Susan Walsh/Associated Press
More than 40 families participate in a home-schooling cooperative at Andrews Air Force Base.
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: October 27, 2013
ANDREWS AIR FORCE BASE, Md. — More military parents are embracing home schooling, rejecting the age-old tradition of switching schools for their children when they are redeployed.
They are finding support on bases, which are providing resources for
families and opening their doors to home-schooling cooperatives.
“If there’s a military installation, there’s very likely home-schoolers
there if you look,” said Nicole McGhee, 31, of Cameron, N.C., a mother
of three with a husband stationed at Fort Bragg in North Carolina who
runs a Facebook site on military home schooling.
At Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia, the library has special
presentations for home-schoolers on Benjamin Franklin and static
electricity. Fort Bragg offers daytime taekwondo classes. At Fort
Belvoir, Va., there are athletic events and a parent-led chemistry lab.
At Andrews Air Force Base about 15 miles outside Washington, more than
40 families participate on Wednesdays in a home schooling cooperative at
the base’s youth center. This month, teenagers in one room warmed up
for a mock audition, while younger children downstairs learned to sign
words like “play” and searched for “Special Agent Stan” during a math
game. Military mothers taught each class.
Military families move nearly every three years on average. The
transition can be tough for children, and home schooling can make it
easier, advocates say. The children do not have to adjust to a new
teacher or worry that they are behind because the new school’s
curriculum is different.
Some military families also cite the same reasons for choosing home
schooling as those in the civilian population: a desire to educate their
children in a religious environment, concern about the school
environment, or to provide for a child with special needs.
Two 16-year-olds, Andrew Roberts and Christina Cagle, interviewed at the
Andrews co-op, said they were happy their parents had made the decision
to home-school them. Andrew said he thinks he gets more done in a
school day than his peers in a traditional school, and he sees his
friends at Bible study groups and during other social events with
teenagers on base.
“There’s not a lot of peer pressure considering you’re mostly with your
siblings and it’s kind of a relaxed environment,” Christina said.
Participating military families say home schooling also allows them to
schedule school time around the rigorous deployment, training and school
schedules of the military member.
“We can take time off when Dad is home and work harder when he is gone,” Ms. McGhee said, “so we have that flexibility.”
Sharon Moore, the education liaison at Andrews who helps parents with
school-related matters, said that at the height of the summer military
moving season, she typically gets 20 calls from families moving to the
base with home-schooling questions. She links them with families from
the co-op and includes the home-schooled children during back-to-school
events and other functions like a trip to a planetarium.
“It comes down to they are military children, and we love our military
children,” said Ms. Moore, a former schoolteacher. “We recognize that
they have unique needs that sometimes other children don’t have, and we
want to make sure that we do our best to serve them and meet those needs
because they have given so much to this country.”
Strong support for home schooling by the military was uncommon in the
1990s, said Mike Donnelly, a former Army officer who is a lawyer with
the Home School Legal Defense Association, based in Purcellville, Va. He
said that changed in 2002 with a militarywide memo that said home
schooling can be a “legitimate alternative form of education” for
military children. Most military bases today are friendly toward
home-schoolers, he said.
Lindsay Burchette said she first considered home schooling in 2011 when
her husband joined the Navy and they were living in suburban Knoxville,
Tenn. Her son, then 8, feared having to start a new school in Pensacola,
Fla., when they moved there for her husband’s training and then again
within a year when they reached his permanent duty station at Andrews.
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