Project Encourages Home Educators to Mentor New Home-Schooling Families
by Jim Brown
October 11, 2005
(AgapePress) - An effort is under way to bring one million additional children into home education over the next five to seven years. The campaign, launched by Exodus Mandate, is called "Homeschooling Family-to-Family" (HFTF). Exodus Mandate was founded by Bible teacher and retired Army chaplain E. Ray Moore, Jr., to encourage and assist Christian families to leave government schools in favor of Christian schools or home education. The ministry is now asking experienced home schoolers to share their heart for home education by offering to mentor families they know into home schooling their own children.
A designer of HFTF, author Bruce Shortt, says the project targets people who have expressed interest in home schooling but are afraid to get started. "What we're suggesting is that we become, in a sense, a little bit more evangelical as home schoolers," he says. "When those conversations come along, what we need to do is reach out to these people and come alongside them and say, 'Come on, you can do this. We can do it together.'
Short encourages those parents with home-schooling experience to let those considering home education know that help is available. These mentors can let uninitiated parents know, for instance, "We'll help you figure out what to do with curriculum, and we'll take you over to meet the folks in the co-op and the local home-school support associations," he says.
By joining a home-schooling co-op or network, the families gain access to numerous resources, the HFTF designer points out. "Those resources range from the academic to the spiritual," he says. "And, as I like to tell people, we all have rough days. It certainly helps to have a network of people that you know who've been through it all, who've had similar problems, and who can give you encouragement and, in some cases, solutions."
"Homeschooling Family-to-Family" has been endorsed by several national home=schooling groups, including the National Black Home Educators Resource Association and the Home School Legal Defense Association. Shortt hopes the HFTF campaign will ignite a renewed spirit of evangelism for Christian education in the hearts of experienced home schoolers.
Jim Brown, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
