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Frank Varga

Before Kaleb Slaatthaug was born, his parents could almost taste the freedom of his father’s impending retirement and the traveling it would allow them to do.

Two weeks after Kory Slaatthaug’s 55th birthday, Kaleb was born. When it came time for him to start school, the family wasn’t ready to trade in their globe-trotting lifestyle for a regular school routine.

“It was like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is going to crimp our style,’” said Mickey Bambrick, Kaleb’s mother.

“Now that we’re free from work, we didn’t want to have to be stuck with the school schedule.”

Instead, the family sets its own school schedule, one that includes extensive travel.

At his parents’ house near La Conner, Kyle, now an energetic and talkative 8-year-old, goes to school at the dining room table. He jumps up to talk about his books, which sprawl across the entire surface of the living room coffee table. His teachers are Mom and Dad.

A 2003 U.S. Department of Education survey suggested that about 1.1 million American students were homeschooled that year. That’s up from 850,000 in a 1999 survey.

Washington’s permissive “home-based instruction” law gives parents control over books and materials, educational philosophy, teaching methods, and location and times of instruction.

By law, parents must register with their school district, keep records of some annual measure of academic progress and show that they are qualified to instruct their students through one of several options.

At least 10,890 Washington families homeschooled more than 17,500 students during the 2006-2007 school year, according to data collected by the state Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction.

Those estimates are likely low, because homeschooling families self-report, and not all districts pass the data along to the state, OSPI spokesman Nathan Olson said.

A 1998 study funded by the Home School Legal Defense Association suggested that homeschoolers, on average, score better than the national average on achievement tests.

Other factors may play a role in that. Homeschoolers are more likely to have married parents with above-average income and education and one parent who doesn’t work outside the home, according to a 2001 U.S. Census Bureau report.

There are no real differences between traditional high school graduates and homeschooled students in performance in the first year of college, according to a 2004 paper in the Journal of College Admission.

Skagit County homeschoolers say their motivations for taking education into their own hands vary. They do it to provide students with an experience tailored to their needs, to retain greater parental control over teaching style, curriculum and the learning environment, to guard a flexible family schedule, to take a break from the mainstream classroom or to form closer family bonds.

Homeschooling allows Kaleb’s family to make annual trips to Kory Slaatthaug’s native Norway and a monthlong road trip in the western United States every year. For his 7th birthday, Kaleb helped plan a family trip to Australia and Japan, researching museums and transportation options.

“He’s a privileged child, that’s all I can say,” Bambrick said. “But then we always study up before we go. He turns into a tour guide.”

Archeologist Kelly Bush didn’t want her 8-year-old sitting at a desk all day in a crowded classroom when he could be with her on trips to do archeological field work, work in the garden, visit the library, or help his dad rebuild a tractor in the shop at their home along the south side of the Skagit River, west of Concrete.

Susan Allison of Sedro-Woolley happily put two children, now 17 and 22, through public school. She thought a lot of homeschoolers were just “freaky mothers,” she said, until her youngest child needed an alternative to the mainstream seventh-grade classroom.

Tami Hodge of Mount Vernon wanted to make sure her oldest son didn’t “fall through the cracks” because of a vision problem. She also wanted her two sons’ educations to reflect the family’s Christian faith, not taught in public schools because of the separation of church and state.


Sharing values

When her two sons were babies, Hodge didn’t intend to homeschool. Then a preschool teacher said she suspected that Hodge’s oldest son, Anthony, might be having vision problems. An eye specialist found that the then 4-year-old had a condition that made it difficult for his eyes to track together.

Hodge and her husband wanted to make sure their sons enjoyed learning and never had a chance of “falling through the cracks,” she said.

They wanted to make sure that Anthony didn’t have trouble in school while he worked to improve his vision. They decided to try homeschooling.

“For us it was, ‘OK Lord, is this what you’re showing us to do as parents?’” Hodge said.

Homeschooling gave Anthony one-on-one attention. The more flexible school schedule also allowed for once-a-week trips to Lynnwood for vision therapy to treat the problem.

Anthony, now 15, and his 13-year-old brother, Dylan, have been homeschooled ever since.

Hodge said homeschooling has given the boys a love of learning while instilling them with their parents’ values.

“I believe that we have really good, open communication,” Hodge said. “They’re teenagers and I enjoy them, and we’re a part of their lives.”

The family’s flexible approach — she calls it “the Hodge-podge of homeschooling”— revolves around the boys’ interests and current events as well as more conventional math and reading lessons.

Recently, they researched Hurricane Dean, studied a biography of Mary Slessor, a 19th century Scottish missionary to Nigeria, and took a spur-of-the-moment trip to the Museum of Flight in Tukwila on a day admission was free.

They also have plenty of opportunities to socialize, Hodge said, including church, soccer, baseball, bowling and a Child Evangelism Fellowship group that teaches them to share the Gospel with other kids.

Their education also includes their parents’ religious beliefs and values, something Hodge sees lacking in public school, where religious instruction is prohibited.

“You see everything else but God,” she said.

Another perk of homeschooling, Hodge said, is that the whole family is engaged in learning and enjoying it.

When she was in school, learning felt more like a chore to be finished than fun, Hodge said. She wants to instill a different perspective in her sons, she said.

“I had a view of learning as if it stopped at a certain point, and it doesn’t,” she said. “Learning should be a lifetime thing.”


Exploring interests

There’s no typical school day for 8-year-old Hamilton Bush, and he never spends more than an hour a day sitting down at a table working on math problems or practicing handwriting.

If one of his archeologist mother’s projects takes her to Ross Lake for a month, he comes along. If he wants to mix vinegar and baking soda in a pop bottle and learn about how they produce the carbon dioxide gas he traps in balloons, he’s allowed. If he wants to disassemble and rebuild an old computer, that’s fine too.

Hamilton is good with numbers and loves design projects, said Kelly Bush, his mother.

She said she’s put off by the rigidity of public school curriculum and worries that the emphasis on the Washington Assessment of Student Learning standardized test runs counter to real learning.

“I think they shoot to the middle, and I think they lose the top and bottom,” she said.

Bush said she’s also reluctant to give her son all of the vaccinations required to attend public school because she doesn’t think there is enough long-range research into their effects in young children.

The family’s homeschool approach, sometimes called “unschooling,” looks to everyday life and the child’s natural interests to steer his learning. For Hamilton, that means lots of time spent on science and figuring out how things work.

Recently, the family watched a thunder and lightning storm and then researched on the Web to learn how light and sound waves travel.

Hamilton also does a lot of projects, creating posters or Powerpoint presentations to explain what he’s learned, Bush said. At 8, he understands algebra, and the family plans to move to trigonometry soon.

“Just because it’s not curriculum-based learning doesn’t mean he’s not getting challenged,” Bush said.


A closer bond

Susan Allison “wasn’t a fan” of homeschooling, suspecting some parents might not understand all the work that goes into educating a child.

But when her youngest son, Kyle, was unhappy with school at the start of seventh-grade, Allison started searching for alternatives.

Kyle was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome. People with Asperger’s are of normal intelligence but can struggle with social interaction.

“He kind of has some quirks,” Allison said of her son. “He was having some problems socially at school. He was kind of a target for other kids.”

Allison went looking for options. Bruce Vilders, director of the Sedro-Woolley School District’s Home School Partnership program, convinced Allison to try homeschooling with Kyle for seventh grade.

Mother and son stuck to a strict routine, Allison said. They would get up early in the morning, eat breakfast together, work at a table in the living room for 21⁄2 hours on materials they checked out from the school district program. Then they’d ride their bikes to the library and back home, eat lunch and study for another 21⁄2 hours.

Kyle, now 14, missed his friends and chose to return to Cascade Middle School for the eighth grade. But Allison calls their homeschool experiment “the most wonderful, greatest experience of my life.”

Allison feels a closer connection to her son, thanks to all the shared bike rides and library visits.

“I’m ashamed to say, I did not know my son until that time,” she said.

Allison said she understands now what causes her son to have problems and what she can do to help him. Kyle rides his bike to school with a couple of friends and is having an easier time socializing, she said.

Allison credits the year at home for her son’s greater maturity and confidence and for her newfound respect for homeschoolers.

“It’s a lot of work, and it’s hard,” she said.