Cost of Homeschooling

What would someone have to pay to have their child babysat for the 8 hour work day? I think $25 a day is a bargain and I’d happily pay that for my child to be a part of learning group led by a teacher with experience.

Good luck.

I assume you’ve checked the legalities — in some states “homeschool” must be your own children (though I suspect “tutoring” would be a loophole one could ply with some success); other states have different regulations if a student has already acquired that special needs label.
Have you considered just what would be involved in this and whether $25/day would begin to cover it? (And what ages are you looking at?) WOuld you do the whole curriculum (and have you got one put together or at least a framework from which to design, once you know your studetns’ needs) or just specific skills? Lunch? Insurance? Physical Activity?
Sometimes homeschool communities are sensitive about people trying to capitalize on their market; other times they *love* it. How well do you know the homeschoolers in yhour area>

Gosh, $25 a day would be fair for babysitting here, but I’d be charging that or more per hour for tutoring with effective methods.

Janis

Hmmm .. $25 per day is $125 per week or $25 x 180 = $4500. per school year. At that rate, you’re equalling the tuition of some of the less expensive (usually church-based) private schools.

(It’s amazing what you can discover when you actually look at numbers and their consequences.)

If you do this with more than two or three kids at a time, yes, you do become a school and all sorts of laws and legal safeguards apply — insurance and fire exits and curriculum requirements and whatnot. True, the states don’t often shut people down — but if the department of education was informed about it, you would have a lot of hoops to jump through.

Do you think you could really provide *all* the things needed to be a good all-day school experience? There’s everything from reading to math to phys ed to health to science and lots more. What you are proposing is different from a parent homeschooling their own children with only one child at a level, so that each child would get very individualized education — there are advantages to that which many people feel outweigh the disadvantages of not having a school building and staff and budget. Now, on the other hand, if the kids’ public school experience is a disaster sometimes an option like this can be a great improvement — but it is a question to think about.

And on the third hand, there is the option of tutoring. I offer tutoring at $25. to $30 per hour; but that is genuine one-to-one intensive work, and that is very different and often very much more effective than even small group work.

[quote=”victoria”]Hmmm .. $25 per day is $125 per week or $25 x 180 = $4500. per school year. At that rate, you’re equalling the tuition of some of the less expensive (usually church-based) private schools.

Yes but those schools are subsidized. The tuition charged to parents is less because they are subsidized. I’m not certain what your point is. I couldn’t charge less than $25 a day and have people take the school seriously I don’t think.

If you do this with more than two or three kids at a time, yes, you do become a school

Well not in my state actually. I could charge that here and call it babysitting regardless of what we actually do doing the day. Here we don’t automatically become a school. Here there are many homes where children are taken in and watched for the day and that home doesn’t automatically become a school.

and all sorts of laws and legal safeguards apply — insurance and fire exits and curriculum requirements and whatnot

No, not here. Private schools here don’t have to follow state curriculum requirements. They’re free to establish their own. I think you might be a public school teacher.

. True, the states don’t often shut people down — but if the department of education was informed about it, you would have a lot of hoops to jump through.

Our state is very friendly to homeschooling - we have many religious groups here that have their children homeschooled in small home settings. Here we have laws that protect small informal schools that are operated out of homes or churches. We have a lot of Amish here who lobbied for these laws very successfully.

Do you think you could really provide *all* the things needed to be a good all-day school experience?

I think there are many different definitions of a “good, all-day school experience”. I don’t think there’s just one way to a good school experience and I think history bears that out. There are many different colleges out there from Cal Tech to Hampshire to Notre Dame to Brandeis. Their curriculums are very different, their requirements are very different and they offer very different experiences. Just like that, there are many different ways to a good all day school experience.

There’s everything from reading to math to phys ed to health to science and lots more. What you are proposing is different from a parent homeschooling their own children with only one child at a level, so that each child would get very individualized education

I don’t know really what the OP was proposing but what Im’ working on here is more like the old one room schoolhouse which had 10 to 20 children in it. 20 would be too much for me alone but I could do up to 5-7 by myself and I’d like to start there. I have other parents who have teaching backgrounds and one of them is interested in teaching also if her child can go for free. With another teacher, I figure we could have about 14-15 children total and we’ll have it be like the old one room schoolhouse. My background is literature and history and hers is math and science.

Our older students we can send out for courses at our local community college or the nearby colleges. We have two colleges who are very willing to have our older students come take advanced math and science courses with them and will give them credit for their work. We’re thinking about organizing the kids into a soccer team in fall, a basketball team in winter and a softball team in spring and have some other homeschooling schools ready to play our team.

— there are advantages to that which many people feel outweigh the disadvantages of not having a school building and staff and budget. Now, on the other hand, if the kids’ public school experience is a disaster sometimes an option like this can be a great improvement — but it is a question to think about.

And on the third hand, there is the option of tutoring. I offer tutoring at $25. to $30 per hour; but that is genuine one-to-one intensive work, and that is very different and often very much more effective than even small group work.[/quote]

I answered what I thought was an honest question as honestly as I could, and you replied with what you obviously intend as a put-down “I think you might be a public school teacher”.

Well, from the sound of it you intend to ignore any advice that doesn’t fit your own opinions, but just in case you are listening and for the information of others here, another try:

No. I’m not a public school teacher. Tried it for several years, found that I and the system have very basic philosophical differences, and I am now a professional tutor.

The information I gave you came from my own researches into setting up my own business — I looked into what I would need to do to set up classes in my own home, and found the limitations that I mentioned to you.

There is a very, very large difference between what many people find they can get away with and what the law actually says. Sure you can drive over 70 most of the time on most highways, but that sign says 55 and yes, you can get a ticket for going 56; it doesn’t happen often, but if the authorities do decide to enforce the law you don’t have a leg to stand on. Same with education/ child care; people do all sorts of things for years and the law winks at them, but when there’s a complaint a lot of places get shut down.

For various historical reasons, religious groups are very strongly protected under the American legal system, and they can do many things that private people and companies cannot. When I looked into setting up my own business, I found in particular that in Maryland, there were two separate sets of regulations for schools, religious and others. A school that operates under the umbrella of a church, especially in a church building (or in the case of the Amish, a home that also has a space for religious purposes) is free of a *lot* of regulations that secular schools must follow. This is probably the case with many of the small schools you have seen. (I considered looking for a religion to put a school under, but decided against it for myself.)

Calling it babysitting is opening up a whole new set of questions. The law requires that every parent educate their children at least between ages 6 and 16. If a challenge arises, and you claim you are only babysitting and not educating, then the parents are open to charges of neglect and can end up having their custody of the children challenged — yes, this has happened. Even if they win, the emotional damage and court costs are not worth it.
If you claim that you are educating, then you are operating an unlicensed school and have your own legal mess, as well as whatever happens to the parents and students.

Child care is under departments of social services, which are notoriously underfunded and understaffed, so many people get away with all sorts of things, often for a long time. You may feel that you are in a rural area where lots of people are doing this sort of thing and nobody is coming out to check so you can do it too. But it only takes one complaint. It’s a big risk to take with your reputation and career, not to mention whatever happens to the kids and their families.

Instead of casually looking around and saying that you see a lot of people doing this, you really need to do some serious research. First contact your state department of education directly. Some of them even have internet sites, most publish regulations which are available in larger public libraries, and you can always spend several days on the telephone chasing people down until you find someone who knows about these things.
Then you should talk to the people running those other schools and find out how theygot started and under what legal (or not) umbrella they operate.

She didn’t say being a ps teacher would be a put-down — it would have been a logical reason for the attention to rules and regs.
I do think she missed the point about codes and laws, though (how “insurance and Fire exits” disappeared and only “curriculum requirements” remained I don’t know) — in many places as soon as you take in X number of stranger’s children, babysitting or whatever, you need to meet building codes (wheelchair access, certain kinsd of locks on doors, kitchens not accessible). Friend of mine successfully opened a day care center out of her house but that was because they pretty much had to rebuild the thing when they bought it anyway and could work that stuff into it.
Some friends and I explored starting up the Blue Robe School for Cosmic Enlightenment and Good Grammar as a sort of brainstorming exercise when our public school was a source of extreme stress. It can be done but one bottom line is, how many adults would be there for when one of the kiddos gets an appendicitis attack? (We, of course, had several volunteers for school secretary because we were not going to admit students who had a history of nausea in the school office. ) We also had different kinds of expenses to consider because we were talking middle school.
I’m not trying to shoot down the idea at all — but agree it crosses a legal threshold in many states (but perhaps not all — if she’s not in the East) in several different arenas, where the “homeschool friendliness” could suddenly not apply. And given some of the recent absurd press focusing on homeschooling as having its “secrets” (abusive parents who claim to be “homeschooling” so they don’t have to send children to school) there might be a slightly higher risk that more attention would be paid to formerly unenforced laws and policies (or, as has been known to happen, public official types would make ‘em up as they go).

Last I checked, this sort of thing was against the law.