Every child enrolled in a DL program has three main components involved in their education. There is the Ministry of Education which sets out the guidelines of what a child should learn in each grade. We refer to these guidelines as the PLO’s. The other two components are the teacher and the parents. In this Newsletter I want to focus on the teachers’ component.

For the 2005 -2006 school year Heritage Christian Online School is probably going to have about double enrollment of students over last school year. With the increased numbers of children we of course had to greatly increase our number of teachers. The Administration staff has been very busy since April interviewing new teachers. Our ideal teacher is a Christian who is also or has home schooled their own children. Each teacher that we hired had to go through a 3 part interview system. Chris McGrath questioned them on their Christian World view with regards to teaching. Sarah Bennett questioned them on their philosophy with regards to home schooling. Finally, as the new Administrator of Staff, I explained what was expected of a teacher with HCOS and questioned them to see if they felt they could do the job. At first we wondered if there were enough teachers out there. God as always provides and we now have teachers on the waiting list wanting to be hired.

We now have teachers nearly all over the province. We have about half of our staff living in Kelowna, Penticton, Vernon and Kamloops. We now have one teacher in Northern BC, one in the Kootneys, and have added several teachers to our staff living on the lower Mainland. At this time we have eight teachers on the Island with two more waiting in the wings to be hired, depending on enrollment.

We are trying to place children as much as possible with teachers from their local areas. This is important to us for several reasons. First of all it is possible for a teacher to do a home visit. I have found home visits to be a real highlight for me and I know that most parents and children also really appreciate it. Secondly, many of our teachers have shown an interest to teach mini lessons on a wide variety of topics. We will be supporting them to do this through the local homeschool support group so that we can help as many parents as we can whether they are registered with us or not. We have a policy of wanting to share our expertise to all homeschoolers regardless of who they are registered with. If you have some ideas of lessons you would like to see taught be sure to let your contact teacher know when you are talking to them.

I know many parents feel very nervous about having a teacher involved in their child’s education. As a parent we often feel that it is us who are being graded, not our child. In our staff training we discuss how to make a parent feel comfortable. If it is any comfort to a parent, I know that teachers are often just as nervous phoning or meeting a parent for the first time. My experience has been that parents and teachers should see themselves as partners in providing the best education for the child.

There are several ways that parents can help the teacher. The first and most important one is weekly email contact. This is required by the Ministry of Education and one of the first things the Ministry looks for when doing an evaluation. Another way that a parent can help a teacher is with providing the information the teacher needs to write the Student Learning Plan. Several of our teachers are not familiar with homeschool curriculums or you may have found a new one that they haven’t seen. I would like to encourage you to show them what you are using, and if possible give them a copy of the table of contents. The teacher can then make note if the curriculum is weak in an area of PLO’s and help you find something to cover that area. They can also recommend it to other families who are looking for something to help them in a certain area.

Parents, teachers and the Ministry of Education all have a role to play but together we can make a great or dare I say fantastic team towards the education of children.

Janet Rainbow, HCOS Teacher Admin Support
jrainbow@onlineschool.ca