Parents Shun Schools, Bring Education Back Home : Family life: Living rooms are becoming classrooms. The goal is often to keep children from drugs and other problems.

Sandra Yip spent 10 years teaching other people’s children.

These days, however, the mother of two devotes her days to teaching her own children, Jonathan, 10, and Julie, 7, in a book-lined classroom that was once the living room of their Oxnard home.

“They’ve never known anything else,” said Yip, 42, who left public school teaching when her son was born. “The kind of education you can give one-on-one or one-on-two is much more efficient than you can give one-on-25 or -30.”

Debbie Schaub of Thousand Oaks also teaches her three children. A former secretary and office manager, Schaub, 35, started teaching her daughters two years ago, after the family decided that private school was too expensive, and the girls, ages 13, 11 and 9, said they didn’t want to return to public school.

The first year “was very overwhelming,” Schaub said. “For the most part, for the children, it was getting used to the idea that I was no longer just the mom, but that I was also the teacher. For me, the adjustment was not having the time alone, not having an empty house for any length of time.”

Home schooling, long favored by some parents for academic and religious reasons, appears to be as popular as ever in Ventura County and beyond, with about 350,000 children nationwide being schooled at home.

Despite the fact that state law requires parents who teach at home, as well as private schools, to file affidavits with state education officials, the exact number of Ventura County children who are taught at home is not known.

Of about 233 private and parochial schools in the county that filed affidavits by the Oct. 15 deadline, 144 had 10 or fewer students. Many of the smallest schools consist of just a parent and a child or two.

However, parents and education officials say the number of home schoolers may be far larger than that list indicates, because many parents do not file the forms. Also, other parents teach through independent study programs run by public school districts or private, accredited schools.

Parents and other operators of private schools are not required to have teaching credentials.

Although many parents have set up curricula and follow regular schedules, other parents may be keeping their children out of school with no regular lessons or supervision, said Rich Morrison, pupil and administrative services coordinator with the county schools office. In such cases, the child would be considered truant and the parent would be breaking the law, he said.

“Some of these parents are very sincere,” Morrison said. “But if the parent is not capable of teaching, they’re going on a path that’s going to lead their children to nowhere, and that’s a tragedy, because it doesn’t have to be that way.

“Our main concern is that they’re breaking the law.”

School districts have the authority to check on any child reported truant. If a parent is teaching the child at home, the district may ask to review the home curriculum at a hearing of the local Student Attendance Review Board, a community-based group, Morrison said.

If the curriculum is found to be inadequate, the family has the options of putting the child in a public or accredited private school or continuing home study with a district-approved independent study program.

However, officials in several school districts said that although attendance officers follow up on reports of truant students, they rarely ask to evaluate a curriculum if parents say they are teaching the child at home and if an affidavit is on file with the state. Many districts offer to help parents by providing curriculum guidelines.

There are home schoolers in every city in the county. Many parents cite religious reasons for teaching at home, saying they want to imbue their children with their own beliefs and principles. Others say their children are better off at home than in public schools beset by funding problems and crowded classrooms.

And most say they want to avoid exposing their children to gangs, drugs or other problems associated with public schools.

“My reasons stem from Christian values and just good schooling,” said Debbie Burch, a recently widowed mother who teaches her 6-year-old daughter, Mary, at their Fillmore home. “I never in my life thought I’d be doing this.”

A number of groups around the county help provide a loose support network for parents who teach at home, providing help on such topics as setting up classroom space in the home and choosing curricula.

One of the largest is the Assn. of Christian Home Educators of Ventura County, whose membership consists of about 110 families, said treasurer Betsy Brown. The association publishes a monthly newsletter and sets up field trips and other events for groups of children.

The statewide California Home Educators Assn. also sponsors an annual convention, which many Ventura County home educators attend. And many belong to the Home School Legal Defense Assn., a national organization that provides legal advice to parents who teach at home.

In her classroom, Sandra Yip teaches from language arts and math curricula used in many public schools throughout the state. She also uses some materials published especially for home teachers, as well as the Bible, she said.

The atmosphere of Yip’s classroom is disciplined yet informal. One recent school day, daughter Julie wore comfortable house slippers and a brightly flowered apron and clutched a stuffed toy cat as she worked at a small desk under her mother’s tutelage.

Julie’s brother, Jonathan, sat barefoot at a larger desk beside her, completing a set of vocabulary exercises and then working on the latest in a series of essays he is compiling on historical figures from missionary and explorer David Livingstone to President Bush.

On the kitchen table was a relief map of Ventura County that Julie was making out of hardened dough on cardboard. Periodically, Julie went to check how quickly the paint was drying, and then added bright blue depictions of Lake Piru, Lake Casitas and the Santa Clara River.

Yip said she and her husband, Sherwin, decided that she should teach their children at home because of initial concern that the children were too young to be in an institutional school setting. They were also worried about peer influence and wanted their children to be taught Christian values, Yip said.

Yip likened home schooling to an old-fashioned one-room schoolhouse, where children of different ages learn together.

“Julie’s had the advantage of being around while her brother has been learning, so she’s picked up a broad range of skills above her grade level,” Yip said.

For Julie, school is “fun,” she said. “I’m with my mom a lot more.”

Jonathan also sees advantages to being taught at home, including less noise and more time to get work done.

“I can work at my own pace and not have to work faster or slower than I can go,” he said.

But there are also disadvantages, Jonathan said. “There aren’t many kids around, and that’s kind of depressing, seeing the same people every day.”

Some educators see a lack of opportunity to socialize with peers, especially with children from different racial or economic backgrounds, as a major disadvantage of home schooling.

But some home school parents--and their children--say students who are taught at home don’t miss daily interaction with other students.

“I don’t feel it’s necessary for them to be with large groups of children,” said Betsy Brown, 30, of Fillmore, who teaches her two children, Randy, 8, and Darcy, 7, at home. “A lot of the socialization kids get at school is negative socialization. Other kids aren’t real role models at that age.”

Brown and other parents say their children have plenty of friends from activities such as gymnastic classes, soccer, church, Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts.

“When I was in school with other kids, I hated it,” said Rebekah Schaub, 11. She said most of her friends are from her church and extended family.

Plus, Rebekah said, she’s learning more at home.

“I’m reading a lot more than I did then, and I’m learning more in math,” Rebekah said. “Mom has the time to make it easier when you’re stuck. In public school, teachers didn’t have a lot of time to spend with you when you got stuck, and if you didn’t understand, you flunked.”

Debbie Schaub, who said she found high school boring and chose not to go to college, is teaching her daughters in a school the family has named “Off the Wall and Into the Heart.”

Schaub said her daughters took the standardized Stanford Achievement Test last year to measure their abilities, and that their scores were in the 94th percentile and above.

Like many home schoolers, Yip said she doesn’t know how long she will continue to teach her children. She’s taking it a year at a time.

“Teaching at home is so much more rewarding and so much more efficient,” Yip said. “Our goal is to raise godly, productive citizens.”