other merchandise adorned with their school names. And now, so can home schoolers.
Triple Dog Christian Apparel of Greencastle, Ind., embroiders T-shirts with stick-figure drawings of families above the name of their home school and year launched. "We saw there was a need out there we thought that wasn't being served well," said co-owner Tara Normington. "The kids are proud of their home schools."
But these wares don't suit every home-schooling family, as many reject school as an institution.
"On some levels (such merchandise) reinvents school," said Mark Hegener, publisher of the Tonasket, Wash.-based Home Education Magazine, who has home schooled his five children. "It supports an institutional perspective in raising kids."
And, Derrick added, "Most home-schooling families don't build miniature schoolrooms" at home but do consume a growing variety of home-school teaching aids and lesson plans.
Tammy Cline, of Upperco, Md., is one.
Cline, 41, teaches her daughters, Susannah, 11, and Sarah, 8. Sometimes they do lesson work at the kitchen table of their home, which sits on 1? acres amid farmland about 30 miles northwest of Baltimore. And they often find learning opportunities at nearby attractions, such as the Maryland Zoo in Baltimore or Towson University.
Susannah said it's a fun way to learn: "I get to do stuff I'm interested in. I'm really interested in animals, like horses. So my mom bought me a horse study (guide)."
Cline finds learning materials on the Internet, in catalogs and even at a local store called Home and School Connection, started by a home-schooling mother of five.
Store founder Amy Huffman opened her first location in Hagerstown, Md., in 1998, wanting to give fellow home schoolers an alternative to mail and online ordering, a place to browse and inspect the merchandise. There was such a response from parents and teachers alike that Huffman opened a second store in Frederick, Md., in 2001 and is preparing to open a third.
Parents looking for more direction can call on home-school consultants, like Rivka Seeman of New York City. She typically starts by interviewing the child and parents. She gets a feel of what kind of teaching style best fits and determines the parents' ideal approach.
"Not everybody wants to do everything from scratch," said Seeman, who started advising families three years ago. "They don't want to do all the curriculum planning themselves. It's a lot of work."
Esther Grossman, 40, of Chicago, identifies. She contacted Seeman this year after seeing a listing on a home-schooling Web site. Although Grossman, mother of nine, has been home schooling for 14 years, she sought help for her 6-year-old twins, Rivkie and Laivi, who learn differently and have had no formal schooling, unlike their older siblings.
"I felt much more confidant to plan a program with (Seeman's) expertise behind me," Grossman said.
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