Home Study

You are the parent-teacher and you will teach your children full time. I, the JCS Educational Facilitator, will meet with your family once every 20 school days to go over all of the curriculum, once a month. I set aside 1 hour per child so that I’m available for all questions, concerns and support needs you have. If you choose the curriculum that JCS provides, I would help create a pacing guide for you that marks out what your children would need to complete each month. If you choose the curriculum that is not provided by JCS, each month, YOU would provide me with the pacing guide for the following month. Pacing guides are created to help parents, but are also documents that we provide for our auditors when they come to show what our students are learning. At various meetings throughout the school year, just like at a traditional public school, I take part of our meeting time to assess my students. I will give them reading tests for fluency, math assessments and also the MAP comprehensive assessment.  This is to assure that our homestudy students are also understanding at grade level. If they are not, I start a concern report and make tier 1 interventions to see if SPED services are needed. 

JCS provides Common Core curriculum at no charge to your family and you can view a recommended list of them here. At our resource center, we also have an abundance of other enrichment such as games, flashcards and other tools you may want to borrow. The reason why I don’t know everything that is available is because oftentimes, families order what is best for their family, and when they are done with it, it’s returned to the resource center if it is not a consumed item. We also provide free field trips for our students. In addition, families have access to free purchases on Teachers Pay Teachers as an added layer of personalized education.

You have complete freedom in your curriculum choice for your family. As I mentioned above, JCS provides Common Core aligned curriculum. If for some reason you are not happy with the curriculum that our school has, you are able to provide the curriculum you feel is best. The curriculum may not be common core aligned and that’s okay but keep in mind that I will be giving your child assessments based on Common Core curriculum. If your child continues to score proficient, there is no need to change your curriculum choice, however, if I give an assessment and your child is performing below grade level, I will start to add material to your curriculum to support the areas that your child is struggling in. At this point, the recommendations I make will be a mandatory add to your curriculum. This is where my legal responsibility as a teacher comes in to ensure your child gets my support to help reach proficiency.

A week before each monthly meeting, I email out an agenda that lays out what we will cover. I go over student work, approve grades, give assessments, claim attendance, and collect work samples when necessary.

At a traditional public school, attendance and funds are given based on students being present in the classroom. Because we are an independent charter school, our attendance and funds are given based on work completion. At our monthly meetings, I verify and go through all of your child’s work and confirm that at least 80% of their work is completed and at that point, I approve attendance for the month. Since our kids are working from home, our auditors need proof, 4 times a year that the pacing guide we generate actually matches work that students are producing. I will collect one piece for work from each subject and I will bundle them to turn into our office.

My most important role during our monthly meetings is to support your family. I love to talk to your child about what they learn, answer your questions, and discuss in-depth about your family’s monthly homeschooling experience. This is also when you provide me with a monthly grade sheet that assesses your child’s understanding for the month. We discuss the grade you give and then I report it on our school grading system (School Pathways). At the end of the semester, School Pathways takes an average of all the grades I enter to create the report card.

As part of the JCS-Cedar Cove Home Study program, the school will work with parents and students to personalize the homeschool experience through the allocation of additional funding from the state. For instance, this may include karate lessons as personalized Physical Education (P.E.), piano lessons or art classes as personalized Visual and Performing Arts (VAPA), or educational materials tied to a core academic area. We work with Community Partners for educational enrichment and all our partners must be approved by the school. 

Often, when interested parents are considering homeschooling with a public charter school, they ask, “How much money will the school give me to take enrichment classes or buy educational materials.” Recent state legislation has challenged the common practice of non-classroom based charter schools allocating funding for personalized learning as a monetary value such as “educational units.” This can be viewed as a “gift of public funds,” which is an unlawful practice for public schools. Therefore, JCS is committed to providing a free, public and personalized education with enrichment opportunities but we do not equate this commitment to a dollar amount. 

We hope you choose JCS-Cedar Cove because you value the support and opportunities we provide and they are aligned with your homeschooling vision. JCS families are able to personalize their child’s education by working with the school to design a personalized learning plan which may include extracurricular classes in the community throughout the week or with one of our JCS Learning Centers on Fridays. If families are not interested in supplementing the Home Study program with any extracurricular classes, they can put school funding towards educational materials that align with their student’s personalized learning plan and goals.