- Story by Michael Overall, Staff Writer
- Photos by James Plumlee
Part two of a two-part series. 
Read part one.
One teenage boy comes to class in a dark blue blazer with the collar turned up and his pant legs stuffed into the tops of knee-high boots. He was going to wear a powdered wig, too, but it didn’t fit.
Still, even with the makeshift costume, he looks surprisingly colonial.
“My name,” he introduces himself, “is George Washington, future president of the United States — but I don’t know that yet.”
For now, Washington is just a young Army officer in the French and Indian War. And his classmates, most of them in socks or bare feet as they sprawl across the couches and arm chairs in the living room, are about to interview him for a big promotion — to commander-in-chief of the Virginia militia.
One girl, playing the role of a minister in the British government, asks a particularly pointed question.
“Why should we give you the military training and experience that you could use someday to lead a revolution against us?”
Scratching his chin, Washington thinks for a moment.
“Well,” he decides, “you don’t need to worry about me becoming a revolutionary unless you try to take my rights away. That’s up to you.”
The American Revolution didn’t start overnight, and neither did the home-school revolution. A handful of activists rebelled because they believed their rights were being trampled, and others slowly joined the cause until eventually a mass movement broke out.
The earliest revolutionaries included a Tulsa man named Roy Sheppard, who once slapped a public school teacher in the face during an argument over how to discipline Sheppard’s 8-year-old twins, a boy and a girl.
After that incident in January 1956, Sheppard yanked his children out of school and set up a classroom at home, complete with school desks and a chalk board.
The Tulsa World reported that each day began with the mother ringing a bell at 9 a.m., then leading her children in the Pledge of Allegiance and singing a few patriotic songs – the same way public school teachers started each morning back then.
Less than a month later, however, a Tulsa jury convicted the Sheppards of breaking the state’s compulsory school attendance law, fining each parent $25 and ordering the twins back to third grade.
The appeals process raged through the Oklahoma court system all summer, making front-page headlines across the country. The mother told the World that the family was receiving no public sympathy. “Even the church people have drawn away from us.”
But the battle ended in September 1956 with a landmark decision that recognized a parent’s right to home-school under the Oklahoma constitution, putting the state at the forefront of the home-school movement. And it has stayed there ever since.
“The most important right that parents have,” declares Renee Janzen, who leads the home-school group in south Tulsa where George Washington sat down for his job interview, “is the right to decide what kind of values to teach their children.”
‘Bet my life’
Breaking for a brown-bag lunch at Heller Park, the students wander off to a pair of picnic tables under a shade tree, leaving Janzen behind in the parking lot.
“Don’t worry,” she shrugs. “I never have any discipline problems, not with these kids.”
That’s why she started home-schooling in the first place. Back in the early 1980s, Janzen met a family that had kept their children out of public schools — the first personal encounter she ever had with what still seemed like a radical lifestyle back then.
“What impressed me,” she remembers, “was the relationship the kids seemed to have with their parents — very close, very respectful, the kind of relationship you would want with your kids.”
Before she had children of her own, Janzen earned a law degree from the University of Tulsa in 1984, then served as a clerk for the Oklahoma Court of Appeals before joining a private practice.
But she gave up her career to stay home. And now, instead of litigating, she teaches an all-day, once-a-week tutoring session for about 20 high-school students — covering history, literature and several other subjects.
Except for the occasional diversion to the park, the class goes back and forth between her living room and dining room — offering a compromise between traditional home-schooling and the institutionalized “education co-ops,” such as Owasso’s Heartland Home Educators.
On the one hand, a class like Janzen’s will give the students a way to socialize outside of their homes — and take a lot of the burden of teaching off the parents.
“On the other hand,” Janzen says, “it’s a very informal, relaxed atmosphere.” Students kick off their shoes, curl up on couches and stretch out across the carpeted floor. “Kids make themselves at home in my house,” Janzen says, “because, once a week, it is their home.”
For Janzen, the class brings in more than $3,000 a month in tuition. But after expenses, it doesn’t amount to half of what the average attorney makes in Oklahoma, based on U.S. Census data.
“It’s really not that great of a sacrifice,” she says, unwrapping a sandwich. “Yes, you have to readjust your expectations in terms of money and material things, but what you get out of it is so much more important.”
When she first started home-schooling, she knew just a handful of other families doing it. Now she stays in touch with hundreds of other parents.
Some are deeply religious; others totally secular. Some worry about the theory of evolution or sex education in public schools, but most wouldn’t fit any stereotype of a home-school family, Janzen says.
“Most people are motivated by the results they see. When you meet a kid who has been home-schooled, especially one who’s now a young adult, you understand why people do it.”
She points at a vulgar piece of graffiti on the park’s sidewalk.
“I would bet my life that a home-schooled kid didn’t do that.”
‘Strong roots’
Dressed in dainty leotards and tights, the middle-school girls sit in a circle on the hardwood floor to offer prayer requests.
A sick friend. A dead pet. A sore knee. And this being Inauguration Day, they end by asking a blessing for the new president.
Now it’s time to line up at the barre and practice “third position,” a classic ballet stance with ankles crossed and the feet pointing in opposite directions.
“Pay attention to where your hands are, too,” the instructor demands. “Keep your back straight. Chin up.”
Over breakfast this morning, 12-year-old Rebekah Byrd examined paintings by Georgia O’Keefe for art appreciation. And while her older brother cleared the dirty dishes from the table, she finished her literature lesson for the day by reading a chapter from a nonfiction book about a female pilot in World War II.
Before the morning is half over, she’ll have perfected the “rond de jambe” and the “battement tendu” with a dozen other home-schooled girls at a dance studio in south Tulsa.
“Would she be doing all of this at a public school?” asks her mother, Kathleen Byrd.
“Would she be doing any of it?”
Certainly not the prayer. And for the Byrd family, the prayer was the most important part.
“I want my kids to have a Biblical worldview,” Byrd says, “and that’s just not where the public schools are.”
A worldview, Biblical or not, doesn’t come from a classroom or a textbook. It can’t be learned like proper grammar, Byrd says, or memorized like a multiplication table.
“It has to be absorbed from everything around you. It’s your lifestyle, all the little decisions you make every day without even thinking.”
To find the right atmosphere for her children to grow up in, Bryd thought about private schools, and especially Christian schools.
But the average home-school parent can expect to spend maybe $100 a month per child on supplies and curriculums. Private school tuition could easily cost four times as much.
“You find yourself working full-time just so you can pay to send your kids off to spend the whole day with other people,” Byrd chuckles at the thought. “
“I want to spend that time with my kids. I want to be the biggest influence in my children’s lives. I want my values and my beliefs to the ones that shape them.”
‘The better judge’
Working through his math homework at the kitchen counter, 16-year-old Cameron Byrd is a part of Janzen’s weekly class, where he ranks as a junior in high school.
Typing a book report at the computer in the dining room, 10-year-old Daniel is in the fourth grade. And Rebekah, still away at ballet lessons, is a seventh-grader.
At least, that’s how Byrd ranks her children. If they ever enroll in Tulsa Public Schools, they will have to take a proficiency exam to determine their grade levels. And Byrd could be disappointed.
Home-schooled students, when they enroll in public schools, have generally fallen a year or two behind other children their age, explains Sharolyn Sorrels, who administers the proficiency exams for the school district.
“It’s extremely rare for them to test out at the level where they think they’re going to be,” she says, “We almost never see it.”
With no other kind of record kept on home-schoolers in Oklahoma, these proficiency exams offer a rare chance to judge how effective home-schooling is. But Sorrels warns against making any generalizations.
The parents who are most committed to home-schooling are precisely the ones least likely to return their children to public schools.
“We tend to see the home-school failures, not the home-school successes,” she explains. “I would never suggest that home-schooled students in general are lagging behind their public-school counterparts. I don’t have any data to support that.”
A retired teacher, Tulsa state Sen. Mary Easley described herself as a home-school proponent when she first joined the Legislature in 1997. She even attracted activists to campaign events, where sometimes she would notice school-age children still wearing pajamas in the afternoon.
More recently, she heard about a father who was enrolling three sons in high school after a lifetime of home-schooling. None of them could read or write.
“There are problems out there,” Easley decided.
Her proposal, Senate Bill 472, would’ve required home-school parents to register with local school districts and submit progress reports at the end of each semester.
Basically, it would’ve let districts keep track of home-school grades and provide state officials with a way to collect statistics.
The bill died in committee this month, but supporters promise to resurrect the idea in the next legislative session.
And home-school activists will keep fighting it. For many of them, the whole point of home-schooling is to avoid government regulation.
“You have to ask yourself,” argues Byrd, “who’s the better judge of what’s best for your children? You or the state?”
‘Aren’t you a freak?’
With everybody back in Tulsa for a holiday break, Micah Janzen and some old friends are hanging out for the afternoon at his mother’s house.
For them, it’s like a school reunion, sitting around the same kitchen table where they used to study together every week during Janzen’s class.
“I think we’ve all turned out OK,” Micah smiles. “At least so far.”
He’s majoring in mechanical engineering at Baylor, where he’ll graduate next year. His sister Grace is a freshman at Ouachita Baptist, and her friend Lexi Taylor is getting ready to leave on an overseas mission trip.
“And him,” Micah points to Chris Byrd as he arrives a little late, “he’s going to college, too.”
The University of Tulsa, as a matter of fact.
“So his parents must have done something right.”
Other freshmen don’t always know what to think when they ask Byrd where he went to high school and find out it was Janzen’s living room.
“Really? You were home-schooled? Why aren’t you a freak?”
Everybody laughs. They’ve all heard the same response.
“They expect you to be so socially awkward that you can’t function away from home,”
Byrd says. “And some home-school kids are like that.”
“Who?” Janzen wants to know.
“I’m not talking about any of us,” Byrd assures him. “It’s not the norm, but it happens. You see it.”
Grace speaks up to say that home-school probably prepared her for college better than a regular school would have.
“I learned a lot of time management and self-motivation,” she says. “A lot of my friends are getting stressed out from the workload, but not me.”
But home-school had drawbacks, too.
“You can’t go home and complain to your parents about what a bad day you had at school,” Micah says. “You can’t tell your mother, 'I have this teacher who is being too tough on me.’ Your mother is your teacher.”
Still, he’ll probably home-school his own children someday.
Grace nods her head, agreeing.
“Me, too,” Lexi says.
But on the other side of the table, Byrd hesitates.
“I’ll have to think about it. A lot of that depends on who I marry — we would have to decide together. I don’t think home-schooling is for everybody.”
The conversation could go on for hours. But with the afternoon slipping away and Christmas vacation almost over, they all have other places to go.
“Just because we were home-schooled,” Micah jokes, “doesn’t mean we don’t have lives.”
Officials shy away from home-school issues
Home schools have become such a touchy issue that many state officials prefer not to touch it at all.
From school principals to university professors, several educators turned down opportunities to comment. Privately, some of them criticized home-schooling and hoped for more state regulation of it. But not on the record.
As one suburban school principal explained: “Nobody wants to deal with 300 angry phone calls.”
Others supported home-schooling but worried about offending their peers.
Nationally, teacher unions often stand as the “opposition” to home-schooling, but the opposition usually turns out to be indirect — not so much attacking home-schooling itself, but the lack of state oversight. And the same holds true in Oklahoma.
“It’s important to understand that we have no objection whatsoever to parents exercising their right to home-school,” says Roy Bishop, the president of the Oklahoma Education Association. “We take no position against it.”
Then comes the “but … .”
During his teaching career, before becoming the teachers union president, Bishop had two students who had been home-schooled before joining his ninth-grade class in Stillwater Public Schools.
One seemed perfectly well prepared and received good grades. The other seemed at least one grade-level behind the rest of the class, and struggled to catch up.
“So, anecdotally, I can tell you that sometimes home-schooling works, and sometimes it doesn’t.”
When it doesn’t work — or when so-called home-schooling turns out to be an excuse for truancy — the child almost inevitably becomes a burden on the state, either by venturing into adulthood uneducated or by rejoining the public schools in need of remediation.
Either way, it gives the state a clear interest in monitoring home-schools and certifying that they’re really engaged in schooling, Bishop says. And he suggests that home-schools should welcome the oversight.
“It would help the home-school community, the real home-school community, distinguish itself from people who are giving home-school a bad name. It would be in their own interest to be able to say, 'Look, we’re doing it the right way.”
Most home schools closely follow the public schools calendar, teaching for roughly 36 weeks, or 180 days, each year.
The Oklahoma Department of Education offers several resources for parents who are interested in educating their children at home. For information, see tulsaworld.com/homeschooling.
Read part one.
