Speech for Cyberschool

Presented by Alison in Capitol Rotunda, Harrisburg


Teaching children in their home has been successful for our family. We graduated a daughter from homeschool last year who is now attending The Ohio State University Honors College on a full scholarship and entered with sophomore standing. She is also a National Merit Scholar. We call that Academic success.

She took many online courses: chemistry, AP US HISTORY, AP MACRO AND MICRO ECONOMICS. She also used video courses, and courses from local community colleges, and some correspondence courses.

Our family has looked at educational resources from a consumer’s perspective because we have paid course by course, text by text. The least expensive course was $150.00; the most expensive course was $700.00. It adds up.

Education is costly – not everyone realizes just how much it does cost – but ask any homeschooling parent how expensive it is – especially where one of them has given up one of those two-incomes most families need just to get by.

Our state legislators know how expensive education is though – they allocate over 40% of our tax dollars to be spent on it and that does not include your local school tax dollars. But that money never seems to get to those of us who want to try a better way, a different way.

Because the online courses my older daughter took were so successful and enabled her to earn the highest grades on AP exams or to CLEP out of many college courses, and because our youngest (soon to be 10) wants to be “just like her big sis,” we decided to experiment with The Einstein Academy Charter School.

We will always wonder what it would have been like if the school had received the monies it expected to have when it expected to have them. We’ll never know.

A week ago, we were all thinking how wonderful it was that the school was just about fully operational – all of our classes were up and running and we were moving rapidly ahead. In our Language Arts through History class my daughter was using the web to find out about Condaleeza Rice and Colin Powell and Ralph Bunch and a dozen other well known black leaders. Then all of a sudden, we hear that the Department of Education is going to withhold the school’s funding – again!

That night my daughter fell asleep crying and asking Why would they do that to my school? Is my school going to have to close?

I couldn’t answer her questions. That’s why I’m here in Harrisburg today. Does the PDE want to investigate the school
–
or do they just want to put such a stranglehold on the school that it will simply die.


Alison Weber
155 Spohn Road
Freeport PA 16229