As the new school year begins, not every kid will be heading back to school -- some of them will be starting school at home.
Kim Quon is the regional director of Families for Home Education. She said the numbers of people inquiring about homeschooling is relatively high -- but not nearly as high as they were at the beginning of the pandemic.
"At that point, it was like a landslide of people were pulling out right and left," she told KMOX's Brian Kelly. "It's still a good stream of families pulling out a variety of reasons, a lot of it is still residual of the whole COVID issue."
Among the reasons for people leaving traditional in-person school include a lack of virtual options and concern about what they're seeing from their local school boards.
"[Parents] want to do virtual but the school is not able to, so therefore, they decided to just go ahead and stay home and homeschool instead," she said. "But also, issues of school board meetings and things like all those situations that have come up, families are making choices to home educate instead. And so that's kind of where we're at now."
Quon was careful to point out that virtual schooling through the child's educational institution is not the same as homeschooling.
She also said some parents are keeping their kids at home because in the last two years, they've fallen behind their peers.
"For a lot of children, Zooms just were not working for them," she said. "They just weren't working. So now we're on catchup mode for a lot of these children."
Quon said the state of Missouri doesn't keep data on how many kids are homeschoold so it's impossible to know, but she guesses that the number is around 11-12%. Prior to the pandemic, it was thought to be around 5%.
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