School Age

It had been snowing for a week straight in Mansonville, a mountain village nestled in the Appalachians, 150 kilometres east of Montreal. But there was no hope of a snow day for 10-year-old Kira Nichols — she’s home-schooled. So she doesn’t even need to get out of her PJs to hit the books.

Besides, Kira doesn’t need cajoling to start school. Before breakfast, she’s already spent an hour engrossed in Allie Finkle’s Rules for Girls. After reading for a while in French, Kira turns her attention to math, practising fractions on some worksheets that her mom, Kim, printed from an educational website. Then she works on a short story that she’s writing about mythical creatures, plays Scrabble with Mom (building Kira’s vocabulary) and plays outside. School’s done for the day and it isn’t even time for lunch; Kira virtually never needs to spend more than two hours a day on academics to stay ahead of the school curriculum for her grade.

Kira and Kim are part of a fast-growing movement: In Canada, the number of home-schooled kids has doubled in a decade to an estimated 60,000 to 80,000, or two percent of this country’s school-aged population. In the US, 1½ to 2 million kids are home-schooled — about 3½ percent of all school-agers — and that number is growing seven percent a year.

Originally published in Today's Parent, May 2010