My life is rich and wonderful now that I'm an adult, but it's not because I was homeschooled K-12--it's in spite of it. 

I fought to advocate for myself, begging to participate in classes, to get tutoring, to spend time with my peers. I was so often told we couldn't manage it, because my siblings needed attention first, because no one had time for that, because I didn't need it and could just teach myself, because it would be not genuine homeschooling and we didn't "do" that. 

Everything I have achieved in my life would have been easier, less of a battle, if my actual needs as a student had been first and center in my homeschooling journey. It didn't have to be this way.

More and more families are choosing to homeschool and those kids are entering a wild west where educational oversight, standards, and protections are piecemeal to nonexistent. 

Homeschooled alumni like myself founded CRHE in 2013 to be the adult voices in the room to advocate for the rights of homeschooled kids to have a safe learning environment and an education that prepares them for an open future as adults. No one was speaking for us when we were kids, and we wished there had been. 

So we're here now. We remember what it was like to be a vulnerable homeschooled kid with no educational accountability for our parents, and we are working to make homeschooling safe, to make for others the future that we needed.

This Giving Tuesday, please consider supporting the Coalition for Responsible Home Education and our work to advocate and educate about the needs of homeschooled children.