Ritzya Mitchell's 2,000-square-foot, split-level home in Herndon does not, at first glance, look like a place that doubles as a school.
The kitchen has the usual appliances. There are three traditional bedrooms. Then you reach the dining room: Books are stacked on the walls, a globe perches on a sideboard, a world map substitutes as wall art, and there is an assortment of other unexpected items, including small containers of paint and a karaoke machine for learning Bible verses.
Renanah Mitchell, 8, gets help with schoolwork from her mother, Ritzya, at the dining room table. The rule at the Mitchells' house, where Renanah is home-schooled, is that every room is a classroom.
(Photos Johnathan Ernst For The Washington Post)
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Mitchell, 50, works out of the house as a drama coach, party planner and personal organizer. In that last role, she has helped home-schooling clients arrange their own houses so they can teach their children without losing control of their living spaces.
"You need a place for everything and everything in its place," Mitchell said. "There has to be order so that when you are done with home schooling for the day you can contain all your stuff and not have the house look like a cyclone hit it."
Two centuries ago, almost all American children were home-schooled in some fashion. One century ago, far fewer learned at home, and the modern school building became a symbol of the 20th century. But today, at the beginning of a new century, home schooling is making a comeback, with one federal survey indicating that as many as 2 million children are learning at home.
The parents who reject regular public and private schooling say they do it for a number of reasons: dissatisfaction with the pace of instruction, impatience with the lack of moral and religious lessons, distaste for the pop culture that rules school halls, and just the simple realization that they are always going to have more time to help their child than any teacher ever would.
But architects and interior designers long ago lost their appreciation of the need for learning spaces at home, so home-schooling parents such as Mitchell have to work out the designs and routines on their own. Mitchell has a 15-year-old and an 8-year-old whom she home-schools, as well as a 19-year-old. Their solutions can be helpful even to parents who don't home-school but who want to carve out areas in their homes that are conducive to homework and other school projects.
In many cases, home-schooling parents attack the least-used space in their home, the living room. Peggy Welton in Tuscon, who home-schools her two daughters, 10 and 13, said, "We ditched the formal living room and have bookshelves, two computers and toys stored there in industrial steel shelving units from an office supply store."
In Michelle Shaver's house in Springfield, Ill., the living room serves as a library and display center. It is decorated with posters of George Washington, Egyptian hieroglyphics, a world map and some satellite pictures of Earth showing different weather patterns. Some of this Shaver got off the NASA Web site, www.nasa.gov, which she considers a home-schooler's good friend.
"We have bookcases all over filled with books, games, bins of crayons, pencils, etc.," said Shaver, who has two children, ages 16 and 6. "We'll never be asked to be photographed for Better Homes and Gardens, but for right now, this works for us."
Janice Kielb, an attorney, and Mark Kielb, chief executive of a software company, put a great deal of thought and effort into rearranging their two-story brick colonial in Ann Arbor, Mich., when they decided four years ago to home-school their three children, now 11, 9 and 7. The first year they took the $16,000 they had been spending on Montessori school tuition for the two oldest children and remodeled half of their basement.
They put up drywall, installed new carpeting and replaced windows so they would open to give the long, rectangular space more light and air. At the end closest to the stairs, they established a reading area with a couch and bookshelves. On the wall above the couch they post different timelines, depending on the era their children are studying. A globe is set on top of the bookshelves for ready reference.
In the middle of the room they established a main work area: floor-to-ceiling storage drawers along one wall, two dry-erase boards plus U.S. and world maps on the opposite wall and the Kielb student desks in the middle. At the other end of the room under a row of windows are shelves to store art and school supplies and a table with a computer that plays educational programs and games but is not connected to the Internet.
"My kids are still at an age when I prefer they do their primary research from books and at the library," Janice Kielb said.
