Finding the Mother Lode!

Homeschool Blogs are everywhere! I mean EVERYWHERE. Sometimes they are hard to find though. However, I have located two that are an excellent resource. The first one Is called WHY HOMESCHOOL and the second one is THE THINKING MOTHER. They not only inspire the homeschooling parent, but these two have an abundance of links to other homeschool blogs and resources. The other blogs that they link to in turn link to more blogs and resource sites. Before you know it you have travelled around the world within a few mouse clicks! These two sites generate a lot of traffic to their sites too. A lot of that has to do with the fact that they have been around for a few years. Maybe this site will be as beneficial in a couple of years. So, if you live around Dayton, Ohio and would like to contribute to this site or want me to link you your homeschool blog then send me an email. In the meantime I will continue to search and pull as much information that I can to this site so Dayton parents don't feel like they are alone.

Home School Library Group

On Tuesday April 24th the East Dayton Branch of the Montgomery County library has a homeschool group meet at 1 PM. This is located at 2008 Wyoming St. in Dayton. They do this twice a month on Tuesdays.
I have attended two of these. The first one had 4 parents and the second on had just two. There is usually a story or poetry and a craft of some kind. I got to discuss whether I should put this site together with the other parents. I plan to be there since it is close. I would recommend that everyone attend who can. The library wants to get more involved with the home schooling community. If people don't support the library's effort then they will withdraw from offering the facility. If we can make this program a success in East Dayton, I'm sure the library would be willing to expand activities directed at home schoolers to other branches.

A Follow Up to My Last Post

I sat through a long presentation by Dr. Mack from Dayton Public Schools on Thursday evening at the Southeast Dayton Priority Board office. He made every effort to explain how changes in State funding are causing a projected $30 million deficit in their $182 million spending budget (Not $225 million since they have to give charter schools $43 million.) That is still over $11,000 per child. He did elaborate on the fact that 20% of DPS students are "special needs" cases and some of those cause the costs of education to be higher since private and charter schools are not obligated to teach those students.
I asked one question. "If the 6000 charter school students attended DPS, would we need the levy?" His answer was a firm "No." Which pretty much proved the point of Wednesdays post.

I also pointed out that a private school education costs $5000 to $7000 a year in this region.

I think it is wrong for any organization to impose a tax when you fear and cannot keep pace with your competition.

Public School Ratings

I picked up a copy of this at the local library a couple of weeks ago.




This week I decided to look at it. I noticed that it ranked public and charter schools and listed the number of students for each school. I grabbed a piece of paper and then I did some number crunching since those of us who live in Dayton are facing an emergency school levy vote next month. Dayton Public Schools is wanting to raise $30 million a year to support their $225 million a year budget.

Here are the results. I must state that all of the information came from this booklet so if you don't believe me, go get yourself a copy and do the research! I won't be biased either and all opinions expressed are my own (not that I'm giving one).

The booklet lists 86 schools. Dayton Public Schools make up 34 of those and charter schools account for 17 the rest are private or special schools and they aren't required to release performance results.

16121 students attend DPS (73%) while 5885 students attend charter schools (27%) the number of publicly funded students totals 22007.

Of the 34 DPS schools 4 are new and have no rating from the Ohio Department of Education. The rest are as follows

Academic Emergency 4

Academic Watch 11

Continuous Improvement 13

Effective 1 (Stivers)

Excellent 1 (Dayton Early Colledge Academy)

The "No child left behind" law requires that schools exhibit "adequate yearly progress". For DPS only 8 achieved this while 23 failed (3 of the new schools have no statistics).

Now for the Charter Schools

Academic Emergency 3

Academic Watch 2

Continuous Improvement 9

Effective 2

Of these, 4 achieved the AYP while 11 failed.

The Dayton Daily News reported several months ago that the DPS annual budget is $225 million. Divide that by the 16000 students they claim to have (and this report verifies) and you get $14062 per student. If the results don't improve the number of DPS students will decrease and charter school numbers will increase.

You can play around with the numbers to accommodate this and maybe the real reason for the emergency levy will reveal itself. I will give you a hint.

If every child attended DPS the cost per child drops to $10,227. If the attendance drops to 15,000 students the cost goes up to $15,000 per child.

If you multiply the difference of $4800 by 6250 charter school students ( DPS students have to go somewhere) you get $30 million.

Can you imagine what a homes schooler could do with a $10,000 budget!

Ohio Virtual Academy Information Sessions

I got an email today with parent information sessions details from Ohio Virtual Academy. Here is a link in case anyone reading this has an interest.

http://ohva.org/calendar/parent-info-sessions.html

Mark Your Calendars!

Taken from the Library webpage.
The Dayton Metro Library's semi-annual booksale returns this spring. The sale will be May 4th, 5th and 6th at Hara Arena (1001 Shiloh Springs Rd.). Hours of the sale are Friday 4 - 7 p.m., Saturday 10 a.m. - 7 p.m., and Sunday 1 - 3 p.m. or while supplies last. Free admission and free parking!

We go to this every year and I must say that we have more books then space to store them! On Friday hardbacks are $1.00. On Saturday they are 50 cents and on Sunday you can get a box load for a $1.00!

If you eschool which eschool and why?

I'd also be interested in hearing which eschool people chose and why as that is the way that we are leaning for our 12 year old middle schooler.

Thanks,

Eileen

Glad to see Dayton area non-public school families will have a way to get to know eachother

If there wind up being enough of us park days would be nice or even jsut having coffee's etc. We could even meet at libraries by just posting what day time we intend to go and other could show up.

Ok so if the truth be know 3 of the lst 4 times i"ve seen my mom have been meeting her at Sam's club which is 1/2 for both of us; lets accomplish somethign we need to do-get groceries; and we still get to see each other.


Eileen

Starfall Website

Here is a great early learning website that I was told about. If you haven't seen it yet then you need to check it out. I think it was designed with home schoolers in mind.

www.starfall.com

Why I am Doing This!

Now that I am a parent, I have to consider the education options for my child. There are three basic options. Public schools/charter schools, private school or attempting to do the job myself. Dayton Public Schools at this point are out of the question. I have nothing against the beautiful new schools that they are building or the quality of the teachers. My problem is what they have to tolerate from the students. A teacher should not have to be a baby sitter for 30 children and since the needs of the unlearned appear to be greater than the needs of the learned, I fear that my child won't be getting the education that she deserves. These problems exist in charter schools too because they are publicly funded. Private schools may exhibit a higher level of education but still house cliches and provide an environment where peer pressure determines ones social status.

Over the last few years I have been amazed at how many people home school their children. Within a two block radius of my house I found eight families and the interesting thing was that they didn't know each other. There are several co-ops in the region geared towards a particular style of teaching that some of these families participated in BUT there is no central information system for everyone to tap into for resources, events, support or that provides for true neighborhood schooling to actually exist.

I have been using the Blog format for a couple of years to provide information to my neighborhood and have recently opened it up to group participation in the hope that it will take on a life of its own without my having to verify or edit information. I tried a similar thing with the neighborhood home schoolers but have realized that the source of participants is too limited and needs to be expanded upon in order to be effective. If I can get some 60 team members from the Dayton area then the few who are posting on a regular basis make this site happen for the other members and anyone else who reading it.

For those of you who aren't familiar with this "Blog" format (which is short for Web Log) I can tell you that with a little tweaking, I can add links to the basic page that may be useful and I can ask any home schooling parent to become a team member which will allow them to post directly to this site AND add photos or hyperlinks if they want to. Anyone registered with Blogger.com can make comments to any of the posts. All that I ask is that posting should be home school related and should be informative.

If you are reading this and know anyone in the vicinity of Dayton, Ohio who has an interest in the Home School alternative let them know about this site and encourage them to contact me so that they can join. Hopefully we can all make Dayton a home school friendly city which may encourage educated people to relocate here because we have an established group of home schoolers pooling their resources and sharing the experience.