Homeschooling High School in College?

It’s been SO long since I updat­ed things here! I did­n’t think any­body real­ly missed me, but I should have kept it up a bit better.

Katie tried attend­ing a good high school near us and loved it. She got great grades, was cho­sen to work on the year­book (a very com­pet­i­tive process there), and was even made the chief pho­tog­ra­ph­er imme­di­ate­ly! She was also involved in oth­er activ­i­ties and made some good friends. She real­ly loved the art class­es, in particular.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, her health suf­fered. She has severe rest­less leg syn­drome, fibromyal­gia (which caus­es sleep prob­lems), and tru­ly hor­rif­ic migraines in addi­tion to being aller­gic to all kinds of things. The migraines aren’t well-man­aged any­more, so she has a migraine almost every day despite tak­ing Trilep­tal as a pre­ven­tive. She’s had to use her res­cue med­i­cine so much that it’s no longer very help­ful, either. She just can’t get any decent sleep, thanks to the RLS and fibro, which means that she needs a min­i­mum of ten to twelve hours every night and still wakes up unrest­ed. And our insur­ance has gone stu­pid, repeat­ed­ly refus­ing to cov­er her aller­gy med­ica­tions, in par­tic­u­lar. ¹They insist that every­body should be just fine with Clar­itin, which is avail­able over the counter. Not so! Right now, they’re refus­ing to cov­er Provig­il, which was the only thing keep­ing her awake enough to even con­sid­er attend­ing school. She’s under doc­tor’s orders to stop dri­ving until the sleep sit­u­a­tion is ame­lio­rat­ed, and has been for some time, so she’s been delayed in learn­ing to dri­ve and get­ting her license.

So she’s back to home­school­ing, which real­ly dis­ap­point­ed her. We’ve decid­ed to try mak­ing the best of it and focus on the good things. For instance, she’s no longer held back to any­one else’s learn­ing pace and does­n’t have to jump through bureau­crat­ic hoops. She can learn when­ev­er she is awake, hon­or­ing her body’s need for more sleep than most people. 

She wants to take col­lege class­es online, which is how I’m man­ag­ing to con­tin­ue my edu­ca­tion despite health prob­lems. I think it’s a good idea, so now we’re con­sid­er­ing schools and mon­ey. While the Uni­ver­si­ty sys­tem schools here in Geor­gia tech­ni­cal­ly have all their core class­es online, the real­i­ty when I attend­ed South­ern Poly was that the entire school usu­al­ly had only one or two seats for any par­tic­u­lar course, and of course, those seats were tak­en immediately.

We’d love to hear about the expe­ri­ences of any oth­er home­schooled teens who are fin­ish­ing high school in col­lege, par­tic­u­lar­ly those who are tak­ing class­es online.

Her even­tu­al goal is an art school, and while a local school has an online pro­gram, I just don’t see how it’s pos­si­ble to learn some things through the inter­net. Nei­ther does she. So we’re also look­ing for good art class­es to sup­ple­ment what­ev­er she does online. We’re in Decatur, and since nei­ther she nor I am dri­ving, close is good. MARTA acces­si­bil­i­ty is absolute­ly necessary!