Any experience in transitioning from homeschool to public high school?

[moon sky]

Hi there,

I am just wondering whether advanced homeschool kids were able to continue classes at their levels when they transitioned to public school. Any experience to share?

Thank you!

 

[prairiewindmomma]

Welcome to the boards.

You are asking a broader question than you realize, I think.

You are asking:

1. Was your homeschool student able to place into Honors or AP classes? (Yes, if offered by the school.)

2. Was your homeschool student, who was beyond what the local high school offered, able to continue their students. (This is an option at my kids' high school, but it is not an option everywhere, and it requires some hoop jumping.)

So, the question of what is offered is dependent on what is offered in your school district, and none of us are going to know the answer for that for you. We also aren't going to be able to answer what the actual protocol is at your kid's school.  For us, we always showed standardized testing at enrollment and work samples to prove that our kid, who they didn't know, was truly ready for advanced work.

 

[HomeAgain]

So, yes and no.

I had one kid who was slightly advanced.  He did a year of online, asynchronous classes with a state-accredited online school, and then when we moved him into the public high school he had a guidance counselor willing to let him forge his own path, doing dual enrollment at the college and dual enrollment with the online school.  It worked well for him, but we also made sure we advocated for him and gave him a way to have proper placement from the start.

 

Other kid........he's a slightly different beast. I have been preparing our school district for a while now, making sure that our end of year report includes quite a bit of information and work samples.  There will be questions when he starts the local school, and I want them to have a good idea of where he's coming in so it doesn't seem like I'm the parent who's pushing her kid into advanced classes after a "mommy grade".  I don't know how it's going to work out for him yet.  We have another year at home before we cross that bridge as even a possibility.  There isn't the same opportunity for him to take classes like his brother (different state), but I'm hoping that having years of a file available will make it an easier transition.  If not, I keep meticulous files of my own, and that should help some.

[Random]

Hello and welcome!

Like the previous posters mentioned, this is widely variable.  In my local PS, yes, I am able to walk in and say, "Put my son in your AP Calc class." That's all I have to do.  Our local administration is very friendly towards homeschoolers, employs hs parents as substitute teachers, and welcomes any and all hs students for classes, clubs, sports, whatever.

60 miles away, it's the opposite.  It takes an act of congress (almost) to place your kid in a high school class, even though the laws are the same for both places.  And if you enroll your previously hs'd student as a full time student, the student has to test for credit for *each* class on the homeschool transcript before the high school will accept the transcript credits as valid.

I have an acquaintance with a student who was taking classes such as Ominbus, Logic, & Rhetoric  etc. at Veritas Press online.  None of these classes corresponded well to their local high school humanities courses and the student wasn't able to transfer many credits to the high school.  As a result, the student wasn't able to place in their grade-for-age at the high school, even though they'd been doing advanced work.   This would be different for a STEM kid, I guess, since math and science are more standardized.

You have to know your local laws and reach out to your local public school administration to find out what the procedures are if this is a future goal of yours.

[egao_gakari]

This is somewhat dated info, but when my brother and I transferred in at 11th and 7th grades, respectively, my parents had to do a bunch of retrospective documentation to prove to the school's satisfaction that my brother should be an 11th grader. This was the early 2000s when homeschooling was relatively rare, and the district did not keep strict tabs on us. We were basically unschooled, so it was very difficult for my parents to produce anything resembling work samples etc. In the end they had to placement-test us for math and language arts, and took my parents' word for it that high school credit should be given to my brother for social studies, science, etc. However, we both tested extremely high on the placements, so that was a significant boost to our credibility. Bro tested into AP Literary Criticism, and I received a perfect score on the math placement test for middle school and got placed in pre-algebra. Thinking back on it though, I think I could have used another year of arithmetic skills before pre-algebra.

So while it's district-dependent, I think it's usually doable for math and language arts, since there are usually placement tests to prove that the student is working at advanced level. Science, history, etc., I'm not so sure.

[stripe]

I suspect you will have better luck with younger kids. It may be hard to put a kid in mid-high school. My local school district has testing, and any student can try to test out of things, as well as students coming in who would apparently need to pass their test. 

[kirstenhill]

On 5/26/2021 at 12:28 PM, moon sky said:

Hi there,

I am just wondering whether advanced homeschool kids were able to continue classes at their levels when they transitioned to public school. Any experience to share?

Thank you!

 

If you have any opportunity to ask locally, you might get more location-specific information that pertains to your local school district.  I feel like experiences I've read here on the forums are all across the board from excellent to terrible in terms of high school placement.  I think the hardest thing to do is to enter mid-highschool and have any credits count.  Many (if not most) high schools won't accept course credits earned at home toward graduation, so by far the best time to enter is 9th grade (or earlier).

As for personal experiences, my DD chose to enter public school in 8th grade, so it was super easy.  They took my word for it on math placement (I just sent scans of the table of contents of the previous math text she had completed to confirm that what she did for Pre-Algebra matched what they covered), and everything else was pretty standard - no "levels" of classes offered anyway. 

My current 8th grader will enter public school in 9th grade.  It helps for him that we were able to enroll him for 1 math class with the public school this year, so he was already "in the system" so to speak.  But with no proof of his abilities in other areas, they enrolled him in all honors/advanced classes for next year.  The only slight "snag" to getting exactly the placement we wanted is that due to the way our state's graduation requirements are worded, he couldn't just show proof of Algebra 2 competency in order to start in Pre-Calc - he actually has to take an exam-for-credit (unless he had taken the class with a state-accredited provider).   The same would have been true of Geometry, but that was the 1 class he took through the public school so he has appropriate credit for that. 

Coming in with some kind of standardized test scores to show at least grade-level mastery might help in some situations.  The school did ask me to show DS14's Algebra 1 competency (which I did through standardized test scores as well as a "placement test" I had him take in ALEKS math that showed he had mastered half of Alg 2 at the time) before they would enroll him in Geometry as an 8th grader.

[moon sky]

Thank you all for the wonderful advice. We are still waiting to hear back from the local high school on their protocol.