Calvert Program Gets Top Grade In Home Service
Baltimore institution has been leading force in nontraditional setting
By Linda Linley
SUN STAFFPublished on Monday, September 15, 2003
School arrived recently at the Knickman family home in Jarrettsville in a
white cardboard box sent from a warehouse in Northwest Baltimore.
The familiar carton with the silhouette logo has been sent to Edward and
Carol Knickman every summer since they started home-schooling their daughter,
Clare, 13, and son, Thomas, 11, seven years ago.
Calvert School Education Services, the nonprofit home instruction division
of the Calvert School in North Baltimore, has long been known as "the school
in a box."
That's because the cardboard container contains all the textbooks,
day-by-day lesson manuals, reading material and supplies - including pencils
and paper - needed by parents to teach a year's worth of lessons. Calvert
started adding supplies to the boxes decades ago to help families living in
remote areas, where deliveries were sometimes made by parachute, camel and
dogsled.
At its 19,000-square-foot warehouse in the Seton Industrial Park off
Northern Parkway, Calvert employees hand-packed and shipped by traditional
carriers nearly 30,000 courses last year to students in pre-kindergarten
through eighth grade who are being home-schooled or are enrolled in charter,
cyber or other schools around the world.`Top-notch education'
"My children have gotten a top-notch education with the Calvert
curriculum," said Carol Knickman, who has home-schooled her children on the
family's Harford County farm since Clare was in second grade. She is now a
ninth-grader, and Thomas is a sixth-grader. "Calvert had it all laid out for
us."
Knickman said she had to develop her own curriculum after her daughter
entered ninth grade; Calvert's study materials only go through eighth grade.
"Calvert gave her a good base. She has been able to tackle anything that
comes her way," Knickman said.
Lisa Dean, president and founder of the Columbia Homeschool Community,
agrees.
"I don't think I'd be home-schooling today without the Calvert experience.
I'm no teacher, but they gave me a written script to follow and they held my
hand," said Dean, who teaches her two children, Elizabeth, 7, and Teddy, 6. "I
tell everybody to give Calvert a try. It will get you a successful home-school
experience."Beginnings in 1906
Calvert, which bills itself as the oldest formal home-schooling program in
the United States, was started in 1906 by the school's first headmaster,
Virgil Hillyer, with six families. Today, the home instruction division has an
enrollment of nearly 20,000, company officials said.
Hillyer's idea was to offer the Calvert School curriculum, with its
emphasis on writing, spelling, reading and mathematics, to parents who
couldn't send their children to the day school.
The home-based curriculum is the same as the one used at Calvert School,
with most of the courses written by Calvert faculty. It also includes art,
geography, science and history, depending on the grade level.
The Knickmans and Deans are part of the trend in home-based education,
which has increased drastically in the past decade.
"Home schooling is growing and will continue to grow between 7 and 12
percent per year nationally," said Brian Ray, author of the Worldwide Guide to
Homeschooling and a researcher with the National Home Education Research
Institute in Salem, Ore.
Although some government estimates put the number of home-schooled students
near 1 million, Ray estimated that the number is "between 1.7 million and 2.1
million children."Balto. Co. leads state
In Baltimore County, the number of home-schooled students has jumped in the
past 11 years, according to Francine M. Schaffer, home school liaison for the
Baltimore County public school system.
In the 1991-1992 school year, she said, 371 students were home-schooled.
That number grew to 2,642 in the 2002-2003 school year.
"Baltimore County has the highest number of home-schooled students in the
state," said Schaffer, whose office oversees the curriculums for the students.
"A lot of the parents use the Calvert School curriculum."
Home schooling is big business. Some experts estimate that parents in the
United States spend as much as $700 million a year for educational materials.
Along with its secular curriculum, which costs from $235 for a
pre-kindergarten package to $670 for eighth-grade materials, Calvert offers an
optional advisory teaching service at an additional cost of $255 to $310.
Parents also can purchase other reading materials, instructional CD-ROMS and
videotapes, tests, and backpacks and T-shirts with the Calvert School logo, a
young child in silhouette.
The advisory teaching service uses educators who act as professional
coaches for parents and students. They evaluate the student's work, grade
tests and offer teaching tips and encouragement.Hunt Valley operation
Once located in the basement of the Calvert School in the city's
Tuscany-Canterbury neighborhood, the home instruction division outgrew the
location and moved to Hunt Valley in 2001 when it became a separate operation
and Jean C. Halle became president. That's when the division changed its name
to Calvert School Education Services.
The warehouse in the industrial park is moving later this year to a larger
facility near the company offices to keep pace with the trend in home
schooling, company officials said.
"We are growing about 15 percent a year," said Halle, a former vice
president of The Sun, who noted that the division employs about 60 people,
including business personnel, counselors and educators, who are advisers to
parents and students.
Halle said that during the 1980s, the home-schooling business came into its
own and now there are dozens of firms that cater to home-based education.
"We're a nonprofit company, so we can focus on the families and students,"
she said.
More than 300,000 students have been schooled in the Calvert curriculum,
Halle said, about 186,000 of them in the past decade.
Former students include entertainer Donny Osmond and NBC Today Show movie
reviewer Gene Shalit. There also have been actors, musicians and athletes
schooled in the Calvert curriculum, but company officials are reluctant to
name them.
Parents decide to educate their children at home for different reasons,
including the academic experience and the chance to spend quality family time,
said Kelly Painter, Calvert Education Services' director of academic services.
"We hear all the time from parents who say they are learning to know their
child on a level that they would never have known without home schooling,"
Painter said.
Paulette Coffman of Oakdale, Calif., a farming community east of Modesto,
teaches daughters Brittany, 14, and Chelsea, 12, at home. Coffman said she
researched every type of curriculum before she started teaching about eight
years ago, and everything she read came back to Calvert.
"It put my mind at ease that Calvert educators were only a phone call
away," she said. "We've always been pleased with Calvert, right down to the
advisory teachers. When you find something that works, you don't tinker with
it."
© 2003 The Baltimore Sun