Though each of my six kids, ages 6 to 16, has a story equally important and unique, I’ll share a bit about my daughter. After homeschooling for a few years my kids were advanced in English and math. During a particularly difficult pregnancy, I put my two oldest in public school. I attended my second grade daughter’s parent teacher conference. “She has difficulty with reading comprehension,” they said. I sat silently. “She can’t do double digit addition.”
I knew my daughter could add anything, no matter how many digits. She could subtract equally well, and she was starting into multiplication. As far as reading went, she wasn’t quite four when she learned to read fluently. At that time, her favorite thing to read together with me was King Lear. I explained that she just wasn’t performing for them, and I knew why. She was fanciful! “Tell it to me in a story or a poem!” she used to say. She loved to dance and sing, and that’s how she learned. She couldn’t learn sitting at a desk, so I brought her back home.
As my children have grown, I have struggled with the choice of putting them in school to receive the benefits of new perspectives, extra-curriculars, and socialization, or keeping them home so that they could advance academically. So far the school system has served only one out of my six children well in terms of academic pacing. Each of them would have been served wonderfully at different times and in different subjects by microschools, immersion programs, online classes, study abroad, homeschooling, arts programs, private schools and private tutors.
My daughter, now 14, attends public middle school. It is not the best place for her and she is not happy, but we don’t know what to do. She needs more than I can teach her. With a Utah Fits All Scholarship I could get her a private tutor for writing because she writes novels in her spare time, enroll her in a local commonwealth school, and homeschool her in Spanish with a quality course. These are things she has asked me to do! She wants to learn.
Please, please consider increasing the number of scholarships to include all kids. There is no reason that Utah should not use its education funds in a way that best allows the innovation our kids need for uninhibited LEARNING! Thank you.
