Network Founder Presents Home Schooling Option to Evacuee Families
by Ed Thomas
September 27, 2005
(AgapePress) - Joyce Burges, who heads a home-education advocacy group based in Baker, Louisiana, says evacuee parents need to consider home schooling as an option for children going through trauma and transition in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Burges and her husband Eric founded National Black Home Educators Resource Association in 2000 after some 10 years of home schooling their family of five children. In the days and weeks following Hurricane Katrina, the home-education advocate heard the many calls by government and emergency officials to have displaced children put in public school immediately, touting this as an advisable return to routine for evacuee families.
However, Burges says it made just as much sense to her to consider options that kept children close to their parents after the trauma of the hurricane. While government and emergency authorities reasoned that public school enrollment would put "some type of normalcy back into everyday life" for the children of hurricane refugees, she says she felt home schooling "should have been thrown into the mix," and that hurrying evacuee kids back into the "all-in-all public school system" was by no means the only, nor necessarily the best, option.
"The families had already ripped apart," the NBHERA founder explains. "They had already been torn apart. They were already trying to reconnect themselves and then, by the time they reconnect themselves, the first thing that they're hit with is that this is Louisiana law or this is Texas law, and you have to put your children in public school, when the children are already facing emotional problems."
Burges felt most public educators and officials were not considering the possibility that staying close to parents during this time of upheaval might be better for some children. Raising this issue, she made a request to shelter facilitators and public school officials that she and other home educators in her network be allowed to make presentations to thousands of evacuees in Baton Rouge locations on how to home school children during the families' transition time in shelters and temporary lodges.
Burges is also trying to find sponsors who will contribute funds to cover the curriculum costs of 25 families that want to home school, paying for learning materials packets to cover the first four months of the school year.
Ed Thomas, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
