Confusion is important to avoid to avert regulation. As IAHE Director of Government Affairs, I frequently interface with the Indiana General Assembly (IGA) on issues related to home education in Indiana. I told a legislator I would share this concern with you.
I was told if homeschoolers do not want to see increased regulations, they need to STOP using government (taxpayer) funding. It was further explained homeschoolers have found a way to have the government pay for their homeschooling by enrolling in virtual schools.
It was said virtual schools are having great difficulties (poor A-F grades), and the IGA never intended to have a lot of people use them. The IGA envisioned them to be used for students with disabilities who could not physically go to school. They especially were never intended as a substitute for homeschooling.
I share this as a warning to homeschoolers to avoid using government funding such as ESAs, tax credits, etc. If the money was touched by the government, consider it tainted. Tax deductions are your money, and the government never even saw that money. Some legislators even complain about that.
I explained virtual charter public school students are not classified the same in Indiana Code as homeschoolers have been for decades. I also gave him the funding chart to demonstrate the differences in funding. It was created to help families more easily understand the differences between virtual charter public school and homeschool.
In fact, Indiana case law has classified homeschoolers’ parent-directed, home-based, privately-funded form of education as a private school since 1904 in State v. Peterman. Homeschooling has a long history in the Hoosier state that was occurring while Indiana was still a territory. Abraham Lincoln was an Indiana homeschooler. 
Finally, I am curious to know if those who use virtual public charter schools such as Connections, Hoosier Academy, Indiana Virtual, EVSC, etc., did you ever believe you were “homeschooling”? Why did you think it? Thanks for your insight. I told him I’d report back with findings.
It confuses people who may not understand the difference, because when I search “Indiana homeschool online”, Connections Academy pops up, as well as Indiana Virtual. Aren’t key search words something that the website creators/administrators control? If so, they are not being very clear at all.
Also, for an offshoot of public school that was meant for those who were unable to consistently go to a physical school building, I find it interesting how often I see paid advertising on my social media feed, billboards, commercials, or fliers in the mail recommending that I sign up. Why isn’t it something where the local principal or school guidance counselor simply alerts the individual families who need its services, vs wasting thousands of dollars in ad campaigns to the general public, further muddying the waters between VPS and true home education?
Homeschool pedagogy is parent/child led and graded. The classes my children took at colleges for dual credit were not considered as part of their homeschool education by the college they attend. It was a part of their high school education, but not parent graded. In fact, the classes were considered college courses for credit. VPS is public school directed and public school teacher led and graded. For inclusion in most home school organizations, a student must have 51% of courses graded by parent. Classes graded by others are not included in that classification of a homeschool education. That is why I always refer to our students as home educated. Lifestyle, not school.
We see this ALL the time on Indiana Homeschoolers (Facebook group sponsored by IHEN.org, the Indiana Home Educators Network). We try to explain to people that it matters who is paying for it! But some choose to think we’re trying to exclude them. They really don’t get that it’s different when the government is in charge and paying for it.
Apparently the big two Virtual Charters, Indiana Connections Academy and Hoosier Academy, have been telling parents correctly that this is NOT homeschooling. However, no matter how many times they’re told, many parents insist that VCs are homeschools. I’ve even had some parents argue with me. They seem to think it is some kind of us vs. them mentality and a moral judgement, instead of a simple definition of what is legally independent, traditional homeschooling and what is a government-funded virtual charter school.
I, personally, have not used the virtual school programs, but until now I believed it was considered a form of homeschooling. When I was trying to decide on curriculum for my kindergartener, a friend of mine shared an enrollment packet with me about virtual public school. She uses VPS, and believes that she is homeschooling her kids.
I think this confusion comes from the way VPS has been advertised. In fact, if you Google search “homeschool curriculum” you’ll see ads for VPS.
Regardless, the issue here is that true homeschoolers are not utilizing this government curriculum or any other form of government funding. Most of us prefer to choose our curriculum, and keep the government money out of our schooling. This issue wasn’t caused by homeschoolers, and we shouldn’t be lumped into the same category as in-home VPS users.
As a brand new homeschool mom, I have been very grateful for the minimal regulation in Indiana. My son loves our school time, and he is already so smart! He has a genuine love of learning already, and I intend to encourage that.
I hope our legislators can see the difference, and will correct the real problem here instead of blaming homeschoolers. The advertising for VPS needs to be clarified, and their enrollment should be better screened. If they only want special needs students, then they should only accept special needs students.
We have never used a virtual school nor do we consider it “homeschooling.” All of the people I’ve run in to who use it have claimed that it is homeschooling though, and get very defensive/angry when it’s pointed out that it’s still a public school. I think it’s a lack of info on the parent’s part, since they often say “Well, we wanted him/her to get a diploma and be able to go to college”, so I’m assuming that they don’t fully understand how actual homeschooling works.
When we moved to IN in 2013, we had already been homeschooling for quite a few years and intended to continue to do so. We were not familiar with (what we now know as) virtual public schools. We received numerous mailings from Connections, K12, and perhaps one other organization. While I cannot recall the exact wording, it was definitely worded in such a way as to lead the reader to believe it was a free form of homeschooling. This sounded like a dream come true for us! However, after further research (which took quite a while – perhaps almost up to a year or more), it became clear that this was not what our family was looking for. All the while, the mailings continued to come with the same misleading wording. It was not until reading a thread from Debi Ketron in a homeschooling site that we began to understand that this “free homeschooling” was actually online public school. It is still a bit murky to understand, not having the legal distinctions visible at hand. Also, there are quite a few “homeschoolers” in the area who use these platforms, truly believing it is classified under IN state law as homeschool. The companies did little to assist consumers to believe otherwise. In retrospect, I am very thankful that we did not choose to enroll in one of these services. My request to legislators would be that, if possible, please make it incumbent on these companies to make it crystal clear that this is not a form of homeschooling, so as not to deceive the enrolled.
When we were first considering home educating, I did the normal thing and entered ‘homeschool curriculum’ into Google. K12 website was listed as one of the search results.
We looked into to this because it advertised itself as “free homeschool option”.
During our research of K12, asking the people if they used Christian curriculum, what were the requirements for class, etc.. Not ONCE did they say they were a virtual public school. The reason we decided not to go with K12, was that we didn’t want our kids in front of a computer for 5 hours a day, with no schedule flexibility.
It’s always been pretty clear to me that Hoosier Academy, Connections Academy, & K12 are PUBLIC schools that you attend virtually from home. While some families utilize these options because of disabilities, others may because their child requires more one on one assistance than public school can provide or they’re victims of severe bullying that wasn’t resolved by school admins, etc. They are a completely separate thing, legally, from actual homeschooling. Homeschooling is when parents choose, teach, & pay for/aquire their child’s curriculum themselves. They can buy curriculum new, used, have it donated/gifted to them by another homeschooling family, but ultimately they are the ones responsible for acquiring said curriculum. Online curriculum CAN be used & still be classified as homeschooling IF the program they’re using is not a virtual public school. For example, DiscoveryK12, Easy Peasy All-in-one Homeschool, Khan Academy, to name a few. That’s my understanding anyway.
As a traditional homeschooling parent who has never utilized a VPS, I have a few thoughts on this issue:
I never realized that VPS’s were only intended to be used by those with disabilities. I have never seen them advertised as such.
As I have met people who mistakenly believe that VPS’s are indeed homeschooling, it seems that there is faulty advertising occurring. It should be incumbent upon the VPS to clarify that it is not a homeschool program. Homeschooling, by definition, is privately-funded and parent-directed. VPS’s are neither.
A clarification of terms seems to be in order.
I am a mother and a home educator. I have home educated in two different states and can attest that those of us in the homeschool community are very aware of the differences between home education and public virtual school or cyber school–the new kid on the block so to speak. We are painfully aware of the differences mainly because it costs us so much in time, effort, dedication…and money! We pay for everything that a public school would normally pay for: books, extracurriculars, field trips, arts and craft supplies and the list goes on and on. Oh, we know the cost! We are not confused at all. However, perhaps our local communities’ school boards and/or our Indiana state government has had some “fogginess” over how much time and money they’ve spent in advertising dollars to attract consumers/students AND how many public school students have positively responded to said advertising, AND how many they’ve welcomed and enrolled into their program (from public school to public virtual school that is) with open arms vs how the results are paying off for them today, years later and surely many, many tax dollars later. Nevertheless, those enrollment numbers have nothing to do with the sort of traditional home school that’s been around since Abraham Lincoln read and studied for himself, the kind that my children do at home with their math texts and biology books filling our bookcases at absolutely zero tax dollar expense. Fiscally, there are little similarities between these two school choices; families, like mine for example, are forced by limited income to stay within budget and not overspend on over advertising. I hope this helps explain the difference between VPS and Honest Abe’s traditional brand of homeschool to those suffering under the fog– not so much parents, but the ones holding the taxpayers wallet. Those of us involved in homeschool support groups, co-ops, and social media educational forums serve to keep each other informed and assist each other so that confusion like this is kept to a minimum and we can function in daily clarity. Perhaps, the public virtual school administrators should practice the same transparency with their constituents.