Home Schooling for Senior Year-How?

M_s_Mom
Sat, 22 Nov 2008 23:03:12 +0000

Our D is a junior this year. She is a highly motivated, independent and accomplished student who loves learning, but feels that high school involves a great deal of wasted time. She has asked us if we would allow her to self-study in her senior year rather than attend our local high school.

In principle, we are not opposed: She is unusually mature, organized and would follow through (and if she didn’t, she could re-enroll in the local high school for the last semester of her senior year). But we have no idea where to start. If she stayed on next year, she’d be taking AP courses in English Lit, Physics, Spanish, World Hist, and Music Theory. (She’s already completed APs in Stat, Bio and Amer Hist, and will do APs in Econ, Calc and Eng at the end of this year.)
By the end of the year, she will also have met all the course requirements for graduation in our state except for 1 more year of English.

-What kind of resources are out there that she can take advantage of to help her structure her coursework? I notice in other threads here that there are ‘on line high schools.’ Can you do it for just one year?

-We have a community college nearby where she might be able to take Spanish and Music: What are the implications for enrolling in community college if she wants to apply to a 4-year college as a freshman, not a transfer student, the following year?

-What are the broader implications for college applications? What issues and pitfalls should we be aware of?

We realize that to answer all these questions would take someone hours, so what we really need is some idea of how to get started, where to find information and what to be aware of.

By the way, her primary concern about leaving high school is that she has friends there whom she will miss seeing-but she feels it might still be worth it if she could use her time more productively. She would also have to give up her school-based ECs, but she has other non-school related ECs that she would continue and probably invest more time in. We also want to not burn any bridges with the local high school in case she changes her mind. It really isn’t about them-they do a very good job-but she’s just a different kind of kid.