Hello fellow educators, welcome to Summer repeat podcast number 71. We live in a part of the world where educational choice has become an important value. Christian Education is thriving because of a unique partnership between schools or churches with the Provincial Government. Probably the one method of education that has flourished the most in this open approach is home schooling. Today we will begin a series of podcasts that takes a closer look at home education. If you teach in a traditional campus school environment this series will be very important for you to understand what has become the fastest growing trend in education in the last 20 years. Please don’t forget that we are still sending out free copies of my book, Discipling this Generation for a Digital World to any one that sends us an email. Details to follow at the end of the podcast.

When we began Heritage Christian Online School I had very little experience with the home school movement. I always believed that is would be a great way to raise your children. The philosophy of homeschooling was compatible with our beliefs at Heritage Christian School, that is, it is the parent’s responsibility to ensure their children with their values and beliefs. What better way to do this when you take full responsibility of their education. So when we were starting a program that would come along side home schoolers it made sense for me to consult our future client base. I set out to research this new community and the second or third website that popped up on my Google search was Sarah Bennett’s blog on homeschool philosophy. As I read through her website I saw that she  went much deeper than most home educators I had known in the past and she lived in Kelowna! I looked up her number and in less than two hours she was in my office. I will never forget the moment she said, “I want to be involved with the best Distributed Learning school in BC.” As we listened to her insight and experience we knew we had to rethink every presumption we started with. We had a great set of online courses we had developed for grades 5 to 12 and presumed this would be the great benefit and blessing we would give to the homeschooling community.  I hired her as our official Home Education Consultant and we have never looked back. Sarah wise counsel helped HCOS become the largest DL school in the Province, both public or independent, in just four short years. More importantly she has carefully and tactfully kept us on track in our service to the home school community. This is part one of a series of interviews with Sarah on the topic of home schooling:

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