Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, September 6, 1993 TAG: 9309060070
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: HOLIDAY
SOURCE: LAURA WILLIAMSON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
When the big, yellow school buses roll through Bedford County Tuesday, they won't groan to a halt for Rachel Shiflett.
The 16-year-old, who says she fits somewhere between the 11th and 12th grades, will be yanking on rubber boots and trudging down to the barn as her peers slip into back-to-school clothing and head for the classroom.
When they slide into their seats for first period, she'll be settling into a rhythm gently pulling the teats of her four milking goats. As they crack open their books for the first time in months, she'll be weighing her milk, recording each goat's output and preparing to pasteurize.
She won't call her morning activities math or science. And she won't receive a grade. But she will call it school.
Home school.
"It's just been a learning project," said Rachel's mother, Audrey, who also prepares regular lesson plans for her two daughters at the Shifletts' Goodview home.
"She wants to be a nurse."
Or maybe a veterinarian. Like most students her age, Rachel sees her future only in loosely defined terms. But she does see a future, and the Shifletts believe the lessons Rachel learns at home - both in the barn and at the books - have prepared her as well as, if not better than, most for success.
According to studies provided by the Home School Legal Defense Association, they could be right. The organization reports home-educated students, on average, score 30 points above the national average on standardized achievement tests. No independent data exist, and the Virginia Department of Education collects no information on home-schoolers' achievement.
Home-schooling families say their children learn better in the living room than in the classroom because they receive individualized attention, flexible lesson plans, shelter from the negative influence of drugs and violence and a religious grounding absent in public schools.
Predominantly Christian and conservative, home schoolers have drawn an unusual amount of attention this year with the entry of home-school advocate Mike Farris into statewide politics. Farris, who founded the Legal Defense Association, turned out great numbers of home schoolers to win the Republican nomination for lieutenant governor.
He has been attacked for calling the public school system "a godless monstrosity" and for calling on born-again Christians to pull their children out of school, statements made during the early years of his career as a constitutional lawyer.
But he has since backed down from that stance, and many home schoolers say their desire to keep their children at home should not be taken as a criticism of the public education system.
"That's just something I always wanted to do," said Lynelle Bishop, who has been teaching her 10-year-old son, Lee, at their Craig County home for six years.
"I guess the roots are probably religious," she said, "just wanting my child to get a balanced view of creation and evolution."
Like many home schoolers, Bishop creates her own curricula by mixing Christian textbooks with library research, home-computer programs, Bible study and other educational materials, such as math games. She rounds out her son's education with 4-H activities, community sports and social events organized by a local home-schooling support group.
Bishop's son is one of 17 children taught at home this year in Craig County, which boasts the highest percentage of home schoolers in Virginia. Student enrollment in Craig County totals 684 this year.
Statewide, the number of home schoolers is growing. It rose 28 percent in the last year for which statistics were available, from 4,560 in September 1991 to 5,842 in 1992.
Nationally, estimated numbers of home schoolers range from 350,000 to more than 500,000.
The numbers are likely much higher, however, because states regulate and track home schoolers differently, with some not regulating them at all.
Virginia records only those children kept home under a statute that allows a parent to teach if qualified by a four-year college degree, teacher's certificate or by following a state-approved curriculum or correspondence course.
The state does not track children kept out of school for religious reasons, nor does state law clarify whether families seeking that exemption must present their case to the local school board.
"It's a very poorly worded law," said Larry Fenzel, president of Greater Roanoke Home Educators, a support group for more than 200 home schoolers in the Roanoke Valley.
Under Virginia law, school boards "shall excuse" families whose religious convictions compel them to keep their children out of the public schools. But the law does not provide specifics for how that exemption should be obtained.
It does provide a high legal standard, however, for what constitutes a religious objection, said Education Department spokesman Jim Foudriat.
"You have to have bona fide religious reasons," he said. "You have to basically conscientiously object to public education."
People have been challenging compulsory education laws since they emerged on the books in the late 1800s and early part of this century. Laws allowing for religious exemptions first were enacted in the 1950s, said Chris Klicka, senior counsel for the Legal Defense Association, which provides legal representation to secure religious exemptions for its members nationwide.
Gaining such an exemption in Virginia has become easier since a 1991 state Supreme Court ruling found that families must prove their religious opposition to public schools only. Prior to that, they had to prove religious opposition to Christian and private schools as well.
Things were not easy for the Shifletts, who first sought a religious exemption in 1987. The first to ask for such an exemption in Bedford County, they were denied. Farris argued their case in court, where Audrey Shiflett was eventually designated a tutor and granted an exemption on that basis.
Other families simply hid what they were doing; nobody knows how many still do.
"Personally, I don't agree with that," Shiflett said. "But there's some folks who choose to do it that way. If it were me, I'd feel like I were hiding out in my house. I guess they don't want to feel obligated to anyone in any way."
Those who don't take a religious exemption must take their children for standardized testing each spring and submit the results to the local school division.
Parents find the process both nerve-racking and rewarding, said Bishop, who takes her son each spring to Bob Jones University for a Stanford Achievement Test series.
"I hold my breath until the scores come in," she said.
Bishop's son scores consistently at or above average, with particularly high marks in reading and science. But his mother still worries sometimes about whether she has enough expertise in math and science to carry him into the higher grades.
She plans to teach him for the next two or three years, then re-evaluate the situation.
"If it gets to be in his best interest for the technical achievement," she said, she'll place him in a Christian school.
Lee said he hopes it doesn't come to that.
"It would be nice if you could teach me high school," he told her during a recent interview.
Some parents do teach their children all the way through high school. If there are areas in which they feel unqualified, they rely on other home-school parents who know the subjects better.
Through the Greater Roanoke Home Educators, Marie Northington found someone to teach her daughter creative writing, American history, American and English literature and world history.
That parent sometimes taught more than a dozen students at a time, a situation the Northingtons liked, because it placed Michelle in a more traditional learning environment as she approached college age.
"Basically the idea was to let her become comfortable in the classroom setting, because at some point, she would go on to college," Northington said.
Now 19, her daughter holds a job in a Christian day-care center and takes night classes at Virginia Western Community College.
Ella and Larry Fenzel sent their oldest daughter to Virginia Western to round out some of the high school classes she couldn't get at home, such as chemistry and biology. Rebekah Fenzel, 18, is now a sophomore at Pensacola (Fla.) Christian College.
Others, such as Kurt Kochendarfer of Bedford, gain entry to even more competitive schools with their home-schooling degrees. Kurt attends the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis.
The toughest obstacle in getting him admitted was filling out the application, his mother, Linda, said.
Designed for students graduating from traditional schools, the application had columns for filling in items such as class rank and extracurricular activities that didn't fit Kurt's situation.
"With every page of application, there had to be for us a separate letter of explanation," Linda Kochendarfer said.
But Kurt, who knew from a very young age he wanted to attend a military academy, was well-prepared. He competed as a classical pianist, took four years of Russian at Hollins College, worked on computers and joined the Civil Air Patrol as part of his education.
Kochendarfer, who holds a teaching degree from Radford, also taught her two other sons, one of whom recently chose to attend a private school so he could become more involved in sports. The other son, who is learning-disabled, will finish his home studies this year.
"For us, it was a good alternative for our family, for the stages that they're in. But I don't think it's the be-all and end-all for everybody," she said. "I'm really sorry it's over, but I'm really glad we succeeded."
Keywords:
POLITICS
by CNB