Everybody knows that the number of homeschoolers has increased dramatically over the past decade.  The reasons for more homeschooling have been split between primarily academic and primarily religious, though I’d throw in “primarily philosophical” as a category that seems to be expanding, though this probably gets lumped into “primarily academic”.

Homeschooling is a substantial commitment and means giving up around $12,000 per student per year in taxpayer funded support of the public school systems.  So I expected a few homeschooled students to join MIST Academy when I moved here.  A few have, but surprisingly the larger number of homeschoolers joining MIST seem to be from the Huntsville/Madison area which makes me ponder whether more families there are rejecting the public schools for academic reasons.  Having spent two years teaching there, I can understand.  Nobody seems satisfied.

This makes me wonder: will there be some city in which the academic homeschool community grows so large that they simply become a sort of mega-school community?  I bet so!  It will be interesting to see where this happens first.  It will also be interesting to see how the tax politics change when that happens.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 21st, 2011 at 10:07 am and is filed under Alabama, Birmingham, Economics, Education, Huntsville. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.