Today I should be getting more bottles so I can bottle up my 2nd batch of homemade vanilla. If you didn't get to try it the first time, I hope you can this time. It smells delicious! And one of my co-workers told me that he made a vanilla pastry just to highlight the vanilla and his party friends raved over it. :)
Speaking of work, they're cutting back on expenses like OT and they just let two of my co-workers go yesterday. :( I still get some OT and I was reassured that my job is not in jeopardy so YAY! I am sad to see anybody let go though. I think they'll both be okay in the end. One is opening up her own law firm and the other's landscaping business is booming :)
Homeschooling has been fun lately. Patch is doing his best to avoid doing any work at all and Franklin does his willingly enough - I'd love to see him adding his own work though. He made a great power point presentation the other day about the history of space. We're hoping to make one next week on our trip to the State House last week.
I'm not sure if the power point will load but he knows he needs to work on his story line to make it a little more interesting but I'm really proud of him!
Elsewhere in homeschooling, the SC homeschoolers are all getting lessons on how government works lately. One of the legislator proposed a bill H 3478 to change the homeschooling laws. In a nutshell, they want homeschoolers to take standardized test that other SC children have to take, register their names and they want to eliminate our 3rd option completely. It seems to have come about because some child died from starvation and abuse by the hands of a father who claimed to be homeschooling this child. While it's a heartbreaking story, it really has nothing to do with homeschooling. My uneducated guess is that this child was being abused and should have been noticed by the system before the father pulled him out of the public school system. The system should have followed up on an abused child, not all of the homeschoolers who are not abusing their children. Anyhow, the legislators are being educated that parents should have the right to raise their children as they see fit and in my eyes, it's not the way the 40th ranked state in the nation is doing it. Some people suspect that SC might be trying to raise their overall test scores by using the homeschoolers - and that's fair because we get no funding and a tiny bit of use of the public schools, right? Not that I want any funding from the state because then they'd only want to regulate us more. It does bother me that I only get one day a week of speech class for Patch because he's a 'walk-in' this year. We own two houses in this school district so pay double the taxes to them. The legislatures are also being educated that we do have our children's names registered - with our 3rd option groups and there is really no reason they need to know them too. If they want to see my registration card, I'd be glad to show it to them but the only people who have asked to see it are people willing to give homeschoolers a discount because they're homeschooling. And, last but not least, there are a LOT of 3rd option members who don't want to have to get their curriculum approved every year or every time they want to make a change in what they're choosing. Option 1, going through the school district, pretty much gives the state the children's names, requires them to take the standardized tests and school at home the way they'd school at PS. Option 2, is very similar to Option 1 but you pay $500 a year for the privilege (or close to that and that could be per child - I'm not willing to look it up at the moment ;-) ) Option 3 has it's requirements too but basically, we have to cover 5 subjects through 6th grade and add 2 more subjects from 7th to 12th, keep a diary, journal or other of the number of days we homeschool and what they're doing and keep examples of their work.
So, basically, the boys and I (and probably most South Carolinian's) have been studying how this bill might become a law and what we can do to stop it. They've been included in what to write to the Reps & Senators involved in this situation. Sadly, we have not heard back from anyone we've written. Thankfully, a lot of homeschoolers have heard back and the bill is quiet for the moment. The ringleader has asked that the bill stay in committee and not get voted on. Being the involved homeschoolers that we are, we're keeping an eye on them and any movement to make changes, introduce something new or try to sneak a vote in on this one anyhow. If representative Brannon thinks that the bill is really dead just because he asked for a non-vote on this one, he's a misinformed legislator and if he thinks we won't pay attention, he's sadly mistaken. He and another one of the original four proposers of the bill have vowed to get more control over homeschoolers so no children will get abused or starved to death again (yeah, good luck with blaming them all on homeschoolers!) At least we got one of the four to drop his name from the bill! Don't go messing with us SC homeschoolers!!
I will update more with info about our trips to the Governor's mansion and the state house soon.
