Churches Take Homeschooling in a Surprising Direction

It is hardly news that homeschooling has taken off around the country, especially since Covid. Over the last year alone, according to the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey, the number of US homeschooled students has gone from 3.6 million to 4 million—an 11 percent increase.

     Less well-known is the role America’s churches have played in not only facilitating the spread of homeschooling but in helping to make it a far more collaborative and even highly structured activity. By providing groups of homeschool families with a space that goes largely unused during the week and a small supervisory staff, many parishes have successfully combined online curricula with an environment more typical of a conventional public or private school. 

     Sometimes this has been accomplished by letting an outside organization administer the program. In Upper Marlboro, Maryland, for example, the Providence St. John Baptist Church hosts the eXtend Homeschool Tutorial which, under the leadership of its director Kym Kent, educates more than 100 children in everything from third-grade English to high-school chemistry and aviation science. Families can choose from an à la carte menu of inexpensively supervised courses, averaging $350 apiece, or use the curriculum to simulate a fully functioning school.

     On the other hand, the Grow Christina Learning Center at the New Life Worship Center, an Assemblies of God church in Worcester, Massachusetts, is very much a project of the congregation. By providing Program Director Elizabeth Lopez with extensive volunteer help, the church enables 85 homeschool students in their largely Hispanic community to get the equivalent of a K–12th-grade private-school education for just $2,400 a year. “From the beginning we’ve all known it was part of God’s plan for us to take on this assignment,” says Lopez. 

     Exactly how many churches across the country offer such organized forms of homeschooling is hard to say, because only Alabama, California, Colorado, Florida, Maine, Maryland, Tennessee, and Washington explicitly grant area churches or parochial schools the right to supervise homeschoolers. While parishes in other states can also do it legally, they must navigate the kind of regulatory minefield that causes them instinctively to keep a low profile. (In some states, for example, church homeschools cannot say that their students are “enrolled,” only that they “attend.”) 

     What is clear is that church-sited homeschools are proving an effective way to help parents overcome what have historically been the three biggest obstacles to homeschooling: the fear of being an incompetent teacher, the reluctance to do it without outside support, and the inability to work full-time while schooling one’s own children. This awareness has led a growing number of nonprofits to provide local houses of worship with guidance on how to make themselves into a full-time homeschool collaborative. 

     In Massachusetts, for example, the Family Institute posts an online guide to “Church-Based Learning Center Resources” on its website. Designed by Pastor Adam Rondeau of the Bethany Assembly of God church in Agawam, it has already been used to establish 20 Protestant and Catholic programs in the Bay State, including Worcester’s Grow Christina Learning Center. “Everything a religious group needs to get started is right there,” says Institute CEO Michael King. 

     And in Florida, a local charity known as the Florida Citizens Alliance has divided the state into eight regions, supplying each with an “ambassador” whose job it is to teach interested churches how to start their own homeschool programs. At the same time, the Alliance works with My Father’s World and other religiously oriented publishers of online curricula to develop courses specifically tailored to group homeschooling.

     At the national level, the Stanley M. Herzog Foundation (also working with Rondeau) sponsors a specialized training for both clergy and laypeople wanting to establish a church homeschool in their own community. Called the “school box,” it has already launched 13 parish learning centers in five states.

     Beyond making homeschooling more accessible, many education reformers believe church programs are an economical way to provide school choice to poor and middle-class families in the 38 states that do not yet subsidize it. To find out, the Children’s Scholarship Fund will this fall give $75,000 in matching grants to poor parents in Massachusetts who want to register their children in one of the state’s homeschooling parishes.

     The Reverend Steve Macias, whose Canterbury Christian School in Los Altos, California, offers instruction to local homeschoolers, goes one step further, arguing that the benefit of parish learning centers in non-choice states extends to many affluent parents as well. “If you’re trying to support a family in a place like Silicon Valley, where even ordinary homes cost $3-to-$4 million,” Macias says, “it’s not easy to pay the tuition of a more traditional private or parochial school with after-tax dollars.”

     But perhaps it is the Family Institute’s King who has the most sweeping vision of what homeschooling churches can accomplish. He thinks that by combining the availability of unused parish spaces with inexpensive online curricula, they will not only “bypass the legislative roadblocks in states which keep children from getting a more rigorous education,” but create a better future “for both education and organized religion.”