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

Alison Dowling isn’t waiting to be rejected by the lottery. Although her son is not yet 2, she’s already started organizing a home-schooling network around her Foggy Bottom home. The do-it-yourself approach, she said, started to make sense “when we’re faced with the choice between a $20,000-a-year preschool or the public school.”

Dowling’s local school is Francis-Stevens Education Campus, a school that is considered an up-and-comer. It’s one of several elementary campuses on which school officials have focused attention and support in recent years. Smith said the long-term D.C. goal is to improve all the schools, “but obviously we’re not there yet.” So the short-term goal is to concentrate efforts every year on a collection of schools, including Francis-Stevens, so that the pool of most-desired schools grows.

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More on this Story

• Home-schooling resources
• A home-schooler’s typical day
• Gallery: Home-schooling in the District
• Home schooling takes hold in D.C.

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For Dowling, however, the local option is not desirable enough. Instead, she and her husband are plotting out the alternatives.

Between her background in chemistry and Asian studies, and her husband, a chef with a degree in economics, she looks forward to sharing their knowledge with their child. At the same time, Dowling doesn’t intend to home-school for the rest of her son’s academic career. She hopes that the e-mail list she’s compiling of other families considering the home option will serve as both a network and a resource and also, maybe, a springboard to form a new co-op or charter school.

Williams had long hoped to home-school her children and embraces the ability to find new teaching opportunities. She spends her weekday mornings hunched with her twin boys at the dining room table.

Formal instruction lasts a couple of hours. Otherwise, the “schooling” tends to be free-form, with experiences taking precedence.

Their day takes on a certain rhythm: a few hours of phonics or spelling; an outing, perhaps a trip to a museum or a park; afternoon downtime; piano lessons or a reading session. She and the boys often meet up with other home-schoolers for group teaching sessions or field trips. Last year, she coordinated a production of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” among a group of home-schooled students.

Ray estimates that 70 percent of home-schooling families have children in kindergarten through eighth grade. Parents sometimes want their children to have a more standardized education as they approach college years, while others, Ray said, “realize it’s hard work.”

Not that hard, however, Williams said. The former middle and high school teacher said one of the comments she gets most often from parents is, “ ‘Oh, I could never do that.’ Or, ‘Oh, you’ve been a teacher so you know how to do it.’ ”

Neither is true, she said. “Maybe being a teacher gave me the confidence to do this. But I never taught a child to read before. Anyone who wants to do this can.”

More:

Online chat Farrar Williams, who home-schools her twin 7-year-old sons, and writer Janice D’Arcy will discuss home schooling at 1 p.m. Thursday.

Home-schooling resources

The District

DC Area Preschool Homeschoolers

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DCAreaPreschoolHomeschoolers/

DC Area Elementary Homeschoolers

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Half_Caf/

DC Home Educators Association

www.dchea.org

Maryland

Maryland Home Education Association

www.mhea.com

Virginia

Home Education Association of Virginia

www.heav.org

National

National Home Education Research Institute

www.nheri.org