Homeschool families experience academic success

By LAURA BEHENNA

Bigfork Eagle

Bigfork homeschooling families have found the experience rewarding for every member of the family - and their children often become high achievers.

The Dupea and May families both opted for homeschooling as a way to keep the children’s fathers involved in their lives. Both Monte Dupea and Daniel May work in the restaurant business, and their work hours meant they would be at work from the time their kids came home from school until they went to bed. Homeschooling allows the fathers to be with their children in the morning and early afternoon.

“It worked so well for our family,” Echo Dupea said of her and Monte’s choice to homeschool.

Deborah May’s father was a Navy man who was often away for months at a time when she was a child. “I wanted my children to know their father,” she said.

Their Christian faith was also a primary motivation for both families to choose homeschooling, and they have chosen curricula that support their faith. The Dupea children use textbooks from Bob Jones University Press, which teaches from a conservative Christian viewpoint. They also view live and recorded lectures available by satellite from the same university, based in North Carolina.

“It requires children to reach high,” Echo Dupea said of the curriculum. “People reach the potential you set for them.”

The May family started homeschooling 22 years ago using “hand-me-downs” from other homeschoolers, and now use “A Beka Academy” materials published by Pensacola Christian College, in addition to a variety of other resources they’ve discovered over the years. The children learned anatomy from watching their father dress an elk he had hunted. They have taken on “apprenticeships” with their father and other adults, allowing them to learn by doing.

“It was a little here, a little there,” Deborah May said of her family’s choices of curricula and hands-on learning methods. Both families emphasized that many curriculum choices are now available.

“When we started out, there were only two or three,” May said.

Dupea added that the Internet is a good way to look for and compare curriculum options.

Children in different grades may study together at home, where they’re free to learn at their own pace. At the Dupea home on May 25, Nathan, 15, Bethany, 14, and Jonathan, 13, watched a videotaped lecture on the human nervous system in one of their home-based classrooms.

They can call or send an e-mail to the instructor if they have a question. They take quizzes and tests, write papers and receive grades for their work. Echo Dupea, who was trained as an elementary and junior high school teacher, grades their assignments.

Dupea teaches 11-year-old Daniel, who’s in fifth grade, separately. The Dupeas’ oldest daughter, Hannah, 18, graduated last month at a homeschool students’ graduation ceremony at Easthaven Baptist Church in Kalispell. She’s also been working as a certified nursing assistant at Lakeview Care Center. She wants to become a surgeon, her father said.

Echo Dupea said that what she’s enjoyed most about homeschooling her children is “being able to know them, really know them. I see them learning, I’m not just hearing about them learning. I’m with them every day, so I can work on character traits that will make them godly and good citizens.”

Being with their children as they learn has allowed her to witness Jonathan’s aptitude for math and science, and Nathan’s love for literature, the arts and history. She added she feels as if she’s graduating with Hannah after how closely they’ve worked together for the last 12 years.

“Homeschool parents are really tuned in to their kids’ learning styles,” May added. That awareness lets them adjust their teaching methods to accommodate a child who learns better by what he sees than what he hears, for example.

With 22 years of teaching experience, May is confident that homeschooling works just fine, even for parents like her who had no previous training as teachers. She also has observed what other homeschooling parents have reported: Homeschooled students tend to do exceptionally well academically and often go on to excel in college. Three of the May children have gone on to college, while Jonathan, 14, Tabitha, 11, Susannah, 9, and Josiah, 7, are still studying at home.

Homeschooled students “get very good scores, usually above the national averages,” Dupea said.

“When my [older] kids went to college, they could compete as well as anyone else,” May said. “They know how to study.”

May’s oldest daughter was valedictorian of her college class, which she achieved while taking 18 to 20 credits — a heavier than average course load — and working a job. Her son Nathan’s college peers were surprised that he seemed “so normal” for someone who had been exclusively homeschooled, she said.

Also, contrary to a common belief, homeschooled students need not be isolated or lack social interaction, the parents said. Echo Dupea was happy to learn “there’s a whole community of people homeschooling, and you can be as involved as you want.” That can mean taking classes with other home-based students, going on field trips together, singing in a choir or playing soccer.

May’s children are active in their church, 4-H, a children’s choir and the Bigfork Children’s Theater, so “they’re with other kids all the time,” she said. They became active in puppetry and have performed puppet shows around northwestern Montana.

The older May children have traveled extensively on church mission trips to China, India, Israel, Central America and the Caribbean, where “they saw things they didn’t see in school every day,” their mother said.

Dupea also keeps a list of other homeschooling moms whom she can call to ask questions or request help.

“We help tutor each other,” she said. “We share our skills.” She has volunteered to tutor other children in English, for instance.

May noted that homeschooled kids seem to relate more comfortably to adults than students at traditional schools who interact mostly with their peers, who often can’t even look adults in the eye, she said.

The homeschooling process also seems to bring out leadership qualities in many children, she observed.

“The kids all seem to be leaders,” she said of her children and the other homeschooled kids they know. “They’re not as apt to be followers.”

In both families, the children help in their parents’ businesses, learning their parents’ work ethic, gaining job experience and spending time with their fathers. The Dupeas own Rosa’s Pizza and the Mays own the Bigfork Inn. Nathan May, their oldest son, now an engineer, started his own lawn-mowing business when he was 12, saving enough money to cover his first two years of college, his mother said.

Both mothers agreed that homeschooled children often have a confident aura about them.

“You can almost pick out a homeschooler” in a group of children, Echo Dupea said.

Homeschooling costs vary. The teaching materials the Mays chose costs them about $2,000 a year, less than a private Christian school would cost, Deborah May said.

“But we’ve known people who’ve done it on almost nothing,” she added. Families sometimes share used books, videos and software their children have outgrown, and some used bookstores have helpful resources from other homeschool families, Echo Dupea said.

One of the most rewarding outcomes of homeschooling is the close family ties that grow from studying, playing and working together so much, the two families said.

“The kids are so tight, the older ones call each other weekly,” Deborah May said.