Park Gathering Celebrates Home Schooling’s Growth
By Elizabeth Baier, South Florida Sun-Sentinel
Jan. 28–WESTON — If you think home schooling means being pent up in the house all day, drilling the three R’s, 5-year-old Mark Modzelewski Jr. will be happy to set you straight. He’s been on field trips with his brother, snorkeled off Broward County to view tarpon and stingrays in the wild, built a model volcano and learned to use the microscope he got for Christmas.
All that in addition to the reading, math and science that Mark’s parents have been taking turns teaching him since July.
“When you are the [teacher] you have more control over the things they are exposed to,” said Rose Modzelewski, a former science teacher. “You can also specialize the learning. He wants to do math, addition and subtraction, which he normally wouldn’t do in kindergarten.”
On Saturday, the Modzelewskis and about 600 other home-schoolers and their family members attended the sixth annual Christian Homeschool Family Fun Fest at Markham Park. The half-day event was designed to help the families make friends, network and learn about support groups, organizer John Kernohan said.
Kernohan, vice chairman of the Florida Parent-Educators Association, a statewide support group for home-schooling families, viewed the event as an occasion to celebrate home schooling’s acceptance into the American educational mainstream.
“When home schooling became legal 21 years ago in Florida, no one understood why these kids were not in school in the middle of the day. Now, more people understand,” Kernohan said.
The number of Florida children being educated at home has more than doubled from 25,000 in 1996 to 53,000 in 2006, according to the state Department of Education.
The statewide figure includes about 9,000 children in Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties.
For some parents who came to the Saturday event, one major advantage of home-schooling is being able to impart Christian morals to their children.
Allison and Thomas Weinmann, of Pembroke Pines, attended the festival for the first time with their 4-year-old daughter Kathryn, whom they hope to start home schooling in August.
“If we’re going to teach them certain values at home and at school they teach them something else or nothing at all, then it defeats the purpose,” Thomas Weinmann said. “It’ll avoid the confusion.”
Kernohan insisted on the quality of the education that many of the children receive. “Home schooling is not sitting at home all day,” he said.
Tori Santos, a 14-year-old from Sunrise who met up with three friends at the festival, said she has been home-schooled since kindergarten.
Her mother teaches her math, she said, and she takes French, biology and even physical education over the computer, checking in with a teacher when she’s completed an assignment. For English lessons, she and other home-school students meet in a small group.
Santos and her friends, Cameron Perry, 14, Jackie Fernandez, 14, and Kate Love, 15, said being home-schooled has its perks, like wearing pajamas while learning math, not having a set schedule to follow, and spending more time on a subject if they’re having trouble understanding. The drawbacks, they said, are not having friends to do homework with and not being with other teens during the day.
Still, Santos said: “It’s easier. It’s less stressful. I like being home-schooled better.”
Elizabeth Baier can be reached at ebaier@sun-sentinel.com or 954-356-4637.
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Copyright (c) 2007, South Florida Sun-Sentinel
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.
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