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Well, after the volume of incoming mail slows
down a bit we take a deep breath. Then
we get busy helping the families who decide right before or right after the
beginning of the Public Schools’ start that they should homeschool. Lisa and Monica are available by phone and
email to answer questions about how to get started, where to get books and how
to inform the school that a student will not be attending.
Our other major fall project is making the high schoolers’ transcripts. We type in all the grades that were submitted at the end of last school year and now Martha is going through and checking and rechecking each transcript to be sure that everything is correct. Fall is also busy as our new seniors are preparing to apply to colleges. Everyone needs something a little different so we work with parents to make sure the transcripts reflect what the colleges are looking for. Then we print and mail them – to parents, to colleges, to the NCAA, to the military academies. Fall is also when we see who has qualified for the Palmetto Fellows Scholarship. We await the test scores almost as eagerly as the students do. The first scores from the fall testing are coming available online and we just discovered that one of our students qualified with the higher test scores and helping them put together the submission. The submission goes in the mail the first week of December.
After that we all heave a sigh of relief and
take a week or two to spend with family and celebrate the holidays.
January is district count time. We must submit the number of students we have
registered (no names or addresses –just numbers!) in each school district to
the school districts. This makes a nice
four or five hour job for someone, counting rows and rows of grade levels. Then we check to see if the school district
address has changed (Greenville’s office has moved three times in the last four
years!) and we send those off.
February and March are our quiet months. Not many applications come in, and the phone
calls and emails are usually questions from parents who are already registered. We spend this time putting stamps and return
addresses on hundreds of envelopes so they will be ready for the mailing in
April and the registering in July. We
normally need about three thousand envelopes on hand. We also prepare the envelopes to mail our
soon to be graduating seniors their records.
Each senior’s file will have a large mailing envelope with copies of the
Disposition of Application ready to have the transcripts inserted when we
complete them in early June. All this
preparation allows us to be more efficient at the busy times.
In April we turn our minds to the next school
year, updating and improving the application as needed. Then we print a thousand renewal applications
and fold and stuff them into envelopes.
Each envelope gets a label and then heads to the post office.
We start gearing up for the second Palmetto
Fellows Scholarship submission in May.
We work on a much tighter time frame for this one as we have to type in
all the grades and calculate the final senior class ranking between the middle
of May and the second week of June. When
that is done, Martha disappears into the office and prints and prints and
prints all those transcripts to be sent to the families.
By the time we finish the major transcript
work it is July again and we are getting ready for an avalanche of
applications.
So all in all we manage to keep quite busy
all year. What is missing from this
broad description is all the little things that happen occasionally, but can
make a big difference in the life of a homeschool family. In addition to the general questions about
homeschooling, we also help take care of our families whose homeschool has been
questioned for one reason or another by the authorities. While this doesn’t happen terribly often,
when it does, Martha spends a lot of time talking to the family and talking to
whatever entity is concerned about the homeschool, helping to make sure that
the rights of the family are protected.
Martha also spends a good bit of time talking
with people from many realms – from school employees checking to see if a
family is registered to people at the Commission on Higher Education to ensure
that the high school transcripts we produce meet the requirements for both
state scholarships and for colleges around the state and from admissions staff
at various colleges to parents trying to decide if home schooling is the best
choice and how to go about it.
Through the years we have come to see just
about every facet of homeschooling. While
much of our day to day work centers on the high school students – the seniors
in particular, yet we are very in touch with young families as well. If we can help you in any way don’t hesitate
to call!
