ATHABASCA —An increasing number of parents are choosing homeschooling for their children, but local education leaders say the move is impacting the quality of education being offered to those students and raise concerns about the impact on public education funding.
The growing trend of alternative education options in Alberta has been gaining ground every year since the COVID-19 pandemic, and according to government data of the 800,000 students across the province, some three per cent, or 22,553 students, are registered homeschoolers.
Home education numbers reached their highest in the 2020-21 school year, which saw 24,198 students switch to homeschool. Though this year’s data falls short of the five-year high seen in 2020, over 9,000 more students are homeschooling this year compared to 2019-2020.
An additional 2,078 students are currently registered in a shared responsibility program, the highest in the last five years. In shared responsibility programs, a government-funded school authority — public, private, charter, or otherwise — and certificated teacher is responsible for between 20 and 80 per cent of Grades 1 to 12 programming.
For parents like Tim and Carrie Knopp, who’ve reside outside of Athabasca for the last two years, the decision to homeschool their kids — currently in Kindergarten, Grade 2 and Grade 4, with a three-year-old not yet in school — was one made on personal values.
The Knopps have been homeschooling since 2020, but said the pandemic and its impact on schools was not a driving factor behind their choice.
“Years ago, I read a book by Sir Ken Robinson,” Tim said.
Robinson, a British author and international education advisor, is renowned for his calls for educational system reform, detailed in written works and a 2006 TEDtalk entitled 'Do schools kill creativity?' with over 78 million views.
“His whole proponent of education reform, his philosophy, is that it’s sort of one note. It’s sit down; if you’re good at reading and writing and regurgitating, you’re going to do really well.
“I went through it and went ‘I think we can do a better job, I think we can give them better experiences and be a bit more wide-ranging in how their learning is,” he said.
Concerned about the time commitment, especially factoring in four eventual ‘students’, the pair decided to pursue home education rather than public school at home as their oldest was starting kindergarten during school shutdowns.
“Our first year of homeschooling was a lot of learning,” said Carrie. “It’s so cool because we get to watch each other figure out how our kids learn, and we get to watch how our kids learn.”
She said the learning curve for her and Tim involved letting go of their own notions and experiences of what school is in order to lean into and create a new tailor-made education for their kids.
“You can’t do school at home, it’s totally different,” said Carrie. Letting their kids pursue their interests and essentials in both structured and play or activity-based learning rather than mandating blocks of each day to specific subjects is one way the Knopps are breaking from the ‘typical’ education mold.
Public school perspective
But for players in the educational world like Aspen View Public Schools superintendent Constantine Kastrinos, the growing trend of homeschooling is an issue that will have lasting consequences on education in the province for years to come.
“This is, I believe, the biggest topic going forward in Alberta over the next decade for education,” said Kastrinos.
He laid his concerns over future enrolment numbers at Edwin Parr Composite (EPC) high school due to low numbers seen entering Whispering Hills Primary School out to Athabasca town councillors during a Jan. 7 update on the division’s three schools in town.
Kastrinos said low enrolment in kindergarten and Grades 1 and 2 is an indicator the strong high school numbers, with 151 Grade 12 students at EPC this year, will drop off by between 50 and 75 percent in 10 years.
“That’s going to provide different complications from a divisional stance; it’ll impact staffing, it’ll impact the type of programming that we can put into the school,” Kastrinos told councillors.
Enrolment numbers dictate critical provincial funding for school divisions and schools. In January 2024, AVPS board of trustees voted to close Rochester School after a current and projected future head count was one student away from falling below the full-time equivalent threshold for over $450,000 in funding.
Related: Aspen View trustees call Rochester closure ‘most difficult decision’
And in addition to the funding and enrolment problems the growth in homeschooling is presenting for the public school system, Kastrinos pointed to foreshadowing seen after the COVID closure of schools as evidence of another potential problem.
“Since 2021, the Alberta Government has put and will put in the neighbourhood of $126 million in additional funding to make up for what they call gaps in learning and education that occurred during that time,” said Kastrinos during a Jan. 22 follow-up.
“The reason that happened is not because parents were not well-intentioned and not because parents didn’t want the best for their kids or didn’t know their kids better than anyone else, that’s not why. It’s because education and the act of teaching is a professional duty that comes with experience, credentials, and all of the legal pieces that go along with that.”
Kastrinos added the potential gap homeschool students may face put individuals at a disadvantage when applying to college or university, and could create more burden on the under-funded public system if they return before graduation.
But while the thought of large numbers of students behind in their learning and opportunities for their post-secondary education keep Kastrinos a passionate advocate, his problems aren’t with all homeschoolers.
“Individual families have a right and sometimes a need to individually educate their kids in a homeschool, independent setting,” he said, preferably with the collaboration of a public school via a shared responsibility program or another school authority.
In Alberta, homeschoolers can choose between two home education programs, supervised or not supervised.
Supervised programs are parent planned and delivered but require students to be registered with an authority which provides curriculum resources, facilitators and regular assessment by certificated teachers each year. Supervised programs also allow parents to be reimbursed for certain expenses.
Unsupervised programs are also parent planned and delivered, but do not require registration with accredited authority, nor evaluation by certified teachers. Unsupervised homeschoolers do not receive funding from Alberta Education.
Kastrinos said his issues lay mainly with unsupervised homeschoolers, particularly when forming a “home education commune,” or a “mock charter school” similar to the Rochester Christian Academy that held an open house in the hamlet community earlier this year.
“What they’re doing is leveraging resources and in many cases, even renting out a space for meeting and in many cases, designing their own philosophical twist to their curriculum, whether it be religious or otherwise,” said Kastrinos. “And in all of the situations, not hiring certificated staff to teach their kids. That’s a huge problem.”
Community or collective?
The Knopps are supervised homeschoolers, registered with an authority and focused on ensuring their kids learn the essentials and stay at grade level, although with a more flexible view on progress markers like reading levels, which they’ve seen fluctuate over time, and from kid to kid.
“That’s never a desire of any parent for their kids to be behind, but one of the benefits to (homeschooling) is that they can be behind and not feel like they’re behind,” said Tim, noting the self-esteem impact such progress markers can have, even if kids catch up later in life.
While a concrete number of homeschoolers — supervised or unsupervised — in the Athabasca area is unknown, the Knopps said they’re part of a local group who book facilities for shared recreation opportunities and joint field trips with more than 120 students.
Parents in the Athabasca and Boyle area like Terryl Turner, Brendan Peters, and Vicki Jones are also all registered with different school authorities, ranging from catholic divisions and a board tied to a private catholic academy.
Turner, a homeschool student herself, has been homeschooling her four kids since 2013, and said her and her husband wanted to be active participants in their kids’ education rather than bystanders.
“We wanted to ensure they were taught truths and facts and teach them to be critical thinkers,” she wrote in a Jan. 15 email. “We also wanted to teach what was aligned with our morals, values and beliefs.”
Registered as supervised, Turner does not participate in evaluation standards like Provincial Achievement Tests, designed to measure learning levels in Grades 6 and 9, and diplomas in grade 12. While Kastrinos said not administering these tests can create graduates unqualified to pursue post-secondary, Turner feels the opposite.
“Selecting a test such as climbing a tree, a monkey will thrive, but the goldfish will fail. These tests do not help our kids nor tell us what they are capable of. Students who struggle with school and taking tests are no less than the kids who are on the honour roll and shouldn't be labeled,” said Turner.
For Tim and Carrie, teaching the curriculum for their young children has been a learning experience, and for subjects and topics out of their depth, they look to experts or people in the community for an educated source.
And Jones, the Knopps, and Turner all said getting in touch with other local homeschoolers to share knowledge, resources, and experiences has been an integral part of their journey.
“Our biggest resource that we’ve honestly been blessed with since moving back to Athabasca is the amount of homeschoolers that we’ve connected with and that have paved the path already,” said Carrie. “They’ve graduated children, they are a homeschool child and now are homeschooling their children.”
Jones, who has homeschooled her two kids for seven years in order to move away from a desk-bound education style to a more outdoorsy, active one, echoed Carrie’s sentiment. “(I) love the homeschool community for support and socialization.”
Credentials vs. confidence
Kastrinos said though he recognizes every family’s right to make decisions on what’s best for them, the implications of pulling kids out of public school goes beyond financials and post-secondary potential, and looking at the motivation behind the current influx is important.
“I think the answer comes down to control; I believe that parents want to have the ultimate authority.” He pointed to the COVID mask mandates, a sore spot for many during the pandemic, and the new provincial policy prohibiting phones in classrooms, as reasons parents may feel disconnected or out of control in recent years.
He pointed to potential concerns that could arise in what he describes as home school collectives, unregistered and unstructured groups with no clear pathway to deal with harassment or other disciplinary issues.
“There are avenues of protection (in established divisions) for students and staff and the rest,” said Kastrinos. “In a large commune-style setting of home education, who’s responsible for overseeing and governing that?”
His overarching argument supported his main point; education is a job for practiced, experienced, certificated educators, and breaking from the system can have lasting, and in his view predictable and preventable, impacts.
“If I was a heavy-duty mechanic, and someone said to me you have to rebuild this diesel engine and do it right so that it runs for the next ten years, I would be confident because I have a red seal that I can do it, but if you are just as confident you can do it, and you haven’t looked at an engine before, I’d have concerns driving that vehicle,” he told councillors.
Others, like Turner, disagreed.
“I find the idea of worrying ‘who’s teaching your kids’ a little ridiculous,” said Turner. “Everyone can learn. We are surrounded by information. My high schooler needs to learn quadratic equations? Then I learn quadratic equations and teach them.”
