[ad_1]
In 1979, a Georgia mother named Patty Blankenship was charged with breaking the law by teaching her children at home. At the time, Georgia’s compulsory-attendance statute required children to attend a public or recognized private school. But her case ended in a hung jury, and she kept right on teaching.
Two years later, Terry and Vickie Roemhild, another homeschooling couple, were convicted on 19 different counts of violating the same statute. That case, which ended up in front of the state Supreme Court, overturned the compulsory attendance law and helped to spark the state’s first homeschool advocacy group, Georgians for Freedom in Education. Their influence, along with a sympathetic governor, Joe Frank Harris, led Georgia to legalize homeschooling in 1984. The statute that emerged is one of the most lenient in the nation: Families file an annual declaration of intent to homeschool with the Department of Education, and students take standardized tests every three years. As a result, Georgia today ranks third nationally in homeschooling, with nearly 90,000 of the state’s 1.7 million students educated outside traditional classrooms.
The state’s relaxed regulations, along with metro Atlanta’s density, geographic spread, and diversity, have made it fertile ground for homeschooling, but the issue is still hotly debated in Georgia and nationwide. Some argue that homeschooling is a liberating model for children ill-suited to mainstream schools, while critics cite concern over lack of oversight and its siphoning of public education dollars, especially in states with voucher programs like Georgia. What’s undeniable, however, is its growing popularity. In Georgia, what began around kitchen tables has evolved into a far-reaching network, spanning from the traditional parent-taught curricula to forest schools, microschools, and hybrid schools that blend in-classroom and at-home learning.
So how did a former criminal charge become a flourishing movement?
Andrea Hall, a 43-year-old Cobb County math teacher, remembers how hard it was to homeschool, even as recently as 2012. “I walked into my local library looking for a homeschool group for my four-year-old daughter,” she recalls. She and her husband wanted a social life for their child. There was none. But the librarian had an idea: If Hall started a group, the library could post a flyer for others to see.
At first, five families—calling themselves the South Cobb Homeschoolers—met once a week at the library for study sessions and field trips. Over time, that small circle grew into something much larger. In 2016, Hall formalized a nonprofit, Epic Homeschool Network, which has served nearly 800 families across metro Atlanta.
Hall says she prefers homeschooling but values being a math teacher as well. “Many families can’t homeschool. They need to work.” Teaching math full-time online for a charter school allows her to continue her career and support the education of public-school children while directing her own children’s curriculum.
“I was homeschooling 23 years ago, before it was cool or easy,” says Kerstin Kruse Davis, who is executive director of Wildwood Nature Academy, an all-outdoor, parent-run co-op serving more than 200 children. “Back then, we built our own classes from scratch. Now you can find every sport, every subject. It’s so much easier.”
At Wildwood, parents teach for free and families chip in for supplies. The co-op’s looser structure, Kruse Davis notes, helps students across all abilities thrive. “Kids on the spectrum blossom outside,” says Kruse Davis. “Children who won’t touch paint in a classroom will roll in a muddy creek.”
Photograph by Michelle Meija-Jones
A huge inflection point in the homeschool movement arrived with the pandemic, when in-person education was shuttered for more than 50 million K–12 students nationwide. “Covid opened a lot of parents’ eyes,” says Mesha Mainor, a former Democratic state legislator who is now running for state school superintendent as a Republican. “We were at home with our kids and we saw the poor quality of public schooling right there on our computer screens.” Mainor split with the Democratic Party in 2023 over a controversial school voucher bill that passed the following year; it redirects public education funding toward stipends that families in eligible districts can use to school their children elsewhere.
Remote schooling during the pandemic crystallized many families’ growing unease with Georgia public schools, as families were concerned about sagging test scores, persistent absenteeism, and school safety. At the same time, homeschooling was losing its association with religion, becoming a more popular option for those seeking an alternative to public schools. In 2012, 63 percent of homeschool parents listed religious instruction as a motivation to teach kids at home. By 2023, that number had dropped to about 34 percent, according to a Washington Post-Schar School poll.
In some places, the homeschool population has even shifted to include more progressive families wary of public education in their state: In the same poll, a quarter of homeschool families now cite concerns that schools are too conservative, especially in states like Florida, where certain subjects and curriculum have been restricted or banned from classrooms.
Dissatisfied with remote learning on laptops during the pandemic, families turned to all kinds of alternatives. Some formed “learning pods,” small groups of families who share teaching duties or hire tutors to educate their children at home. In 2021, the Georgia General Assembly helped legitimize the model with the Learning Pods Protection Act, which shields such schools from the staffing ratios and certification rules applied to larger schools or childcare centers. Since then, many pods have matured into microschools: independently run academies that meet a few days a week, charge modest tuition, and blend home-based and classroom learning. Such microschools resemble the one-room schoolhouses of old, with students of all ages learning side by side.
The Georgia Promise Scholarship, passed by the General Assembly in 2024, further bolstered homeschooling. The program offers up to $6,500 per student for families zoned to the lowest-performing quarter of public schools. Parents who withdraw from those schools can use the funds for home study, hybrid schools, or microschools, provided the program is state certified.
The new voucher energized Georgia’s broader school-choice movement—though it sharply divided legislators and parents. Bryce Berry, a seventh-grade math teacher who defeated Mainor in a race for her former state House seat in the 2024 election, said he was “repulsed” by the bill, warning that it would “result in school closures, teacher layoffs, and students left out and left behind,” according to the Atlanta Voice. Critics also note that students with disabilities lose federal protections when they leave public schools and that many approved providers have no verifiable track record.
Concerns about the voucher program reflect broader disagreements about homeschooling. At a 2021 panel at the Harvard Kennedy School, some educators noted that we don’t know how homeschoolers are performing because there are no national, longitudinal datasets. (The federal government had been tracking the number of homeschooling families since 1999, but last year that data collection was cut by the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency.) And largely missing from the debate are the families who tried homeschooling and came back to public school.
But for many, the Georgia Promise Scholarship is seen as long-overdue support; more than 9,000 families signed up in the program’s first year. According to data analysis by the Georgia Recorder and the Current, most of the funds went to private schools and to major retailers like Amazon for school supplies such as laptops and books.
Courtesy of Attuned Community School
“We chose to use the funds for tuition at The Attuned Community School,” says Warner Robins mom Destiny Randle, whose kindergartner, Kairo, attends the K–8 one-room microschool. “The community here is unlike anything we’ve ever experienced. We’ve found family in what were once strangers, and my child is soaring in this village.”
The school, founded by LaToya Nelson, began in 2023 with five students in a living room. Today the school boasts 21 students of different ages, whom Nelson calls “learners.” Nelson’s own daughter, 17-year-old D’Aana, is a hybrid learner at The Attuned Community School.
“The way she’s blossomed is beyond me,” says Nelson. D’Aana is taking classes at several local universities, including one in forensic photography at Atlanta Technical College—an opportunity Nelson believes she never would have had in a traditional setting. “In traditional schools, kids get managed more but learn less of the durable skills that lead them into adulthood,” says Nelson.
Another growing alternative is hybrid schools, also called part-time private schools or university-model schools, in which students split time between in-classroom and at-home learning. Education expert Eric Wearne, a Kennesaw State University professor and author of Defining Hybrid Homeschools in America: Little Platoons, has been tracking their rapid growth and evolution. Fifteen years ago, he and his wife—parents of seven—needed breathing room and time for their growing family. They enrolled in a hybrid program, St. John Bosco Academy in Cumming, which bills itself as college-preparatory with a focus on the Catholic faith, family, and education. “It was a calmer pace of life,” he recalls. “Dinner together, not just homework and hurry.” On school days, his children attend classes; on home days, they work through uploaded lesson plans at their own pace.
Today, Wearne codirects the National Hybrid Schools Project, which surveys and convenes hybrid programs nationwide. His most recent report found an average tuition of less than $5,000 and rapid post-2020 growth: Nearly a quarter of hybrid schools have opened since the pandemic began. Hybrids also ease one of homeschooling’s perennial challenges—how to verify learning outcomes—by combining home instruction with formal classes, grading, and standardized benchmarks. “These schools are the DIY spirit of American education,” he says.
Regardless of the model, educating children outside the typical school model is rarely simple—or cheap. “You can do it inexpensively, yes,” says Kruse Davis. “But homeschool is a sacrifice. Usually one parent steps out of the workforce, cutting the income in half.” There will be days, she adds, “when you sob at the sink and question your choices.”
Nevertheless, many families who opt for homeschooling say the sacrifice is worth it for the freedom they’ve found outside of school walls. Back in Cobb County, Andrea Hall’s eldest is now a high-school senior with college credits, planning to apply to Emory University and Kennesaw State. After 13 years, Hall still marvels at how her experiment has grown.
“When we started, it was five families and a library room,” she says. “Now it’s a whole community, and that’s where my kids have all their friends. One of our families has a student in the Civil Air Patrol, already logging flight hours toward becoming a pilot. Homeschooling is definitely what you make it.”
This article appears in our January 2026 issue.
Advertisement
[ad_2]
Joe Reisigl
Source link