Eastsider Rachel Lozano considered only one option when her first-born son was old enough to start kindergarten: a private, Christian school. But after one year of paying tuition, the mother of three figured it would be too expensive to continue that type of schooling through the 12th grade.
"I liked the school fine and would have liked him to continue there, but my husband and I realized that we just couldn't do it," Lozano said. "We decided that we would take the money that we were spending on tuition and buy books to teach our children at home."
Lozano, joining a trend in El Paso, has home-schooled for more than seven years. She has three children, ages 10, 8 and 6.
The El Paso-based Southwest Homeschooling Network estimates that about 3,000 children in some 1,000 El Paso households use their homes as classrooms. Just two years ago, the group estimated that 800 households in the city had home-schooled children.
Tim Lambert, president of the Texas Home School Coalition, said the number of home-schooled children has grown by as much as 20 percent annually in the state because of favorable state-court rulings for parents who wish to teach their own children.
"People in Texas see this as a viable alternative to public and private education," Lambert said from the group's headquarters in Lubbock. "There also are a number of studies that show that students who are taught at home do well in college."
The coalition estimates that there are more than 100,000 children taught at home by parents or tutors in Texas, where by mandate of the state's Supreme Court, home schools are considered and entitled to the same rights as private schools.
The Texas Education Agency does not oversee, regulate or in any way serve home-schooled children, who thus are not required to take the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills, or TAAS, test or end-of-course exams to receive a high-school diploma.
Parents who home-school their children are not forced to notify the state or a school district, but they are required to create or use a curriculum that covers reading, writing, grammar, math and good citizenship. Most home-schooling parents also teach religion at home, Lambert said.
"Modern home-schooling started in the 1960s with the hippie movement and parents who wanted to teach different values to their children," he said. "But in the 1980s, we saw a number of evangelical Christians who began to do it because they wanted to include religious teachings in their children's education."
Some concerns
Lambert said that these days some parents choose to teach their children at home for safety or academic reasons.
Shirley Skipper was an English teacher in the Ysleta Independent School District who decided to teach her children at home because she was disappointed with the public-school system in which she worked.
"In the 12 or 13 years they spend in school, they haven't learned enough, and the world out there is very competitive," said Skipper, who home-schools three children. "There is a percentage of highly motivated students with caring parents who do make it in the public-school system, but most students fall behind."
Skipper, like most parents who are home-schooling a high-school student, relies on the local network -- the Southwest Homeschooling Network -- to find suitable tutors or other parents to help with more-complicated or in-depth courses. In this network, a parent who is a nurse might teach biology while a parent who is an engineer teaches algebra to several students.
Parents also have found the Internet and other computer software to be helpful in teaching their children courses on history and foreign languages.
Lambert said the availability of home-schooling materials has increased tremendously in the past 10 years and that some community colleges even offer small specialized classes for home-schooled children.
"There is a lot of of this co-oping going around ... parents getting together to teach their expertise" he said. "This is what is making home-schooling a more social experience."
Social misconceptions
One of the misconceptions about home-schooling, Skipper said, is that children will not develop socially when their formal education is given by a parent at their residence. The fear is that missing the classroom experiencing with other children their age and the interaction with other adults will hurt children's social skills.
But 13-year-old Tory Skipper, Shirley's home-schooled daughter, says that is far from being true.
"People think I live in a bubble, but I do meet a lot of people. I am in the basketball and volleyball team and I also swim," she said. "I also have friends, some that I home-school together with. I'm a pretty average teen-ager."
The local network of parents organizes several athletic teams that compete in leagues with Christian private schools. The group also stages extracurricular and academic events, such as science fairs and mock trials, each year.
Lozano, who is heavily involved with the Southwestern network, said that students get a yearbook and even picnics for socializing but that one of the most important features of the network is the support group that meets once a month.
"I'm very fortunate that my family and friends back me up, but I do get a lot of negative comments from people who think that I am hurting my children because I am isolating them," she said. "That's when the support from other families is very helpful."
Lozano's three children and Tory Skipper have always been home-schooled and have not shown an interest in attending a conventional classroom, but some parents have found it more difficult to keep their children home once they experience "regular" school.
"I liked school a lot better. I had good teachers and had a lot of friends, but it was expensive," 14-year-old Tommy Skipper said of his one year at Immanuel Baptist Christian School.
On average, home-schooling parents spend about $300 a student each year without any state help, although they must still pay taxes to their local school district. Tuition at private schools can run as much as $4,000 a year, and school districts spend about $6,000 a student annually.
Morayma Garcia decided to home-school her children when she discovered that one of her sons was doing poorly in math and that the school didn't have enough books to pass out.
"We couldn't tutor him because he didn't have a book," she said.
Sons resisted idea
Garcia's two sons, students at Eastwood and Hanks high schools, were not keen on the idea of being home-schooled, so she made a pact with them.
"They would say that they wanted to go back and go to prom and homecoming," she said. "We promised that if they did well, that we would send them back. They kept up their grades and they're doing great, so they're back in public school."
Garcia said she enjoyed home-schooling and is glad she gave her children the option of which method to go through.
"But if their grades come down, they'll come back," she said.
Lambert said home-schooled students traditionally have performed above average academically and that most are college-bound. There is no mandatory assessment exam for home-schooled students, but most parents do use one of several standardized tests to measure progress and accommodate their children's needs.
But since there is no oversight, many colleges and universities set higher standards for home-schooled students. Normally, students must have higher Scholastic Aptitude Test scores to be accepted, Lambert said.
"We are getting more acceptance among colleges. Texas A&M University (in College Station) changed their admission requirements to equalize them to students who are not home-schooled," Lambert said. "There are even colleges who are targeting home-schooled children because they find that our students are great students and great people."
Gustavo Reveles Acosta may be reached at