live aboard and home schooling

[Michele]

http://www.flvs.net/


You have to show that you are a Florida resident, but it's a great
schooling system. All the teachers are wounderful and stay in contact
with you and you with them as much as you want.

[cabo79]

Do a google search on home schooling. There is lots of stuff. If your kids plan to go to a specific collage it is best to set up residence in that state, If you are on the East Coast I would pick FL for cost of collage and low taxes. Go to the FL Department of ED web site and go from there. Of course if they want to go elsewhere set up in that State.

[Logan S/V Scotty Ann]

Calvert has a good name. We've meet lots of Americans using them while cruising. They seem to be tuned into the cruiser market and make allowances for the oddness of the lifestyle.

[contrail33]

Where will you be going, and how long? The easiest thing is probably to follow the rules for the state you usually reside in.

The Home's Cool website has links to information about legal requirements for each state, as well as a link to the The Home School Legal Defense fund (HSLDA). Their address is:

http://homeschooling.gomilpitas.com/directory/Legalities.htm

[jswwrites]

We are land based homeschoolers... but I would think that, if you are cruising in the US, you'd just need to be registered with whatever state your home base is, which would require you to then follow the laws of that state. (If you're officially international, you may not need to register anywhere!) Each is different and some are very restrictive, and some, like NC, are very non-intrusive. As far as needing to register with a formal school, unless your state is very restrictive, you'd do better to just pick and choose curriculum/books that you like rather than going 100% with a particular one. (ie. you may love Calvert for history, but hate their math)

We already travel a lot, and will be slowly bringing a boat up from FL to NC this year (in spurts around other committments), so I'll get to experience on-board education very soon! :D

[GATOR]

We declared our domicile in Florida using St. Brendan's Isle mail service in Clay County and coordinated with the Clay County home schooling supervisor, and they accepted the Calvert School program, so we used them. It all worked great. It was a bit pricey, but they provided all the books and support we could use. Very good experience all the way around. These days I'd look into the FL school program (mentioned above) which wasn't available for us at the time. I've heard good things about it from other cruisers. When our girls went into High School they didn't have any problems validating their grades (they had to get grades comparable to their home schooling grades for their first term).