Our Decision to Homeschool, by Kami - MetroFamily Magazine
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Our Decision to Homeschool, by Kami

by Kami McManus

Reading Time: 2 minutes 

The decision to homeschool is a very personal one. No one can tell you if it is the right choice for your family or not. As a parent you have to look at all your reasons for considering this avenue and weigh all the pros and cons. 

For our family the idea to try homeschooling actually came from our son. He has been all but begging us to do this since he was finishing up 2nd grade. At the time my husband was stationed at Dobbins ARB in Marietta, Ga and in our two years there he was gone more than half of it. Our son was being bullied at school, and the teachers were doing NOTHING about it. I spoke to the principal, who supposedly spoke to the teachers, but nothing changed. Within a week my son came home crying that the kid had pushed him down and pinned him to a chain-link fence and raised his fist to our son’s face. The kid did not hurt our son, but the experience left us all emotionally scarred.

Thankfully we were PCSing (military word for moving) to Oklahoma shortly after the end of that school year. Our son started 3rd grade in a new school. He did a lot better, so even though homeschooling was not off the table, it was on the back burner for the time being. 

Then my husband deployed for just shy of 6 months, the May 2010 hail storms came through, and before we knew it 4th grade was here and yet another 4-6 mth deployment. Our son’s school had absolutely no empathy for our situation at all. Two deployments that were less than six months apart and the last one meant missing Christmas on top of everything else. I started getting calls from our son’s teachers about talking too much, spitting on other kids (turned out after he was spit on first), and other behavior that to most people are not really all that bad, but for our son was completely out of character. His grades slipped to B’s (he had always had straights A’s before this) and he came home telling me stories of kids calling him names, pushing him into walls and boys talking about “spin the bottle” in the bathroom! 4th grade boys, so 9 yr olds talking about “spin the bottle”??? 

Like a gift from the heavens, another military spouse told us about the curriculum that her family uses for homeschooling. After A LOT of research, we decided it was time to give homeschooling a try! It was scary, but we felt we had to try something because we could see our son headed down a very terrifying path. We made this choice to save our son from bullies, uncaring school staff, and to give him the emotional support needed when dealing with back to back deployments.

We know this journey will have tears of frustration and joy, and we hope you will enjoy reading about our adventures as we navigate the ever-changing terrain of homeschooling.

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