Home Education Boards Supported by The Alberta Home Education Association (AHEA)

Sept. 18, 2013

AHEA supports school boards which offer traditional home education programs ONLY. School boards who offer other options, i.e. blended/aligned programming, tend to undermine and discourage parents and draw students into the brick and mortar system.

AHEA takes our mandate to support home educating parents very seriously and thus promotes only boards who offer ONLY traditional home education.

We do this for the following reasons:

1. When blended/aligned programming was first offered in Alberta, Alberta Education bureaucrats stated that it was their intention to use these programs to reintegrate students back into the brick and mortar school system i.e. to get them back into school. This thinking is not supportive of home education.

2. Parents confidence is often undermined as a way to promote non-traditional programming. Parents are offered 'teacher help' in areas where they are told they are lacking and encouraged to use 'qualified teachers' for difficult subjects. Instead of assisting and encouraging parents in their home education, parents are led to believe that they are not qualified and that others can do better with their children. AHEA advocates for supportive programming ONLY.

3. School boards receive a base rate of $6496 per student when they are enrolled in aligned programs and only $1625 when enrolled as traditional home education students. Schools receive an additional $16 465 when special need students are enrolled in a non-traditional program (2011/12 funding information from http://education.alberta.ca/media/954300/finalbooklet.pdf ). There is great financial motivation for supervising schools to 'encourage' parents to choose blended/online/aligned programs when both programs are offered.

4. Only parents who home educate their children under traditional programming fall under the Home Education Regulation. All other forms of education are governed by brick and mortar school governance and regulation.

5. There are costs to be paid for aligning with government programming http://www.aheaonline.com/index.php/magazine/home-matters-spring-2012/doc_download/202-counting-the-cost-of-alignment-with-the-government-school-system

It is AHEA's mandate to support parents as the educators of their children.  In good conscience, AHEA cannot support systems which undermine home educating parents.

On our website, we provide a list of school boards who provide traditional home education only http://www.aheaonline.com/index.php/resources/supervising-agencies i.e. education which falls under the Home Education Regulation.  In 2011/2012, these experts in home education served approximately 73% of the traditional home educators in Alberta (from statistics provided to AHEA by Alberta Education)