D.C. parents choosing to home-school their children

View Photo Gallery — Home schooling takes hold in D.C.

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This summer, the online parenting forums for some D.C. neighborhoods lighted up with queries about a topic normally considered the domain of suburban and rural parents. In Dupont Circle, Adams Morgan, Columbia Heights, Brookland and along U Street, parents are contemplating educating their children at home.

A sample from the back-and-forth on the Brookland Kids forum:

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“If we don’t have any viable options for 1st grade, I need to consider home schooling.”

“Hi all I was wondering if anyone home-schools their kids . . . I wanted to get your thought on pacing guides and package curriculum.”

“We have been toying with the idea of home schooling.”

It’s an interest that comes from necessity. For years, parents in these sections of the District assumed they could raise their children in their beloved neighborhoods but not have to rely on their local schools, most of which they considered substandard. They went elsewhere for public education, usually to the west of Rock Creek Park, where the affluent neighborhoods were home to high-achieving, under-enrolled schools.

It had been an established routine for decades. In the spring, these families would enter the D.C. public schools’ out-of-boundary lottery, apply to Janney, Lafayette or Murch elementary schools in upper Northwest and wait to find out which one they would be driving to in the fall.

No more. Like most of the best-regarded schools in the city, those Ward 3 schools are now bursting with in-boundary students. Out-of-boundary has come to mean out-of-luck.

“A lot more families are excited to take advantage of their local school options,” said Abigail Smith, director of D.C. schools’ Office of Transformation Management, who has been examining the out-of-boundary process. “That means that, at a certain point, [out-of-boundary] kids are going to have a harder time getting into those schools.”

For the 2011-12 school year, D.C. schools fielded more applications than ever for their out-of-boundary lottery. At the same time, there were far fewer out-of-boundary spots at the most coveted schools. Only one available out-of-boundary kindergarten spot could be found at Janney. Lafayette and Murch had none.

At the same time, there was an overflow of interest in select charter schools. At the popular Northwest charter school Latin American Bilingual Montessori, known as LAMB, 525 families applied for 60 spots.

School officials point to a number of reasons why parents are suddenly clambering for certain schools: an increasing faith in school reform; the perception of school choice; and an economic downturn that makes public education more appealing than pricey private schools.

The speed at which this has occurred, in just the past two or three years, has severely limited options for many D.C. parents, especially those in neighborhoods where the perception of the schools is worse than the perception of the residential amenities.

Faced with the choice of the neighborhood school, a private or parochial school or a move to the suburbs, some of these parents are choosing to educate their children themselves.

 
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