By Rachel Byrd
When Lone Star College-Kingwood student James Corbett tells his classmates where he went to high school, many of them are surprised by his answer.
“It’s fun to watch their eyes go wide,” says Corbett. “Then I have to sit through ‘The Questions’: ‘Did you like it?’ ‘Did you have friends?’”
Like many other Lone Star College-Kingwood students, Corbett was homeschooled.
Despite the common arguments against the decision to educate students at home, home school graduates attending Lone Star College-Kingwood have not found the college transition to be much more difficult than the college transition of public schooled students.
This ease in transition could be attributed to the fact that many home schooled students take dual credit classes in high school, allowing them to become used to the college experience.
However, LSC-Kingwood students who graduated from home schooling attributed the ease in their transition to the way they were educated.
Olivia Kabell, an English major at LSC-Kingwood, stated that her ability to “double-up” on her coursework during her years being home schooled helped prepare her for college.
“I learned from that experience to manage my time, and that I had control over my workload,” says Kabell. “I feel like those skills have continued to carry me into college.”
Public school graduates expressed concerns that a home school experience would affect a college student’s social growth, and that the number of people might make a home school graduate uncomfortable in a classroom setting.
“[They] were home schooled, so then [they] were probably not around a lot of other people, and to us, because we were literally in a room full of the same people we saw every single year… we grew up in that kind of environment… so we were kind of comfortable in it while still developing,” says Jailene Sauceda, who graduated from Porter High School.
However, regarding the effect of home schooling on a student’s social skills, home school graduates did not seem to find their educational setting to have much impact on their own social lives, either while in high school or in college.
Peyton Poteet, a business major, stated that along with doing school work at home, he and his brother Riley were members of two different home school co-ops.
“We were able to get everything done that we needed to there [at home], and we’d still be able to go and interact with other people and have a normal education inside the home,” says Poteet.
Olivia Kabell believes how much home schooling affects a student’s social growth varies from student to student.
“I think the experience is different for each kid depending on if they have siblings, what kind of curriculum their parents decide to use, and then what kind of activities their parents put them in, or what kind of activities those kids choose to do,” says Kabell.
According to Julie Kabell, the vice president of Home Education and Responsible Teaching (HEART), there are 459 home schooling families in the organization.
However, HEART is not the only home schooling organization active in the Kingwood area, and many families home school their children without formally being members of any such organization or co-op.
It also is not certain how many families educate their children at home in the state of Texas as a whole, since according to the Texas Home School Coalition they are not legally required to be regulated by the state.
Because of this, home school graduates could make up a significant number of LSC-Kingwood’s student population.
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