Word: homed
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...James Tolbert has sued the school system to change those rules. And other home-school advocates have taken this issue to Michigan's legislature, where it has split the Republican Party. For Tolbert, it's an issue of basic fairness: "The state should provide these [athletic] benefits on a nondiscriminatory basis," says Stephen Safranek, the lawyer behind the Tolberts and six other families. "We all pay the same taxes...
Opponents also see it as a matter of fairness--not fairness to taxpayers but to students. Officials say kids in traditional schools follow strict requirements--good attendance, decent grades--to become eligible for athletics. They say they have no way to know whether parents would lie to make their home schoolers eligible. And above all, administrators fear that home schoolers, who would parachute in for practice after a day at the house, could undermine a school's sense of community. They argue that a full-time social investment in a school is what entitles kids to play basketball...
Safranek says this argument ignores school rules, which allow enrolled students never to set foot on campus. (They can take classes at community colleges if they wish.) He suspects the rules are really motivated by bias against home schooling, and he takes offense at the notion that his clients would lie to make their kids eligible...
...That home schoolers have begun a debate about the nature of a school community is a little strange. For years they simply withdrew kids from the broader community often because they felt its schools had become antireligious. They fought bitter battles for the right to change old compulsory-education laws, which have now been rewritten or reinterpreted in every state to allow home schooling. Many Americans still have an image of home schoolers as conservative ideologues at best--and weird hermits at worst...
...such images, always a stretch, are now totally outmoded. Those who study the issue say there are probably 1 million to 1.7 million home schoolers in the U.S. (more than 1% of school-age children). Whatever the precise figure, it has jumped since Columbine (North Carolina found this fall that its number of registered home schools had shot up 22% to 16,022 since April...