Common Fears: Homeschooling is a luxury we can’t afford.
After the silly “what about socialization” question, probably the most common comment I get about homeschooling is, “Oh, I wish we could have afforded to do that.”
While it’s obvious that a committed homeschool family is likely to have just one breadwinner and one parent who is full-time at home or only working part-time, I do want to push back on the idea that homeschooling (or living on one income) is only possible for the wealthy. Almost all of the homeschool families I know personally from my childhood and now as a homeschool mom are very middle class. I grew up lower middle class in the Midwest. My dad was a classical musician, and my mom stayed home and homeschooled us. There were none of the government-funded programs for homeschoolers that I will mention later. We simply had a small home, a strict budget, and a simple life. When my husband and I married straight out of college, we planned to be a single income family, so I worked while he was in grad school, and he has worked since I’ve been a full-time stay-at-home mom. While we are comfortable now, our early years of parenting and homeschooling were not without sacrifice. We didn’t take expensive vacations, our kids wore hand-me-downs, and we had a strict budget. We did this in big cities in the Midwest as well as in Malibu, California, where it was indeed more challenging than in lower cost of living areas, but it was possible. We have friends homeschooling and living on one income on the expensive East and West Coasts and all across the country. It is possible to live on one income, especially if you’ve planned for it ahead of time, but even if you suddenly decide ten years into parenting to make a radical lifestyle change.
In many middle class families, a double income family is actually spending almost all or more of one of the parents’ income just to cover childcare. When we started homeschooling in California, the public schools were not an acceptable alternative to us for a variety of reasons, so I crunched the numbers, and it would cost more than my potential income for our family if I went back to work as a teacher, put our son in private school, and sent our then-three younger girls to daycare. In other words, my husband would be bankrolling my work. I was saving our family a significant amount of money by staying home and attending to the kids’ education myself. Now that we have added a child with significant disabilities to our family, the cost of replacing my full-time care with a paid caregiver would be even more financially prohibitive. Yes, once your children are school-age, childcare is “free” if you put your kids in public school, but for many families, this is not desirable. If you’re really dedicated to providing a first-rate education for your child, one of the parents can work full-time just to pay for private school tuition, or that same parent can stay home and teach the children. One of my son’s favorite tutors is a homeschool dad who crunched the numbers and realized they could live on his wife’s salary as a university professor while he taught their boys himself. He has tutored for homeschool co-ops and more recently invited friends like my son to join them in subjects like church history and Koine Greek, so more than just their family benefits from his commitment.
Homeschooling is also as expensive or inexpensive as you choose to make it. In the 80s and 90s, my mom and her friends traded textbooks back and forth, and we took advantage of the public library and filled our shelves with library book sale finds. Families routinely spent under $100 on new homeschool materials in a given year. In the internet age, there are many free or very inexpensive resources for families, including entire K-12 curricula using public domain materials. You can buy huge packages of new curriculum and resources for each grade, but you really only need invest once in a basic math manipulatives kit that you can use throughout elementary school, and a lot of those other extras aren’t really necessary. For my fifth child, I am using the same phonics and math books that I purchased (in some cases, used!) for my first child. My only occasional new purchase is workbooks for some subjects, but by middle school, my children are primarily using a nonconsumable math textbook and doing all of their written work in a 25 cent spiral notebook. Last year, two of my daughters used Saxon math books that my mom had purchased for me in the early 90s, reused for my brothers, and then saved for twenty-five years. Another daughter used an Algebra II book that I purchased for $2 at a homeschool used book exchange. We do choose to pay out of pocket for online Latin and Great Books classes, but the combined cost of all of my son’s online classes and local tutorials his junior and senior years of high school was still less than one year of private school tuition. You can spend a lot on homeschool curriculum, but you certainly do not have to.
One development that we have taken advantage of in multiple states is that many school districts are partnering with charter programs to create virtual schools and other programs that provide support for homeschoolers. The parents are still the primary educators and get to use their preferred curriculum, but these programs provide practical and often financial support alongside the parent-teachers. In California, we homeschooled under the umbrella of a virtual charter network that provided supervising mentor teachers for support as well as paying up to $3000/child on approved online classes, secular school curriculum and materials, music, sports, and art lessons, and admission to museums and historical sites like Alcatraz. In Iowa, we worked with a homeschool assistance program through a local school district that had a hefty homeschool curriculum library (from which we could check out our school books for the year and request any new secular curriculum needed) as well as free enrichment classes and a homeschool orchestra (complete with free instrument rental). In Indiana, one of our daughters is enrolled in a educational service that provides $1900 a year to buy approved technology (like a laptop for online classes), pays for music and sports lessons, or provides curriculum and school supplies. We have also participated in field trips and opportunities to meet other homeschoolers in the area. Many states are seeking to expand such programs, which may require students to send in work samples to supervising teachers and/or participate in the state testing that public schools have to do. Our supervising teacher from California is still a close family friend, and we are still using many of the books and art supplies we purchased through the program over a decade ago.
For some purist homeschoolers, such state-funded programs are an opportunity for government overreach of homeschoolers, and our family always committed to not changing anything about the way we homeschool because of state funds. We have written letters to our representatives when proposed legislation comes up that might place an undue burden on homeschoolers. When we use religious materials or participate in explicitly Christian programs, we simply don’t use them for our work samples, and the reality is that much of what we use for our core subjects is not religious in nature. In Indiana, the requirements were not worth the hassle for our high school children or special needs child, so only one of our children is in the program. But for many families, if finances are tight, having even a couple thousand dollars per child to cover curriculum and extracurriculars makes homeschooling possible. Every state is different, but do look into the options in your home state to determine whether there is support available and whether it is right for you.
The bottom line is that homeschooling need not be a luxury lifestyle choice.
