mcps

mcps

Whew! Got through my homeschool review with the county yesterday. (For those who are curious, here are the Maryland Homeschooling regs.) It was my second since starting homeschooling a year ago. I felt both confident and nervous, so to give myself mcps extra mental boost I put on my work clothes and my high-heeled boots. I guess it worked, because when I walked into the MCPS field office the secretary thought I was an MCPS worker, there for a meeting.

It was a coincidence, but my review came on the same day that the tragic, gruesome local story of four dead children discovered in the home of their clearly psychotic mother was starting to reverberate. The fingers mcps starting to point and as I sat that kitchen table yesterday reading the Post, I predicted that homeschooling in the District  and elsewhere  was in for a whole lot of scrutiny. And I wasnt wrong. Todays Times has the following story, Lack of Supervision Noted in Deaths of Home-Schooled. And todays Post reports that Mayor Fenty vowed to establish a system to track children who are home-schooled or who move from school to school. The whole story is here. With another one here.

Looking particularly prescient is Maryland homeschooling doyen Manfred Smith. At a talk for area homeschoolers that I attended in September, he warned that the growing popularity of homeschooling paradoxically posed a threat, as new homeschoolers with less clarity of purpose  and less knowledge  were joining what had in the early days had been a choice stemming from deeply held values, whatever they might be. families were seeing homeschooling as just another educational choice on the public/private/charter school menu. He sensed that the eyes of the authorities were growing more watchful, waiting to pounce should mcps like the one in the District, occur. And now it has.

A few come-to-homeschooling-lately families, unfamiliar with the history and philosophical underpinnings of homeschooling, asked, Why cant we have access to public school facilities, teams, classes if we pay taxes? They do it in other places. and seemed ready to trade some autonomy for greater state involvement. Others bristled at what they saw as escalating, quixotic demands by their reviewers and warned newbies not to go overboard with scrapbooks, portfolios, and documentation lest they make others look bad  mcps take a just the facts maam approach and adhere strictly to the letter of the law. Smith argued that the Maryland regulations were a finely calibrated mcps that allowed considerable autonomy for homeschoolers, yet provided sufficient safeguards to ensure that a tragedy like the one in DC didnt occur, potentially jeopardizing homeschooling for all. On this Times graphic, it shows Maryland as being in the range of moderate oversight.

Popular topics today: purple prose, dred scott, low glycemic diet, high glycemic foods, quark expeditions, hawaii news, kitv, digestive enzymes, khnl, khon, buynowbe

Post je objavljen 18.01.2008. u 03:38 sati.