Quote:
Originally Posted by fruitfulmomma
When you receive government funding for your homeschool, you are essentially a public-schooled student with home-based instruction. Part of the state and federal funding goes directly to the school because your child is their student and part comes to you. Normal homeschooling laws no longer apply in this situation. You are bound to whatever rules the school you go through gives you. Most likely you will receive a teacher who oversees all of your work and may come to your home periodically to check on your children. Also if you have religious reasons for homeschooling, be aware that you may not use any tax funds to purchase religious curriculum.
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I live in Colorado, and we are enrolled in a public school charter program or "umbrella" school. I consider us 100% homeschoolers, and our experience with the charter has been totally non-invasive and extremely supportive.
Religious materials are not allowed to be purchased with our yearly stipend. They buy everything else. We are secular, but really how much $ does one need to supplement their hs budget with religious materials? I don't think it's a problem for the many Christian hs-ers in our program.
We do have to do some testing--just entry/exit reading leveling and the "regular" CSAP crap for 3rd, 5th, 7th? I dislike that, but it would be required in our state regardless of our involvement in the charter or not.
There's no teacher who "watches" us or tells us what curriculum to use. We have a wonderful, supportive resource consultant who I bounce ideas off about curriculum. I am quite a researcher and she knows that I'm well-informed so she pretty much orders whatever I want for dd. She doesn't come check on us at our house---although she has been kind enough to bring materials over here when dh had the car or I when I was laid up in a difficult first trimester or my pregnancy. We do have to physically meet with her every month, but it's maybe 15 minutes or less and she mostly gives us free educational magazines, early readers, and tells us what a good job we're doing
relatively painless. We do have the option of having these meeting at our house, which I appreciate and do not see as "them" trying to snoop into our business, but more our RC trying to accomodate her parents to make everything as easy as possible.
I know some of these umbrella-type programs have only certain materials or certain budget regulations on what the $ can be spent on, but ours is REALLY open as to what we can buy. I love our ps charter! We write a learning plan at the beginning of the year, and then any materials that fall under that plan and are non-religious can be approved for purchase. So we can buy a guitar for dd, mini-trampoline for PE, voice recorder to record her story-telling, plus I think they'll even buy desks/child-sized tables (but I always want to spend the $ on fun learning stuff, not furniture!).
Our charter was started by grass-roots homeschoolers and is now an official "school" in our district, this next year will be it's third year. So there's hope. I don't know how the families who prompted the initiation of the school went about it, but they were just hs-ers like us!
**eta--oh and they've NEVER asked to see samples of dd's work. Sometimes I want to share, but that is not part of our program. They're not about "checking up on us" but about supporting us. We log hours online, and apparently that's sufficient along with the CSAP stuff that the older kids do.