Plenty of students read “Little House on the Prairie” books in school — but far fewer make the trek to see its protagonists’ real-life homes. As part of his early education, Sander Stone did both.
Stone’s visit to the Laura Ingalls Wilder Historic Homes in 2016 was part of a family road trip from Washington to the Dakotas, lovingly titled “Prairies, Pioneers and Paleontologists.” Along the way, he and his siblings dove headfirst into American history: museums, national parks, even an archaeology tour through the Great Plains.
Stone’s mother, Meagan McGovern, runs the website Homeschoolers of Whatcom County and planned this trip — along with many others — as part of her kids’ education. They had the option to go to public school if they wanted. But Stone, now 19, believes homeschooling “really helped shape my worldview, and helped me a lot in academics, and what I want to do as a career.”
The road trip allowed Stone to deepen his interest in history, which evolved into his passion for government. Today, he’s studying politics at George Washington University on a presidential scholarship.
Home learning is the nation’s fastest-growing form of education, and contrary to stereotypes, home learners are not a monolith. From classical curriculums to partnership programs and even “unschooling,” there are myriad instructional approaches. Experts say home learning can provide families with flexibility and a student-centric approach to education, though it also comes with potential downsides, such as the risk of knowledge gaps or isolation.
Dr. Kate Baehr, who is current president of the Washington Association For Learning Alternatives and principal of the Bellingham Family Partnership Program (BFPP), said that 2020 “crisis learning” left a lasting impact on America’s education system — or at least raised questions about where and how kids learn.
“Since COVID, I think there’s just a lot more understanding that there are options in a variety of ways to set up a successful learning environment, and one of those is to have a home learning environment,” she said.
Homeschooling in Washington and Whatcom County
Four years removed from the COVID-19 pandemic, homeschooling’s rising popularity still makes national headlines. The number of U.S. home learners has grown from 2.5 million in 2019 to almost 4 million in 2024, according to a May Forbes article.
In Whatcom County, 1,025 students were registered as homeschoolers from 2023–2024, including 208 in Bellingham’s school district. These numbers also don’t include students enrolled in partnership programs like BFPP, a supplement for home learners under the Bellingham Public Schools umbrella. Enrollment at BFPP grew to 600 during COVID-19 and has since dropped back to 255 students, just 25 above the 2019–2020 school year.
Still, Washington state as a whole saw a 43% increase in homeschooling — higher than the national average of 27% — in four years.
In Washington, parents must submit a declaration of intent to the state and possess a certain amount of college hours, or attend a Parent Qualifying Course. From there, they can choose from a variety of educational models and resources.
Teachers in other states have expressed concern about home learning’s effect on public school enrollment, and thus funding. But “alternative learning experiences” like BFPP — wherein some or all instruction is delivered outside typical classroom schedules — are available to every public school district in Washington. BFPP offers once-a-week, site-based enrichment classes to home learners, as well as extracurriculars and groups for the whole family.
“When I go to other states and say that I’m supporting families that are homeschooling, there’s a little bit of surprise that it is publicly funded, that we are part of a school district, that we are all sophisticated teachers,” Baehr said, noting that she’s proud to be part of Bellingham Public Schools.
Other resources include project-based co-ops, like Heartsong Learning Co-op, to tutoring centers like Achieve Learning, as well as a plethora of online groups, meetups and websites. Some community colleges even offer dual-enrollment courses to homeschooled students.
“It’s an incredible wealth of resources that feels overwhelming because there’s so much out there, but it also is very freeing,” said McGovern, whose Facebook group has more than 2,500 members.
The ‘whys’ behind homeschooling
Homeschool families are sometimes stereotyped as ideologically extreme — especially amid a tense election year. But Aaron Perzigian, a professor in the Department of Education at Western Washington University, said stories about parents pulling kids from public school over specific content (like LGBTQ+ curriculum) are overblown.
“It has less to do with those individual areas … and more to do with the fact that parents want to feel like they have the autonomy over their child’s learning,” he said.
A national Institution of Education Sciences survey from 2023 found concern about other school environments was the most commonly cited motivation (83%). Other top factors included a desire to provide moral instruction (75%), a desire to emphasize family togetherness (72%) and dissatisfaction with academics at other schools (72%).
Just 53% of homeschooling families identified religious instruction as an important motivating factor. But Whatcom County has a strong community of faith-based homeschoolers, many based in Lynden.
Tammy Barker owns the Christian curriculum store Bright Ideas Homeschool Consignment, and her Facebook group, “Christian Homeschoolers in Lynden,” has almost 500 members. But even among her clientele, Barker said motivations vary. Some parents simply found their kids “slipping through the cracks” in traditional classrooms.
Secular parents may also homeschool to better meet their children’s needs, especially for kids who are neurodivergent, aren’t being challenged, have learning disabilities or struggle with social anxiety.
BFPP parent Teresa Halfacre began homeschooling her daughter during COVID-19 and stuck with it. Her daughter struggles with anxiety and dyslexia; prior to 2020, she “spent most of her school day under the table and not learning.” Thanks to homeschooling, however, she’s involved in extracurriculars and no longer shuts down when she’s home.
Then there are folks like McGovern and BFPP parent Tobi Smukler, whom Baehr describes as “philosophical homeschoolers,” or parents who are passionate about being the “architect of their kids’ education,” McGovern said.
McGovern sees homeschooling as a lifestyle, wherein “school” could mean anything from library storytimes to cross-country adventures. On that Great Plains trip, she added, “There was no curriculum, there’s no workbook. I didn’t ask them to write something — but they will tell you everything they learned.”
McGovern’s approach dovetails with BFPP’s educational philosophy: Brown said classes are often driven by teachers’ “passion and our excitement.” In addition to classes in core subjects, they offer subjects like cooking or entrepreneurship that allow kids to pursue their own interests.
Other home learners follow a set curriculum: Three of Barker’s four children use Classical Conversations, a Christian homeschool program with four locations in Whatcom County. Students meet in person once per week, and curriculum is fully assigned from seventh grade on.
“I feel like to be successful in life, you have to be well-rounded, and you have to learn how to do hard things,” Barker said. “My goal with my kids has always been to teach them not just what to learn, but how to learn.”
Potential pitfalls
As for how these approaches translate to long-term emotional and academic success? Perzigian researches the efficacy of alternative school environments; compared to traditional classrooms, he said the area’s inherent variables can make it difficult to study.
In a traditional school’s population curve, most students land somewhere in the middle — not going above and beyond, per se, but not falling behind. In alternative learning environments like homeschooling, Perzigian said the middle ground lessens. A larger percentage of students excel — but an equally significant number aren’t learning up to par.
“What some of the research tells us about those different population curves is just that the quality of the individual in charge … makes such a significant difference,” Perzigian said. Without support or training, it’s easier for parents to “fall off the horse” in providing a rigorous education. Successful pedagogy is a significant time commitment for the teaching parent, meaning there is an “over-representation of higher-income families and two-parent household families in the homeschool world.”
“While all parents are their child’s first teacher, not all parents have the content expertise to be an effective teacher,” he continued. “So sometimes the success is really dependent on the family’s willingness to seek out the resources so they can become those content experts, as well as the modality experts of teaching and learning.”
Other potential pitfalls include the loss of kids’ “natural environment.”
“The peer environment is this fabulous place where kids can try on different skills, different personalities of sorts,” Perzigian said. “They can practice their social skills, their disagreements, their collaborations, how to goal-set together.”
If kids don’t practice those skills in a natural setting, like classrooms or extracurriculars, “they’re not going to be able to maintain or generalize those skills across placements,” Perzigian continued. In this way, “homeschooling can be very, very limiting socially and emotionally.”
The importance of community
These risks are part of a broader picture: Perzigian said external resources like co-ops, partnership programs and even simple extracurriculars can greatly mitigate negative outcomes. “One thing that makes … this type of learning successful,” he continued, “is when families do not attempt to do this on their own.”
In Baehr’s experience, home learners “are able to navigate so many different groups and people, that they are very adept at being out in the community.” From devout Christians to “unschoolers,” the students themselves introduce each other to different lifestyles, too.
“We’ve had lots of field trips in the past where there’s half the girls wearing long skirts and long hair and dressed … not to show any of their skin, and then a couple kids who had blue hair or were nonbinary,” McGovern said, “and they always figure it out.”
Brown said the BFFP community is a mosaic: “We have lots of [parents] that are same-gender parents. We have adopted kids. We’ve had some foster kids. We’ve had lots of single parents. We have large families. We have single-child families. We have an enormous amount of neurodiverse families.”
But amid this diverse base, one thing is consistent. “The enthusiasm buzzing within and around this school is palpable,” Brown said.
Cocoa Laney is CDN’s lifestyle editor; reach her at cocoalaney@cascadiadaily.com; 360-922-3090 ext. 128.
