By Michelle Martin
Staff writer

As Labor Day approached this year, Lisa Menich, a member of St. Matthew Parish in Schaumburg, spent her days like most other parents: getting ready for school.

But Menich had to go beyond making sure medical forms were completed and school supply lists filled for each of her three children; for them, Menich is mom and teacher rolled into one, and she had lesson plans to prepare and curriculum to buy.

Menich has been teaching her children at home since her oldest, Zachariah, now 9, was in first grade. Hannah, 7, and Elijah, 4, also get lessons at home.

“I’d kind of wanted to consider this before kindergarten anyway, but I chickened out,” Menich said. “I’m not really a by-the-books kind of person, and I thought this would allow more family time, more creativity.”

After a year of public-school kindergarten, Menich decided to take the plunge.

“He was bringing home a lot of values that weren’t what our family was all about,” she said. “There was a lot of negativity, a lot of inappropriate language. Some of the other kids, they were allowed to watch TV shows that my child had never heard of.”

The number of families who teach their children at home is growing every year, and while there are no reliable statistics, anecdotal evidence suggests that Catholic families are no exception. Once viewed as the domain of evangelical Christians, the ranks of home schoolers have become more diverse just as more Catholic families have become disenchanted with educational institutions.

A U.S. Department of Education study of families who home schooled in 1999 estimated about 850,000 were educated primarily at home that year, and predicted the number would climb to between 1.1 million and 1.2 million this year. Some home-school advocates put the number a half-million higher.

Cathy Klocek did not begin teaching her seven children at home until the oldest, now a 28-year-old Sister of Mary Mother of the Eucharist, was 12. At the time, Klocek knew three other Catholic families who taught their children at home. Now, the home school group she helped found at St. Peter Parish in Volo has 59 member families—and members of another Catholic home-school group also worship at the parish. Her youngest child, not yet born when Klocek began home schooling, is 14 and working on the Kolbe Academy Catholic high school curriculum.

Asked why she began the project, Klocek said, “A simple answer is that this is what God wanted.”

She wasn’t happy with the way sex education was taught in Catholic schools, or that most of the textbooks came from secular publishers and did not take advantage of opportunities to teach Catholic values along with reading, writing and arithmetic.

“I just didn’t think they were getting the fullness of the faith,” she said.

Catholic principals and teachers do make a point of including Gospel values in all subject areas, said Barbara O’Block, associate superintendent of Catholic schools for curriculum and instruction. What’s more, she said, Catholic schools show students what it means to live in a “community of faith.”

“The height of Catholic schooling is community,” O’Block said, including parents, students, teachers, administrators and staff. “It’s kind of an apprenticeship in Catholic living.”

But Klocek didn’t like the effect associating with some of the other children had on her first two daughters.

“My oldest begged to home-school,” Klocek said. “She didn’t like the peer pressure at school. My second was a social butterfly, and she begged me not to home-school. But I just felt that this was something I had to answer for to almighty God. If I let her whip me into submission to her will, I would have a terrible time answering to God.”

The situation got better when she prayed to her daughter’s guardian angel, she said.

Menich said her children generally like having school at home. After all, most kids can’t go to class in their pajamas, and lessons usually take less time since the teacher has only three students to work with. Once school is done, there’s no homework, and activities like baking cookies or even cleaning can count as lessons.

“Laundry is a life skill,” she said. “And when we’re doing yard work, everyone does yard work.”

No matter how they get their lessons in, home-school advocates can cite study after study showing that children who learn at home do at least as well as their school-educated peers on standardized tests. Swat and Ivan Pacold of Elmhurst look no further than the success of their own children at St. Ignatius College Prep.

Swat, a native of Indonesia, home schooled most of her six children for most of their elementary school years before sending them to St. Ignatius for high school. Her oldest was valedictorian; her second, a daughter, was second in her class—and she started high school at 12.

“I think children can grasp a lot more than they are given credit for,” said Pacold, who tried Montessori schools, parochial schools and Opus Dei-sponsored Northridge College Prep before deciding that she could teach her children better.

“Home-schooling is like a continuation of taking care of little children,” she said. “I read to all of them from day one. It’s like reading to them and playing puzzles, taking them to museums and libraries. The work is harder and more complex, but it is a continuation.”

Home-school supporters say parents know their children’s strengths, weaknesses and learning styles better than any teacher who has a new class of 24 or more students every year. And with only their children to worry about, parents can adjust the pace of the curriculum to the child, not the other way around.

According to the Department of Education study, the reason parents most often gave for their decision was that they could provide a better education at home than their children could get at school. Religious reasons came next, with concerns about the effect of popular culture near the top of the list.

For many families, it comes down to a desire to control their children’s exposure to the world until they are more mature, and taking seriously the statement of the Catechism of the Catholic Church that parents are the primary educators of their children, said Toni Lyter, a working mother of two from Lake Zurich.

“In some ways, they might have more exposure to the real world than kids in school,” she said. “It’s not like we keep them locked up. We are out in the community. But we can choose who they are with.”

Indeed, many home schoolers offer similar defenses of their children’s socialization almost before the question comes up:

“Our kids are involved in so many things that see other kids six days out of seven,” Menich said. “But I get to choose what they do.”

“As for the social life, it just never stops,” Klocek said. “Some of our friends are a distance away, so sometimes you have to drive a little bit.”

Home school groups offer all kinds of support. The Society of St. Scholastica, the group that meets at St. Peter Parish in Volo, for example, does a beginning-of-the-year Mass and picnic every fall and sponsors everything from field trips to science fairs to Christmas caroling at nursing homes. Menich, who minored in fine arts at Loyola University Chicago, offers her home school group art enrichment classes, and has her two older children involved in the group’s chess club.

By choosing activities carefully, she said, the children have plenty of opportunities to connect with other kids and she can transmit her values—which include keeping the family dinner hour sacred.

For the first time this year, she opted to keep them out of religious education at St. Matthew Parish, also for scheduling reasons. Her husband, John, makes frequent business trips, but is nearly always home on weekends, when religious ed classes meet.

“It’s another day with daddy,” Menich said. Plus, using the Seton Home Study School curriculum, the kids always seemed to be ahead of their peers. This year, she will continue the Seton curriculum, and do the parish’s religious education curriculum and participate in required family activities so that Hannah can make her first confession and first Communion at the parish.

Archdiocesan policies allow for such arrangements in some circumstances, with the knowledge and consent of the pastor. Many home-schoolers report no difficulties, if only because many of them gravitate towards home-school-friendly parishes.

Lyter, for example, had first been encouraged to educate her children at home by the late Jesuit Father John Hardon, but didn’t think seriously about it until her family began attending St. Peter Parish and met other home-schooled families and their children. Now she says she couldn’t have done it without their help and support, especially the help of her friend Ellen Weiss, who went so far as to sometimes teach Lyter’s children with her own on the days Lyter worked.

Other families said they find help from the many providers of home-school curricula, some of which will provide high school transcripts and diplomas, in addition to outside resources like tutors or even community college or occasional public high school classes.

Nearly every parent who took on the job of teaching her children acknowledges some early fears, but says she overcame them and is glad she did.

“My husband was concerned that the house was going to go to hell in a hand basket, and I guess some days it did. But we managed to get the chores done and dinner on the table,” said Klocek, who was a teacher for three years before staying home with her children. “It was such a monumental challenge, that the educational success of my children was going to be in my lap. But if this was what God wanted me to do, he would give me the grace to do it.”