Shane was in his middle school years. He had started classes at Liberty Middle-High School in Bethlehem, PA but it was soon apparent that he wasn’t just unhappy.  He was simply miserable!  He was such a brilliantly creative child that he never needed to do anything more than once. In fact, repetition bored him to tears. Yet, this school, and all the other ones before it he had attended, continued to insist that my son Shane had to sit and do endless repetitions of things he already knew. I dare say he knew these things far better than even the teachers did. Well, his spirit rebelled and his grades dropped because it was a "no homework means failing grades" type of school. He received an F for several of his subjects because he didn’t hand in the homework. It didn’t matter to them that in every major test which measured his learning of the materials he had far excelled and gotten the highest score. It was the average of both, the teacher kept telling me. He HAD to do the homework as well, they said.

Shane came home every day with a downcast look and was very sick to his stomach. He was literally being made sick by attending school. He begged me to let him stay home. This was not a situation that sat well with me, his mother. As time went on it just got worse and worse as did his grades. I talked to his teachers who demanded he conform to their requirements and to every counselor the school had. All in all, I came to no satisfactory resolution for my son. He was in just pure misery and I could do nothing to turn it around.

So I rebelled too . . . and removed my son from that cookie cutter, ‘everyone’s got to be the same’ type of environment. I couldn’t afford it but I couldn’t afford leaving my son in the hands of incompetents where he had to conform to the system that should have been conforming to him. It was die of boredom or fail! What type of choice was this? The school did not give my son or any of the students the education they needed. Rules had to be followed and that was that.

Anyway, an acquaintance mentioned a school that was overseeing the homeschooling of her son . . . I had never thought of homeschooling before but the idea seemed perfect for my son. Upattinas Open Community School was founded by a brave woman named Sandy Hurst and was located in Glenmoore, PA. I heard she was one of the original pioneers in the field of homeschooling as well. (She’s since retired) I was told the school had gotten it’s name from the days when classes were simply held up at Tina’s house. So it was shorted to Up-at-Tinas to Upattinas! When it was explained, I chuckled. How charming and down-home feeling, I thought. You’ve got to admit it was pretty clever.

I couldn’t afford the school’s high prices for classes and my son seems delighted with the idea of 100% of his schooling being at home. Also, there were rules and regulations in our state to follow so associating with an alternative school for a modest fee seemed to make a lot of sense.

The only real stumbling block I encountered was my ex-husband. He couldn’t understand why HIS son couldn’t make it in the same system that had educated him and was educating our younger son Brian. He saw his son as a failure not as the genius he really was. He consented only because of my son’s obviously miserable state, his failing grades and poor health but he stated it was without his heartfelt approval. Unfortunately, my husband’s attitude was typical of a lot of mainstream people. They think there’s something wrong with the child rather than something being wrong with the system. I am so pleased to see that so many supportive resources such as this magazine now exist . Back in the 80's when I enrolled my son, very little was available to homeschooling families. One directory and one newsletter is all I remember.

My son was very withdrawn and down on himself when he started homeschooling. He also had lots of anger because of his parents' divorce. This all turned around very quickly. He loved studying what he was interested in when he wanted to study it. This was far different from being dictated to about what to study, how to study and when to study. At first I was really worried because he didn’t like to read or write. But, I learned that something quite magical happens when you set the pace of your own curriculum. In the beginning kids get real excited about the idea they can do what they want and yes, sometimes they just goof off doing nothing. My son did do a bit of that. But, then, comes the change . . . it’s ‘hey, I can study this cool thing if I want and actually get credit for it .. . wow, I’m going to do that. And, this other thing can help me when I get a job. I’ll study that too." They wind up learning far more because they are learning what they want to learn rather than what they have to learn. What they need to learn will naturally come along with all that because they now see the value in learning.

After a few years, Shane showed interest in enrolling in some Upattinas classes. So we had him enrolled. It was a great resource for him. He loved going there and eventually, since we lived so far away, he moved in with one of the teacher’s families during the school year and it became full time thing. Learning Japanese was an extra bonus since half of the kids at Upattinas were exchanged students from Japan. Traveling on the annual Big Trips was too. He got to see most of the US, and Mexico that way. I remember him commenting once that it was more an extended family than a school. Still, it was very much still like the homeschooling environment with the same lax atmosphere with the same lack of requirements on studying a specific curriculum. There were meetings and it was run as a democracy with the students running the school as well as the faculty. . . at least, the teachers tried their best to make it work that way.

The real payoff, of course, was the beautiful person my son had become because of his homeschooling experience. Obviously, he was a gifted child, and I loved being the one who gave him the opportunity to explore those gifts. That boy has now grown into a young man. He is 27 and a senior at Temple University. He was afraid he wouldn’t even get into college but he was accepted at all to which he applied. Now with plans of going on to graduate school in Marine Archaeology and Japanese, he continues to pursue his passion about the environment and about animals. He believes in excelling at whatever he does. He’s been on the honor roll every semester. At a part-time job with a cellphone company, he was recently acknowledged as their number two salesperson in the country. He participated in an archaeological dig that brought him several things: a job cataloging the university lab’s artifacts collection and byline credits for both writing and photography on a research article co-authored with one of his professors. Well, . . . not bad for just a homeschooler, huh?