YES Opportunities, Inc.

YES Opportunities, Inc.

This article was originally printed in the weekend edition of The Gazette, Alexandria, VA.

Higher Learning

Story by Sarah Grim
Special to The Gazette

A two-year-old Prince George's Community College program that provides a special group of classes to supplement the education of middle-school-level home-schooled students appears to be on the road to success, striking a positive chord with students, parents and college officials.

The program, called the Home School Initiative, is administered through the Largo-based college's continuing education (non-credit) division, but the classes are usually taught by faculty from the college's credit division.

Paula Guy, PGCC's director of continuing educations, said the program came into being in the fall of 2000 as a result of information the college gleaned from focus groups of home-schooler parents the previous year. She noted that Prince George's County Board of Education figures showed that as of 1999 there were 2,295 home-schooled students in the county, the highest percentage of any county in the state.

The college had received a number of calls from home-schooler parents asking about laboratory and foreign language classes, so the focus groups were put together to see if the need was great enough to warrant some kind of special program, Guy said.

Home schooling is also growing rapidly nationwide. A survey and report released in August 2001 buy the U.S. Department of Education calculates that about 850,000 of the nation's 50 million school children, about 1.7 percent were being taught at home in 1999. The figures came from a telephone survey of 57,278 households conducted from January through May 1999. The U.S. Census Bureau in 1994 estimated that 360,000 children were home-schooled nationwide.

Many of the courses in the home school initiative are listed as being available for students ages 10 to 15, although some are for narrower age ranges, such as 13 to 16 for certain biology classes, or 12 to 15 for classes such as sign language, college/life skills and current issues. The class listing fo spring 2002 includes classes in Spanish, music, art and biology.

Guy said she did not know of any other colleges that offered such a program. As far as she knows, "Ours is a unique program to supplement the home school effort."