Jodi Stewart began homeschooling her kids more than 20 years ago and remembers few others like her. When the family moved to Baton Rouge a decade ago, she found an active, but still small homeschool community here.
Those days are gone.
For the past five years, Stewart and a few other moms have operated a Friday group called Unschool Fridays, with nearly 500 members, where homeschool families gather in local parks. This coming fall, Stewart plans to start her own co-op for homeschoolers.
“The community is so much better than it was,” Stewart said. “You can find friends now. That was the hard part, finding friends not just for kids but for the moms too.”
About 40,000 children in Louisiana currently attend homeschools and small unregistered private schools, double the number who did so a decade ago. About 8,000 more children have enrolled in these nontraditional school settings than did so in fall 2019, before the start of the coronavirus pandemic.
That’s a stark contrast with traditional schools.
Between fall 2019 and 2022, public schools in Louisiana lost about 35,000 children, a 4.6% decline. Louisiana has not yet released traditional private school data for the current school year, but in fall 2021, private schools had about 3,000 fewer children enrolled than they did two years earlier.
An analysis released last week shows similar enrollment trends across the country, with homeschooling growing fast in 21 states, including Louisiana, that have complete data. The smallest increase occurred in North Carolina, where homeschool enrollment grew by 8 percent, while the biggest was in New York state, 65 percent.
The analysis is a collaboration between The Associated Press, Stanford University’s Big Local News project and Stanford education professor Thomas Dee. They looked at enrollment and U.S. Census data from 2019 to 2021.
The growth in homeschools, however, did not compensate completely for the loss of students from the traditional school world. In 21 states with complete data, there were still an estimated 240,000 students in 21 states whose absence from school could not be explained. There were more than 19,000 such missing kids in Louisiana.
Public schools in Louisiana continued to shed students this past year and homeschools continued to add students at a fast clip. That’s notable since COVID restrictions for schools have almost all been lifted and the impact of the virus on education has lessened significantly.
“The pandemic accelerated in many ways the family’s right to choose,” said state Education Superintendent Cade Brumley. “And the families exercised that right in selecting the school modality that makes the most sense for them.”
In order to compete, Brumley said, traditional schools need to get “back to basics” academically and steer clear of divisive politics.
“(Parents) want their kids to be safe at school, to be able to read and do math and be prepared for college and careers,” he said.
Erin Bendily, vice president for policy & strategy for the Pelican Institute in New Orleans, offers a different take. In her job she closely follows the homeschool sector, which she notes was growing steadily before the pandemic.
In her view, the academic turmoil of the early days of the pandemic exposed families to the not-always-pretty inner workings of traditional education and spurred them to seek alternatives. The marketplace then responded quickly.
“In general, parents feel a lot more empowered now and understand what opportunities are around and what their kids are capable of,” Bendily said. “That is just going to continue to grow.”
In East Baton Rouge Parish, more than 2,600 children are registered with the state as either homeschoolers or as students in small private schools that opt not to go through the hoops that traditional private schools go through to operate. Livingston Parish has even more students, almost 2,800, in such settings, while Ascension Parish has about 800.
St. Tammany Parish is the most active parish in Louisiana when it comes to homeschooling, with more than 3,500 students in such settings.
As homeschooling has expanded so have the options. In addition to parents teaching their children at home, there are a range of small to not-so-small schools, learning pods, co-ops, charter schools, online services and other support organizations where children can further their education in nontraditional ways.
Jessica Price is a part of this new generation of homeschool entrepreneurs. A veteran of the hospitality industry, she had became interested in homeschooling since becoming a mother — she has two children, ages 2 and 4 — but the pandemic led her to accelerate her plans even before her own children became school-age.
Homeschools can seem like a monumental task for parents new to the idea. The quick growth during the pandemic eased parents' concerns as they tried homeschooling for themselves and realized it was doable.
“It took the fear out of making a switch,” Price said.
Last summer, she established Sweet Potato Academy, a tutoring service that caters to homeschool families looking for a variety of instructional help for their children both during and after school hours.
“Sometimes for families we just teach one or two subjects, sometimes we teach multiple subjects,” she said. “It just depends on the parents' workload.”
The available curricula for children has exploded during the pandemic and Price said her company is prepared to try any of them depending on what the parents want.
"The parents get a say in all that and we just implement that program that we have chosen with them,” Price said.
The academy operates in a strip mall on Airline Highway in Prairieville just across the parish line from East Baton Rouge. She said they’ve grown since they started from one to nine children with plans to double next year. She said the unusual structure of her company is intentional: “We didn’t want the state evaluating our business.”
“We’re trying to break the mold,” Price said. “We’re trying to give parents another option.”
Stewart with Unschool Fridays said the recent growth in homeschooling has compensated for traditional shortcomings. For instance, homeschooled teenagers have historically had trouble making social connections, but not so much anymore.
“My daughter who is 13 goes to a dance every two or three weeks,” Stewart said.
Stewart said she’s seen small examples of traditional schools locally opening their doors to homeschools, but they remain few and far between. But she says the ecosystem around homeschools is so broad and varied now that that doesn’t really matter anymore.
“Homeschools have it covered,” she said. “The homeschool community is huge now.”
