Marine Corps Base Quantico -- Sometimes, “back-to-school” doesn’t mean touring a new classroom or meeting a new teacher, instead it means setting up desks in your living room or turning a spare bedroom into a space for lessons.
This is the case for families aboard Marine Corps Base Quantico and Marine families in the surrounding counties who home-school their children. It’s a choice many have made; the Quantico Homeschoolers Facebook group has 124 active members.
“From where we sit, I can see six houses where the family home-schools,” said Sarah McGettrick, a home-schooling Marine spouse. “There are lots, especially on this base.”
Some families choose to home-school because they want their child’s education to have a religious focus. Some feel that their child is not well-served by the public school system, whether it’s because he or she has special needs or is an accelerated learner. And for military families who move often, home schooling can provide a measure of consistency no matter where in the world the family is stationed.
Marine spouse Angela Powell Woulfe has decided to home-school her 8-year-old daughter. She completed second grade in Maryland’s Anne Arundel County schools in the spring before the family moved to Stafford for Woulfe’s husband to attend Command and Staff College aboard MCBQ this year.
“She spent the past three years being bored in school,” Woulfe said of her daughter. When she was tested in second grade, she was found to be reading and comprehending at a sixth grade level.
“The school basically said they had no more content for her,” Woulfe said. “She’s the kind of kid who always wants more information, needs more information. She likes learning and I didn’t want it to become a chore for her.”
McGettrick started home-schooling her oldest son, who’s now seven, after his first year of preschool.
“He’s autistic, and I found that I was getting tired of explaining his likes and dislikes and learning styles over and over again to his teachers,” she said. “I thought, if I try hard, can I do this myself?”
She tried and found it was a good fit for her and her son. As her younger children grew older, she found that it worked for them, too. She now home-schools three children -- ages 7, 6, and 4 -- and plans to do the same with her younger two when they get older.
“I like that I know what they know and what they don’t know,” McGettrick said. “And I like that curriculum can be tailored to the needs of each child.”
Woulfe is also looking forward to being able to customize her daughter’s curriculum. She plans to skip Maddie ahead to a fourth-grade level for some subjects, like history and language arts, and stay at a third-grade level for others, like math. She purchased lesson-planning materials, textbooks, and workbooks for about $550 through Timberdoodle, an online company that offers curriculum kits for preschool through 12th-grade.
McGettrick’s children follow a distance learning curriculum provided by A Beka Academy. They watch videos of full-length classes and their grades and transcripts are managed by the Academy. The program costs $1,500 per child per year.
McGettrick said that the large number of home-schooling families aboard Quantico means her children don’t miss out on the social aspect of traditional school.
“Sometimes on a random Tuesday morning, we’ll all take a break and go to the pool together when all the other kids are at school,” she said. And the Quantico Facebook group organizes meet-ups and field trips throughout the traditional school year.
Woulfe said she expects home schooling to be challenging in some ways. But her daughter says there is nothing she will miss about public school and that’s enough to convince Woulfe that she’s made the right decision for now.
Writer: auphausconner@quanticosentryonline.com