Andrea Knoll’s daughter Adalyn was supposed to start kindergarten at Henry Barnard School this school year.
Even after COVID-19 hit, Knoll and her husband held out hope that their 5-year-old daughter would still be in the classroom come the fall. Then, Rhode Island College announced it would be closing the private school on its campus within the year, and the Providence couple, who also have two younger children, were forced to reconsider.
Sending Adalyn to a crowded public school or monitoring her sitting in front of a computer screen all day doing distance learning didn’t seem like good options. That’s how the family wound up doing something Andrea Knoll never previously considered: home schooling.
Amid virus-related concerns and distaste for distance learning, parents across the country and in Rhode Island are increasingly turning to home schooling as a safer, more effective alternative.
Quantifying the surge in newly home-schooled students is difficult, as states track the data differently and the numbers continue to fluctuate even as the school year progresses.
Just under 1,900 students were home-schooled in Rhode Island last year, versus the more than 143,000 public school students, according to the R.I. Department of Education.
While data on the number of home-schooled students this year was not available, Brian Ray, president and founder of the National Home Education Research Institute, expected states to see a 20% to 40% increase in home-schooled students nationally based on information he had gathered from local and state home-school organizations.
ENRICHri, a secular home-school support group in Rhode Island, has already seen a surge in membership, as well as interest in its virtual workshops, according to Marcia Sirois, an organization spokesperson. Prior to the pandemic, the group’s monthly information workshops held in libraries around the state garnered a couple dozen attendees. Virtual versions held in June and July saw registrations draw upward of 150 people, Sirois said.
At the same time, formal members of ENRICHri, who have access to private Facebook groups and online learning tools for a $30 annual fee, grew by more than 65% since the pandemic to the current roster of 450.
While some of the new members are parents who may have chosen to home-school their children anyway, many are recent converts. But Sirois believed even those who may not have planned to home-school their children will grow to love it and stick with it, even after the pandemic subsides.
“In all our efforts in 10 years, we could not have done a better job than what 2020 has done for home schooling,” she said. “It’s looked at as much more normal now, more mainstream.”
When Sirois, a mother of two, decided to start home schooling seven years ago, it was not viewed so positively, including by herself.
“I always thought they were just weird people who lived in the woods,” she said of families who home-schooled children.
But she was forced to reconsider amid the struggles faced by her then-middle school-aged son, who began attending Riverside Middle School in East Providence after the family moved from Maine, where he attended a much smaller school. She saw an ad for ENRICHri and decided to give home schooling a go. It proved so successful that Sirois and her husband have opted to home-school their younger son, who is 7, from the get-go.
The transition to learning at home is likely more difficult for older students and those already accustomed to a traditional school setting, Sirois acknowledged. But the benefit of home schooling’s increasing popularity is that more resources are becoming available, from online learning platforms and support groups to former teachers offering their expertise to single or small groups of students.
On a recent sunny afternoon, a small classroom in the otherwise-empty St. Martin’s Episcopal Church in Providence filled with laughter and chatter. Two children wrote Halloween-related words on orange, pumpkin-shaped cut-outs, while a third sat in front of a laptop listening to instructions. Piles of books and art supplies surrounded them.
This is the Eastside Learning Pod, a small, group learning environment started by former teacher and school administrator Kathryn Barr. For a $675 monthly fee plus enrollment costs, Barr offers three days per week of supervised hands-on and group activities in the classroom and, when the weather permits, outside. She framed the offering as a way to help struggling parents teach their students the way she would have wanted her now-adult children to learn if she had been in their shoes.
Knoll, who has continued to work full time, said the pod was what made home schooling a viable option. It also gives Adalyn the social interaction she’d been missing for months since the pandemic began.
Knoll was unsure whether she would continue home-schooling once the virus had passed. But either way, the traditional school model was unlikely to remain the same.
“I think what you’re going to see is demand for smaller schools that don’t necessarily have all the bells and whistles we traditionally thought schools needed to have,” Barr said.
Ray agreed. “The whole concept of alternative schooling, whether private or at home, is really going to deepen and extend in ways we haven’t seen,” he said.
Nancy Lavin is a PBN staff writer. Contact her at Gavin@PBN.com.