Home-schooled kids get support for learning and passions
Home-schooling can help families that don’t fit into the standard education system — and with support from centres such as Communidée, they’re hardly left to their own devices
A few elementary school-age children are playing street hockey in a damp drizzle that hasn’t decided whether to be snow or rain. Their puck is a firmly-packed snowball that they smack around, mostly on the wide sidewalk or against the brick of a factory-style building.
Inside, the hallways are industrial and bleak except for a bright mural at the end that announces: “Communidée.”
These kids are like any others you’d expect to come across on a Friday afternoon, with this exception: on one bureaucratic level, many of them are invisible.
By Quebec Ministry of Education numbers, there are 345 homeschooled children on the island of Montreal. But by some anecdotal accounts, there are many more who are not registered with their local school boards, who learn under the radar at kitchen tables, home offices and in home-schooling support centres like this.
Communidée founder Sonya Olthof, 47, knew early in her parenting career that she wanted to home-school.
Twelve years ago, when her son Eli was a baby, she and a friend were talking about another child’s classroom struggles when the friend said: “It sounds like he doesn’t belong at school.”
“That illuminated for me the possibility that you don’t have to go to school. I was always interested in alternative education and self-driven learning, and I had quite a lot of experience with passion-driven projects. Here’s one of them,” she says, sweeping her arms to indicate the workroom, which is big enough to build a sailboat.
The workroom is lined with tools, art supplies and sewing machines. On the thick wood table is a mosaic in progress with three large letters: C-O-M.
Beyond the workroom is a large, bright area for studying and playing, a nook with a sofa and comfy chairs, and a full kitchen with a long family-style dining table. It’s Communidée’s seventh anniversary in this St-Henri building; they were in a different location for two years previous. About 80 children from 50 families are members of the centre, which offers activities and support for people who choose to educate outside the government system.
Olthof ’s second son, Tomek, was born two years after Eli.
“Basically, as soon as I was healed from the delivery, we started the community with the website and park outings and museum outings.”
She wanted to have a full-time centre set up by the time her children were school age.
“They were four and six when we opened the full-time centre. I’m glad I got things started early, because I wasn’t trying to join something — I was trying to build something from the ground up.”
She and her children spend two days a week at the centre and three learning at home. The boys are autonomous in most of their subjects. They are expected to be ready to start studying at 9 a.m., and as soon as their scholastic todo list is done, they can spend their time however they like.
They do a book club together, practise lines for a Communidée play and read French aloud.
“It’s not like I’m tuning out on the computer, but there is some amount of that, where they can study at their desk and I can ... well, wash the dishes, usually.”
All children over six years old are required by Quebec to be registered with a school board, even if they will be learning at home. At the English Montreal School Board, the first person a potential home-schooling parent will meet is Tracy Mangal, a former secondary school teacher who has been the EMSB’s home-schooling consultant since 2012. She meets with 20 to 30 new families each year, learning why they’ve chosen to home-school, advising them on available resources and discussing curriculum.
She and the families sit down together again in February to make sure they ’re on the right track and to help them adjust if their child has fallen behind. There is testing at the end of the school year, but Mangal says home-schooled children sometimes have trouble with traditional testing because “they might not have been exposed to the format.”
If the child falls behind, they can be ordered to return to school. If parents refuse, the Education Act allows for the family to be reported to the Department of Youth Protection. In extreme cases, foster care may be an option.
Mangal says some parents turn to home-schooling because they are nervous about entrusting their children to a stranger for the whole day, or might have had a bad experience with a teacher or a school.
Sometimes “they just need to talk through it and we might find a school that will work for them.”
Sometimes she doesn’t see them again. “I don’t chase anyone down. There are people who sign up and then disappear.”
Rosalind Barrington Craggs’s children, 14-year-old Clara and 13-year-old Thomas, were homeschooled in Vancouver before they moved to Quebec. In B.C., Barrington Craggs says, part-time day programs are offered to those who want them as well as curriculum support and money to help pay for things like music education, sports education or supplies. Quebec does not offer financial compensation.
Barrington Craggs gives her children the choice every year, and every year they opt to continue their education at home.
“I saw through the preschool years how learning happened. I watched the process, and how it never failed when they wanted to learn something. ‘Oh, you want to learn about the Inuit? Let’s look this up and off we go.’ It’s a lovely journey, and at some point you decide to get a handle on something concrete, but you continue the investigative journey.
“I’ve always had my left eye on the (school board) curriculum,” says Barrington Craggs, 46. “When they were little, I’d look at the curriculum and say, ‘Oh, we did that already.’ Then I’d look the next September and, ‘Yup, we’re good.’ Math is the thing that is the most structured and I’m the most keen to be sure they’re near the age level they would be at school.”
Amendments to the Education Act that will come into force this summer, ahead of the 2018-19 school year, promise a sea change. Bill 144 clarifies the framework in which parents operate, gives Quebec more powers to oversee and standardize home education, and allows officials to take action if they feel a child’s situation needs to be regularized. It also makes adjustments to the Health Insurance Act, which would make it possible for school boards to cross-reference school rolls with RAMQ records.
A Quebec-wide advisory panel has been created to make recommendations on the specifics of the regulations, including creating a guide for school boards and parents on good home-schooling practices. Olthof sits on that panel, and says she and many other members of Communidée will proactively register their children with a school board this fall. (Other local groups facing the same situation include Groupe de soutien école-maison dans l’est de Montréal, Éducation en famille Sud- Ouest, Instruction en famille Grand Montréal and Le Réverbère in Châteauguay.)
Members of the Association québécoise pour l’éducation à domicile, a non-profit organization that lobbies for home-schoolers, “are working like demons on lobbying and contacting other groups and building bridges,” Olthof says. “We’re all pretty implicated and talking politics these days. We want freedom of education.
“We’re going to register and then take it to the next level. If they don’t like our math, we’ll ask them to explain why.”
Olthof ’s son Eli has a firm handshake and engaging smile. After greeting a stranger in the workshop, he says to his mother: “I’m going to be going fencing soon, by the way.” She nods and says: “Just check in before you leave.”
“They’ve filled their schedules with tons of sports and music and arts and all kinds of things,” Barrington Craggs says. “Every kid in there has a passion. If they went to school, they’d lose that time for their passions.”