Inside Homeschooling in Germantown
By Miles Wall, Hannah Yoon, Pavlina Cerna, Lillian Hightower, Jozette Williams, and Colin Chrestay.
When longtime Germantown resident Laverne Trusty was growing up in the 1970s, Philadelphia Federation of Teachers was frequently on strike. She recalled how her father, an auto mechanic, kept us his children’s education while they were out of school.
“Dad would change his shift or work at night so that he could get the blackboard out during the daytime and have school,” Trusty said. “It was complete with recess, lunch… everything was scripted, and there was no wiggle room, there was no chance to zone out.”
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Trusty, who has educated all five of her children herself, said that her father’s diligence taught her the value of investing in her children’s education.
Trusty practices a form of home education, commonly called homeschooling. She said she was motivated to do so by her religious beliefs, as well as by dissatisfaction with the public system.
“When I had my own kids, the school system was not the same,” Trusty said. “I wanted a private school or Christian school, but I also wanted to stay at home, and there was no financial way to do both.”
Trusty isn’t alone. 91 percent of parents of homeschooled students expressed concerns about the environment of other schools stating it as an important reason for homeschooling their child in the 2011–12 school year, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
There are approximately 2,500 children ages 5–19 living in Germantown, Pennsylvania, according to Statistical Atlas, but the neighborhood has no public high school, after Germantown High School closed down in 2013 along with 22 other schools by the School District of Philadelphia.
High school-aged students in Germantown were redirected to either Roxborough High School or Martin Luther King Junior High School, an arrangement some parents in the neighborhood are unhappy with, in part due to negative impressions of the quality of those schools.
Jonisa Downey, a Germantown resident with two children in the public system, said the process of deciding where her daughter, now in the 8th grade, will go for high school has been stressful.
“All of the schools that we are interested in are far from our house,” Downey said. “There definitely needs to be more decent schools for our children within our communities.”
Ismael Jimenez, a former teacher at Germantown High School, opposed the closure. He now teaches at Kensington Creative and Performing Arts High School.
“One of my best students, who was a senior the following year after the school was closed, I actually ran into him three or four years later, he told me he ended up dropping out and not finishing school,” Jimenez said. “There’s very few options around the area.”
While lack of education facilities is not among the top reasons why parents decide to homeschool, homeschooling could serve as a solution for parents like Trusty, who homeschooled all of her children through high school.
In the past several decades, the popularity of homeschooling has grown significantly. Between 1999 and 2007, the population of homeschooled children grew from approximately 850,000 to approximately 1.5 million, according to a 2007 study by the National Center for Education Statistics.
In Pennsylvania specifically, 24,568 children were registered as homeschooled for 2017–18 school year, according to a report prepared by the Pennsylvania School Services Board. Approximately 480 of those are in Philadelphia County.
Joseph Murphy, a professor of education at Vanderbilt University and the author of “Homeschooling in America,” noted that quality of education is an increasingly important factor in parent’s decision to homeschool, while noting the lingering weight of religion.
Murphy also noted that the existing research on homeschooling indicated homeschooling doesn’t demonstrate any loss in the quality of the child’s education.
“We have no data that homeschooling hurts kids,” Murphy said. “They do as well or better than other students on most measures.”
Some homeschoolers organize themselves into formal cooperatives or informal social groups and often coordinate online, on blogs like Philadelphia Homeschool which lists various homeschool cooperatives in the city and surrounding area.
Talking Stick, one such cooperative started in 2006, hosts events in Germantown at Awbury Arboretum for homeschooled children of all ages, ranging from informal social hangouts to workshops and formal classes. The founder and current co-director Katie O’Connor was motivated to create the organization by a perceived lack of secular homeschooling spaces, she said.
“I wanted to work with young people in an environment that was respectful and I felt a lot of school environments are coercive and they don’t give enough choice. They don’t give enough free time” O’Connor said.
Amy Entrekin, a homeschooling parent who brings her children to a Talking Stick gathering from their home in Pottstown, said one of the chief benefits she sees in homeschooling is flexibility.
“We can go where the wind takes us,” Entrekin said. “If we’re on a tangent, like we get into something in the morning we can keep doing it all day, or if it leads us into exploring some other genre of learning, we can go there.”
“There’s nothing that holds us back,” Entrekin added.
But O’Connor said she knows homeschooling is not feasible for everyone.
“If there’s a single parent, or both parents have to work in order to make enough money to live, it’s not really an option,” O’Connor said.
While acknowledging such financial obstacles, O’Connor also said that some parents in Germantown and elsewhere manage to make it work.
“They’re not as privileged as they would be if they had the two incomes,” O’Connor said. “But if [they] can, you know, they manage on one income.”
