Are You Considering Home Education in NC?

Home education has been a core value of our family since before the birth of our first child. From his first moments outside the womb, teaching Gavin about the world and his role in it has been one of our family's greatest joys and most important responsibilities. Amy and I strongly believe that the task of educating a child falls squarely to that child's family — parents, siblings, grandparents, and so on, natural, adoptive, or otherwise. The family is the building block of society, and where the family and its members are ill-equipped, society is weakened.

In our family, which now includes two school-aged children, that means taking advantage of the opportunity for Amy to formally educate those children in our home. To assist in this task, we are members of a larger community of families in our area who have made similar choices, the Cabarrus County Home School Association. We've been actively involved in the CCHSA for over two years now, and greatly enjoy the benefits of this local homeschooling support group.

If you're considering home education in North Carolina, and you'll be in or around Concord, NC on Monday, October 25, 2010, you may wish to check out the CCHSA's public Informational Meeting. Here's a snippet from an email notification we received about the meeting:

Hi! I wanted to let everyone know that our first CCHSA Informational Meeting will be held on Monday, Oct. 25th at 7PM at the West Cabarrus YMCA on George Liles Blvd. We will have speakers talking about the "why" of homeschooling, what to know about homeschooling in North Carolina and in Cabarrus County, what resources are available to help homeschoolers, and a variety of "special topics" for a Q and A session.

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The Q and A speakers will be answering questions about things such as sports opportunities, advantages/disadvantages to various specific curricula, how to prepare high school students for college, how to help special needs learners, or how to juggle multiple ages/grades.

For a map to the event location, click here.

To be clear, Amy and I don't believe that the public school system is evil. We don't believe that parents who choose to avail themselves of public education are negligent or failing their children in some way. Many of our dearest friends work every day to ensure that public education in our area is the best that it can be. Our challenge to all families is simple and universal: take ownership of your children's education, and use the best mechanisms and approaches and services you can to do so.