A couple more articles on the continued growth of homeschooling:

• Georgia:
Homeschooling a growing trend

From doctors and dentists to teachers, many professions are represented among the parents who homeschool children. For parents who own a business, homeschooling allows children to help out with the business while still receiving an education, she said.

Latimer said she has never heard of a student who regrets not attending a public school.

• Virginia:
Homeschooling and Unschooling Growing in the Valley

Unschooler Joe Sullivan says, “When you have a system of telling other people always what to do and how to do it and what is necessary, you’re not going to foster in the population the ability to decide that for themselves and to make better choices in the future.”

According to an article on the news blog for Channel 9 News in Chattanooga, Tennessee: Home schooling has increased in popularity across the country and here in Chattanooga. NewsChannel 9 hit the hallways for the first day of Hamilton County schools this week, and now we want to go to where home schooled students hit their books.

In the last decade, the number of homeschoolers has far more than doubled, according to the Department of Education. And Hamilton County has seen some of its largest crowds at the last two expos. NewsChannel 9 sought to find out why.

Continue reading the article at the link above.

An article on homeschooling’s growth in North Carolina, linked from the front page of the Raliegh, NC News-Observer:

The number of home schools has steadily increased across the state since home-schooling became legal in 1985, going from 381 schools that year to nearly 43,316 schools today, according to a recent report released by the N.C. Department of Administration, which registers the state’s home schools.

While 66 percent of North Carolina home schools are religiously affiliated, a growing number of parents are choosing home school because they feel they can do a better job than public schools, particularly for gifted and special-needs children, said Spencer Mason, president of North Carolinians for Home Education, a statewide support group and lobbying organization for home schools.

“A lot of parents are disappointed in how schools deal with special needs,” Mason said. His four children were home-schooled in Charlotte, starting in 1981.

Interesting news article highlighting the history of homeschooling in North Carolina, from the Lincoln-Tribune:

RALEIGH — When Rod Helder became the second director of the state’s Division of Non-Public Education in 1985, he inherited a small staff and a unique arrangement for state regulation of private schools. Under the previous director, the state’s confrontational attitude toward private education had boiled over into civil disobedience by church schools and a class action lawsuit by the state. As thousands of parents rallied quietly in the streets of Raleigh, the General Assembly rewrote the private school law, and in the end, totally separated DNPE — and private education — from any public school oversight.

Now North Carolina boasts a healthy private school community and one of the largest concentrations of homeschoolers in the country.

Continue reading at the link above.

From The McDowell News, McDowell County, North Carolina, comes this article, tellingly titled Homeschools more popular than private schools in McDowell:

More kids are homeschooled in McDowell. Although the state has not released its figures for the 2009-10 school year, in 2008-09, 293 homeschools in McDowell educated 491 kids, more than twice the number who attended private schools.

Although homeschooling appears to have been more popular in McDowell than private schooling, that trend is not reflected statewide. In total, for the 2008-09 school year, 77,065 North Carolina kids were homeschooled and 98,545 were private schooled.

Read the entire article at the link above.

More than 4,000 people will converge on Denver this weekend. They are attending the 27th annual conference of the Christian Home Educators of Colorado.

“We provide resources, vision, workshops, talks; we have keynote speakers,” Mike Chapa, executive director of CHEC, said. “The home school movement is growing across this land and there’s estimates that it’s close to 2-and-a-half million now [nationwide].”

Chapa says there are more and more home schooling families in Colorado each year. He believes a big factor is religion. He says another factor is statistics. Chapa says on average, home-schooled students score in the 85th percentile on standardized tests, beating students from traditional public schools.

“Twenty-four-seven is how we view education of children,” Chapa said. “We don’t view it as they’re in class for X hours a day and then everything else is not education.”

Thirteen-year-old Nathan Johnson may be a good example of that. He is attending the conference as a vendor helping sell woodwork created by him and a friend. They designed and made their own marshmallow shooters and rubber band guns. Johnson says being home-schooled gives him freedom to be creative.

Continue reading Home school families grow in Colorado from Channel 9 News.

Mary Nix has an excellent post on The Informed Parent: Enrollment Data on Homeschoolers:

Some states gather data on homeschoolers, some do not. I live in a state that does not, so I’ve been curious about the numbers that some in the media and elsewhere throw out occasionally about homeschooling’s continued explosive growth.