At the end of the fall each year, Manitoba’s Department of Education sends information to each division about the number of registered home-schooled children in each catchment.
“We get a list of parent names, student names, grade levels, and it just identifies that those . . . families have chosen to follow a homeschooling path for the year,” says Marianne Fenn, the assistant superintendent at Western School Division (WSD). “We don’t have a specific plan for those students, but [we] report the information on the numbers of those students [such as] the grade levels that they would be in should they be in attendance at Western School Division . . . to our board and we just kind of keep track of that information over time to . . . see if there’s any trends or anything of note.”
A number equivalent to six classrooms
Fenn says that this year’s information reports that there are 135 home-schooled students in the WSD catchment.
“135 students is six classrooms full of students that are attending homeschooling as opposed to being enrolled in classes,” says Fenn, adding that the distribution of the students is about equal between grades one through twelve. “We noted that this number is down a little bit from last year. Last year, we saw 140 students on that same list.”
A noteworthy trend
Fenn says the numbers from the past few years are “dramatically different” from 2022, in which there were 210 students registered for home school.
“For us, that was an interesting note — to see that over the last three years, the trend has been a . . . decline locally,” she says. “Our school population has been growing each year, so in 2022 when we had 210 students homeschooling, that represented about 10% of our possible population of students. Because our overall school population has grown so much, we’re now looking at that 135 students that are homeschooling representing about 5.8% of our possible school population.”
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Fenn notes that the rising enrollment at Prairie Crossroads School could also impact the number of children enrolled in WSD. She says she doesn’t have numbers, but because there are some Morden children in the new school, they could be from the WSD catchment.
Partnership with homeschooling
Although home school students receive the bulk of their education outside the division, WSD maintains a good relationship with the group.
“Some of our homeschooling students connect with schools over time to do things like participate in a particular elective. When we have space in the schools, we’ve tried to keep that door open,” says Fenn. “We know that having strong peer relationships is an important part of being a kid [or] teenager.”
Fenn says that opening the doors to homeschooling students also prevents the school from being a “mysterious” place and offers an opportunity for exploration.
‘It’s great for us that the province shares this information’
The homeschooling data sent to the division helps get a sense of the community and the education the children in it are getting.
“We appreciate the fact that parents take the time to register their students with Manitoba homeschooling,” says Fenn. “[It] helps the province understand where kids are, that they have a plan, and that parents are working hard with those plans.”
Fenn says homeschooling information is useful because the school division can be aware of students who may eventually enter its system or use its services.
“As a former high school principal, I saw lots of kids . . . who were suddenly interested [in attending high school] after being in homeschooling,” she says. “We recognize that by registering with the province, by following your own curricula or another sanctioned curricula, you’re giving your kids a great opportunity to learn, but also to connect eventually with [the division and post-secondary schooling] if that’s something that’s of interest to kids and families.”
In the end, it provides more avenues for students on their educational journey.
“We think it’s great for students and families to have lots of options in the way they decide to educate and meet the needs that their kids have and that their households have,” she says.
For the latest in the WSD, see its website.
With files from Robyn Wiebe