Why we homeschool (& maybe you should too)

I live in the free state of Florida, so when I say we have a lot of school choice options, I am not being dramatic or overselling. In a little over the last decade, I have lived in four states, five cities, and heavily researched probably 30 school districts on my way to finding the “perfect education” for my children. We actually moved to Florida, from Charlotte, because of the state of the education system in Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools. 

Don’t come at me if you live in Charlotte, I’m sure there are great fits for someone, but that was not the case for our family when it came to what we were looking for in education. We had a friend whose child attended a very high-end private school and to be honest I immediately dreamed of sending my children there until I saw the ~20k a year price tag and realized that my husband, a disabled veteran who recently left the workforce and now on a fixed income through the VA, was not going to be able to foot the bill. (“You can work”… yes, and I’ll get to that, but to be clear despite the fact that I do work from home I firmly believe in men being the provider for the home and my husband did not need to carry the weight of raising our three children, three and under, while in recovery with ptsd). Let’s just keep it short and say that option was off the table. We knew we had to move (and a story for another day on how we ended up in St. Augustine, FL), and we ended up in “the best school district in Florida”. Problem solved, right? 

To be honest, I went to a private school, and my entire life, I wanted to send my children to public school. The grass really is greener on the other side… I went to one of the best schools in the country growing up and have nothing negative to say about it. The problem I dealt with was not the school but the children who attended it. I felt out of place and disconnected despite having gone there for all of my education. So when I fell out of touch with my closest friend, I was desperate for a friend group. You want to know who the most inviting kids are at schools? The ones doing things you don’t want your kids to do. It’s a really disappointing fact that I wish some sociologist somewhere would look into because my childhood was robbed one night through a cascade of negative events that left me broken. Before that, I was a really good kid who only wanted to make my parents happy. After that, I was a kid who wanted to go back to being good and hid everything I was suffering through from my parents so that they could still be happy if I couldn’t be. The sad thing is that I had the best parents a girl could ask for, and if I had come to them, they would have immediately made it better, and I knew that! I just didn’t want them to hurt like I did, so I suffered in silence. For some reason, I believed that private education meant being surrounded by families with money and trying to keep up with the Joneses*. 

*I have a friend with this last name and she’s the most incredible person, full of God and love, so everytime I say this I think “yes, I actually want to keep up with her because that means I’m racing after God’s heart with all my might and absolutely killing it on the home front. But for this story, I’m going with the traditional old-school colloquialism that is more “show me the money”.*

Those kids I went to school with had credit cards, new cars, and no rules. To be fair, at some point, I also had the new car and the credit card because my parents wanted me to feel like one of the crew. My car was a Hyundai Elantra, which was very different from my friends driving special edition Lexuses or Evos with souped-up engines. That’s not me complaining, just explaining I still wasn’t the typical kid at my school. My credit card was solely for gas while others racked up food, clothes, and designer handbags. Not everyone was like that; there were kids just like me, but I noticed that the ones who had all the money rarely had very involved parents. They had all the access to adult things because they were expected to be an adult. Their parents, albeit with good intentions, were off conquering the world. I got to know some pretty interesting families who owned sports teams, had their own private planes, and season tickets to every opera and playhouse. They were some of the kindest people I’ve ever met, so whatever television shows tell you, rich people aren’t the enemy. These parents were just busy, setting off to other countries to handle business, in and out of the picture due to major work projects, and somehow they still cared enough to show up to plays and big games. I think my school was an enigma now that I write it. Those parents truly loved their children, and at the same time, let them grow up really fast. 

My school was not easy… the education was intense and required students to put in their very best all the time. You couldn’t slack and still graduate from our high school. As I write that, I know that everyone I went to school with would laugh because we THOUGHT we were lazy. We would be out partying until midnight and then come home and stay up all night writing a 15-page paper, while slightly inebriated. The party girl thing isn’t something I’m proud of; it’s just the reality of how I lived my life, so to tell my story, you’ll hear about it. It’s also why my children will be raised to stay children as long as possible. I didn’t even realize until I got to college that my time at “the Academy” was similar to college in every way. My freshman year of college felt like a joke, and in English class, my teacher actually asked if I was from my high school because she could tell from my writing. Needless to say, we were prepared for life. 

How prepared do we want our kids to be? Do we want them to live like they are in their twenties when they are tweens? 

I still have nothing bad to say about my high school, despite having endured some very negative things, because the school itself is a beautiful model of what school should look like, and I am so grateful that options like that exist in the world.  So why don’t my kids go to private school?

I wanted my children to grow up around “normal people” and to be able to walk to their friends' houses. At my church, I never fit in because I went to a different school. I thought that if I went to the same school, I would have had church friends and none of the bad stuff would have happened. I wouldn’t have been lonely because I would have just hung out with my neighborhood friends all the time. Forty-five-minute drives for hangouts really put a damper on hanging with friends until I could drive. That’s it. It really wasn’t a well-thought-out mentality, despite how much time I thought about it. So when my daughter wrapped up VPK (Florida preschool) at a local church, I enrolled my oldest at our local public school. I was so excited for this opportunity for her and knew she would thrive, and she did… for the first month before she got very sick (we get a-symptomatic strep throat and it turned into scarlet fever, genetics are fun), and got stuck at home for weeks and weeks. Luckily, she was okay, and when she returned, she found that it didn’t feel the same. People had new friend groups, and she felt off going into school. Spring break came around, and the world shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Come autumn, when the kids returned and my second daughter joined in at our local school, it became glaringly clear that this was not what we wanted for our children. The school hid a lot from us, didn’t take my daughter’s asthma into consideration, and communication between teachers and children shifted. Yes, this could have been a COVID-era issue, but from parents whose children attended after we left, we found this has continued. We also heard from friends about morality issues already entering the conversation with 1st/2nd graders that we found inappropriate. Everything added up to show us that in the public system, we were allowing the government and local administration to raise our children for eight hours a day, and we didn’t agree with the way they were doing it. We began to realize that as Christians, we would also have long-term issues as our children got older with curriculum in science and history, and decided we needed to shift to a curriculum that would better suit our family. 

That led us to private education, and like I said in the beginning… Florida is the best. We qualified for school vouchers, and our children attended for free. At one point, they actually had leftover funds that covered their uniforms since they were required for attendance. We went to two different private schools, one of which I would recommend to other families and one of which I very quietly warned others about after we left. I saw an insane amount of bullying, including that of a teacher towards my daughter, which put her in therapy in second grade, so we left the first school. The second school we attended, we genuinely loved, and without it, we would have had major issues as a family. Our home flooded during Hurricane Ian and Hurricane Nicole, which left us homeless, then living with a friend, and then in a rental home while we rebuilt our home ourselves. Insurance paid enough for us to buy the supplies, but if the children hadn’t been “in school,” we wouldn’t have ever finished. This is proof to me that there are seasons for everything. This was hands down the worst year of our lives- we lost a baby through miscarriage, then my uncle (he married me and my husband and we were very close) passed away, then my mama passed away. By the time we lost my mom, we knew… we didn’t want to waste our days away from each other. The one thing we couldn’t get more of in this life was time. 

We felt like we had lost a custody case with our children against the Department of Education, and all we had left were nights and weekends. 

We love our kids, but we like them too. I didn’t want their entire childhood to be spent with someone else. Each year, a new teacher that they connected to and then leaves again. They deserved more. They deserved us. So when I finally got the courage to ask my husband if we could homeschool, his response was “What took you so long?”. 

Homeschooling has given my children back their childhood. It has given motherhood back to me, and my husband gets to be the father he dreamed of being. It’s impossible to have all of this when you are only spending 30 minutes a day together after homework. When my kids were in school, we even hated having them in sports because the only time we had together was our bedtime ritual. We felt rushed every second of every day. Homeschooling matches our island lifestyle, slowed down and focused on what matters. 

If you are thinking about homeschooling, I would encourage you to look at how much time you are really getting with your kids. We had lots of reasons why we are happy we chose to homeschool from curriculum control to faith-led learning to enhanced experience for our children, but the number one reason we homeschool is because this time is short and we are gaining back over 1000 hours each year with our kids and that’s not even including transportation time. For us, that means we are spending most of that 1,000+ hours exploring nature, outside, and of course, as a family.

For more information on homeschooling and slowing down life, follow us on TikTok or IG @saltrunschoolhouse and join our mailing list.