Homeschooling?! What Were We Thinking?!

Homeschooling was never our intent.

When we got married I already had a small Cape Cod in Southern New Jersey. Actually, I consider South Jersey a suburb of Philadelphia, where I grew up, or at least I appease myself that way so I don't always have to tell everyone I live in NJ. More about that some other time.

When I purchased that first house, I planned on being there for seven to ten years, fixing it up the best I could (I got pretty good at fixing dry wall and painting) and then selling it and moving on. After having our two son's, we decided it was time to move but we wanted to find something in an area close by. Like any parents with soon to be school aged kids, we wanted to find a neighborhood where the schools had a good reputation. We had a few towns in mind. I had worked in an area that I really liked for roughly 8 years. We had cousins there and enjoyed the overall feel of the people and the town. Unfortunately, every time we went to see a house there, they were already off the market!

We started looking in other NJ suburbs of Philadelphia, one in particular where the schools had a good reputation, and the neighborhood was really nice, but also had a reputation (unfounded as it was) as a place I wouldn't necessarily want to live. The impression was that everyone was pretentious among other things. However, we were running out of options and started looking around that town anyway. One day, while house hunting in this suburb, we pulled up in front of this comer property split level. As we parked, I thought the house looked like it belonged in Florida. The color was this bright flamingo pink, probably the ugliest house we'd seen. As we started to walk up to the door I thought to myself, "this is such an ugly house, and we're probably going to buy it aren't we!?" Yup, we did.

In all actuality, the house was much roomier than our previous home, and was really what we needed in a nice neighborhood, so we took the plunge.

With our sons growing, we found a great pre-school for them to go to. Our oldest first and our younger son not too long after. Our sons were twenty one months apart in age, which was difficult for us the first couple of years, but ended up to be great because they could keep each other occupied. When it was time for the oldest, J, to go to kindergarten, we had a public grade school right around the corner so that's where he was going to go. The first few months were fine. A half day kindergarten. My wife ran a small business from home so she could be there for the kids. She got friendly with the teacher and made herself known.

The problem started in November of that year. J had pretty bad seasonal allergies, something he most likely inherited from me. However, it was November, the leaves had fallen and he should not have been having the type of allergy symptoms he was. He would come home with his eyes watery, sneezing and sniffling. He was on multiple allergy medications just to get through the day. We finally found out that his teacher was also having allergy symptoms and decided to request an air quality test from the school. The results of that test was that there were unhealthy levels of mold and dust mites in the kindergarten classroom. GO FIGURE!!

At that point we basically went to battle with the school district. You would think that they'd want to take care of this problem but it didn't really seem that way. The administration was awful. The PTA told us they couldn't help us even get the word out about this problem, they were trying to keep everything hush hush. Well, they didn't know my wife! We got PEOSHA in there to do the inspections and they gave the school a time limit on cleaning up the mess. We asked the administration to call a meeting so other parents in the school could be informed as well. The meeting was ultimately called for 7 PM on Ash Wednesday. Flyers went out in the kids backpacks the day before and only about eleven people showed up, but the news was there. One of the local news guys even came to our house to report on the issue and interviewed J and my wife, but it was more or less a show. The district "cleaned" up the issue, although they never really found all of the mold sources. One of the classrooms had leaky windows for 13 years and a rug that was constantly wet because of those windows. One source of the mold. However, since the floor beneath the rug was asbestos, they tried to hide this from PEOSHA until my wife pointed it out. They had to wait until the summer to take care of that.

I was a Philadelphia public school kid, but my wife went to a little private Christian school in a Philadelphia NJ suburb. She was, admittedly so, a private school snob. This started us looking at a different path for educating our sons. I talked to the superintendent of the school district at the time, he was one of the biggest pompass asses I've ever met in my life. We wanted to send J to another school in the district but the super had to "think" about it. So while he thought about it, so did my wife and I.

The wife wanted to send J to a local Catholic school. Although she is Christian, I am Jewish and we were raising the kids as Jews. I wasn't going to send my Jewish kids to a Catholic school even if they could opt out of the religion part of the curriculum. I just couldn't do it. Other private schools were costly and at the time that wasn't an option. With my wife home during the day running her business, we decided to home school. It was not an easy decision and I had the same view of homeschoolers that everyone else did, but we were really out of options. I didn't want to send him to a school district that was so haphazard about their schools that they felt unhealthy levels of mold and dust mites was acceptable. I was determined to be involved so we wouldn't fit that stereotypical view of the homeschooled. While my wife would bare the brunt of the teaching, i would take on science and music, as well as making sure they were involved in some kind of athletics. That's the path we took. It had it's good and bad, but ultimately we felt we had no choice.

That was the start, please continue to read additional posts to see how we did!