Parents in the Central Peninsula have been playing a vital role since Kenai Peninsula students returned to school last week, with parents leading remote learning. The district has acknowledged that remote learning is an interruption to many families’ lives. Some parents, however, have decided that educating their children from home is a blessing.
The district’s Connections Homeschool program is thriving in these uncertain times of masking-up and risk-level-monitoring.
If you are a parent who experienced a taste of the “home school” experience for the first time when area schools went to remote learning in March, then decided that it is a great fit for your family, you are not alone.
Rich Bartolowits, Principal at Connections, says that attendance is up immensely compared to last year: “It has definitely been a tremendously larger group of people interested in homeschooling. We have, at this point, almost double from where we would normally be at this time of the school year – approaching 1,600 enrollments right now. We’ve added staff members, we’ve got a couple of new teachers in the Soldotna office this year, and we continue to look at things like that to make sure that we can support both our returning families and our new families. We feel like we’re able to support families: we’re reacting, we’re responding, we’re trying to grow where needed.””
He noted that not only are parents enjoying the experience of leading the teaching process, but the increased variety in the curriculum is attractive: “A lot of people are realizing that the different choices they have from scheduling to choosing different curriculum – homeschooling is not one particular curriculum, it’s a lot of choices. So, we really let people personalize things for students’ needs and wants and interests. There are definitely some people seeing that and thinking, ‘Wow, this might be a nice long-term thing instead of a response to COVID.'”
If a local family decides during this school year that they would rather move from a traditional KPBSD school to the Connections Homeschool program, Bartolowits says that is certainly an option, but he advises pursuing that path during a natural break for students, to ease the transition: “We definitely encourage people to kinda wait until a natural break. Right now is a really tumultuous time. Once the school year is up and going, we encourage people to wait for some sort of a natural break – a quarter, a semester. It varies from high school toe elementary, as well. A high school student, we’re talking credits. If you jump mid-semester, credits are at-risk. Certainly for high school students, we encourage semester changes, not mid-semester. At the elementary level, it’s a little bit more flexible because we’re not talking about those credits, but students can change, and that’s what we’ve told people. My message to people who weren’t sure if they wanted to do school or to home school was to go to the school. Try that first, because it is easier to come to us partway through the semester than it is to go from us back into the school once the school has started-up their procedures.”
More information about Connections Homeschool can be found online.
Schools in the Central Peninsula are set to return to open school buildings on September 8, after a High Risk level of COVID transmission triggered at-home remote learning last week.
