It is hardly news that homeschooling has taken off around the country, especially since Covid. Over the last year alone, according to the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey, the number of US homeschooled students has gone from 3.6 million to 4 million—an 11 percent increase.
Less well-known is the role America’s churches have played in not only facilitating the spread of homeschooling but in helping to make it a far more collaborative and even highly structured activity. By providing groups of homeschool families with a space that goes largely unused during the week and a small supervisory staff, many parishes have successfully combined online curricula with an environment more typical of a conventional public or private school.
Sometimes this has been accomplished by letting an outside organization administer the program. In Upper Marlboro, Maryland, for example, the Providence St. John Baptist Church hosts the eXtend Homeschool Tutorial which, under the leadership of its director Kym Kent, educates more than 100 children in everything from third-grade English to high-school chemistry and aviation science. Families can choose from an à la carte menu of inexpensively supervised courses, averaging $350 apiece, or use the curriculum to simulate a fully functioning school.
On the other hand, the Grow Christina Learning Center at the New Life Worship Center, an Assemblies of God church in Worcester, Massachusetts, is very much a project of the congregation. By providing Program Director Elizabeth Lopez with extensive volunteer help, the church enables 85 homeschool students in their largely Hispanic community to get the equivalent of a K–12th-grade private-school education for just $2,400 a year. “From the beginning we’ve all known it was part of God’s plan for us to take on this assignment,” says Lopez. […]
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