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.