Coming to a Stadium Near You
by John Clark

Since the dawn of the home schooling movement in America, the question has been asked: “Can home schoolers compete academically with their brick-and-mortar counterparts?” Since every serious study has supported home schooling in that regard, you don’t hear the question much these days. Perhaps more readily seeing the value of sports in their sons’ lives, fathers have continued to ask a different question: “Can home schoolers compete athletically with their brick-and-mortar counterparts?”

Fathers, home schooled children are answering that question every day.

Michael Beasley, who was recently signed by the Miami Heat after a year at Kansas State University, is a former home schooled student who was once projected as being the first “home school to the NBA” basketball player.

“Home school to the NBA?” Get used to the phrase.

University of Florida quarterback Tim Tebow is no doubt headed for the NFL, where former home schooler Washington Redskins defensive end Jason Taylor has already found a home. Tim Tebow was home schooled by his parents, Robert and Pam Tebow, whose five home-schooled children have all received college scholarships academically, athletically, or in music. Tim Tebow has won a national championship at Florida, as well as the Heisman Trophy.

On the baseball front, there now exists a Home School World Series Association, whose participants have been signed by the Philadelphia Phillies and Minnesota Twins organizations.

Venus and Serena Williams, two of the most accomplished tennis players in history, were home schooled.

Home schooling doesn’t appear to be much of an obstacle for skaters. Seton Home Study School alumnus Ryan Bradley is a three-time U.S. Collegiate skating champion, and a 2007 U.S. Nationals silver medalist. Katherine Hadford, another Seton Home Study School student, is a three-time Hungarian Figure Skating Championship medalist.

In gymnastics, seven-time U.S. National gymnast and Seton Home Study School alumna Katie Heenan just received the 2008 Honda Award as the nation’s top female collegiate gymnast. Katie is currently at the University of Georgia, where she and her team have won the NCAA Women’s Gymnastics Championship. Katie is in good company, as Carly Patterson, the 2004 gymnastics Olympic gold medalist, was also home schooled.

Bright Future

Rather than being a hindrance to athletics, home schooling is increasingly recognized as a boon to athletic life. In a 2005 USA Today article entitled “Elite Take Home-School Route,” author Sal Ruibal suggests that home schooling is the educational method of choice for exceptionally gifted athletes. The article demonstrates that home schooling provides the perfect situation for athletes to excel, as they are not bound by the constraints of the formal-schooling classroom day. In these exceptional cases, home schooling is viewed as the gifted athlete study program.

More commonly, for team sports, there are two athletic roads that a home schooled child can pursue in America today. First, in many cases, he or she can play for the local public school team, as over twenty states now allow home school participation in public school athletic programs. This was the road chosen by the Tebow family, as they wanted Tim to play in a competitive setting.

Second, the student can play in a home school league, where he or she will play alongside other home school students. In the years to come, as home schooling continues to be a growing educational trend in America, and as the estimated number of home schooled students across the country surpasses the two million mark, home school teams will become increasingly common—and increasingly competitive. Many states now have competitive home schooling teams in baseball, football, soccer and basketball.

Those who have home schooled quickly realize that the dedication necessary for high achievement in sports is a natural outgrowth of the lessons learned through home learning. When the Women’s Professional Soccer League kicks off in 2009, you may see Katie Klaas Erikkson driving for a goal. Erikkson, who has already played in the W-League, the highest women’s league in the country, was home schooled.

In an article entitled: “Soccer Kids” on the HSLDA website several years ago, Katie said:

“At public school, I saw kids do the minimal work required to get through classes. At home, we were always taught to work our hardest at things. We were reminded that God commands us to do our best in everything, that we are working for Him and not for people. I think even in soccer you can see the mentality of ‘what’s the least I can do to get by.’ We had the mentality of ‘what’s the most we can do.’ If my coach told me I need to work on something, I would go work on it. We were used to working on our own.”

Katie’s comments suggest a simple notion: that home schooling habits of diligence, perseverance, and goal orientation directly translate to the playing field. As Aristotle observed: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”

Conclusion

Fathers, on a practical level, try to get involved in home schooling athletic groups in your area. As a father, it should be a source of pride that home schooling programs are producing world-class athletes. Make an effort to get your children involved in these home schooling leagues, and be willing to help coach when you get there! If your children are too young to play in high school leagues, take them to see some local home school league games, illustrate to them that children with their same educational background are excelling on the field athletically as well as off the field academically.

Thanks for reading my articles on fatherhood this year, and thank you for all your kind comments and prayers.

May all you fathers and your families have a Blessed Christmas.

Source:  http://www.setonhome.org/newsletter/stadium.shtml

One-third of schools built in air

pollution danger zones

Mon, Aug 25, 2008 (HealthDay News) — More than 30 percent of U.S. public schools are within a quarter mile of major highways, which puts them in the “air pollution danger zone,” says a University of Cincinnati study.

Previous research has shown that proximity to major highways and pollutants spewed by vehicles can increase school children’s susceptibility to respiratory diseases later in life.

In this new study, the researchers examined data on more than 8,000 schools with 6 million students in Atlanta, Boston, Cincinnati, Denver, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Memphis, Minneapolis and San Antonio.

“This is a major public health concern that should be given serious consideration in future urban development, transportation planning and environmental policies,” principal investigator Sergey Grinshpun, a professor of environmental health, said in a news release from the university.

He noted that school-age children spend more than 30 percent of their day at school.

“For many years, our focus has been on homes when it comes to air pollution. School attendance may result in a large dose of inhaled traffic pollutants that — until now — have been completely overlooked,” Grinshpun said.

New schools should be located well away from major highways, he suggested.

“Health risk can be mitigated through proper urban planning, but that doesn’t erase the immediate risk to school-age children attending schools that are too close to highways right now,” Grinshpun said. “Existing schools should be retrofitted with air filtration systems that will reduce students’ exposure to traffic pollutants.”

The study will be published in the September issue of the Journal of Environmental Planning and Management.
– Robert Preidt

You are looking at some of the estimated 2 million children being home schooled in the U.S., and the number is growing. Their reputation for academic achievement has caused colleges to begin aggressively recruiting them. Savings to the taxpayers in instructional costs are conservatively estimated at $4 billion, and some place the figure as high as $9 billion. When you consider that these families pay taxes to support public schools, but demand nothing from them, it seems quite a deal for the public.

Home schooling parents are usually better educated than the norm, and are more likely to attend worship services. Their motives are many and varied. Some fear contagion from the anti-clericalism, coarse speech, suggestive behavior and hedonistic values that characterize secular schools. Others are concerned for their children’s safety. Some want their children to be challenged beyond the minimal competencies of the public schools. Concern for a theistic world view largely permeates the movement.

Indications are that home schooling is working well for the kids, and the parents are pleased with their choice, but the practice is coming under increasing suspicion, and even official attack, as in California.

Why do we hate (or at least distrust) these people so much?

Methinks American middle-class people are uncomfortable around the home schooled for the same reason the alcoholic is uneasy around the teetotaler.

Their very existence represents a rejection of our values, and an indictment of our lifestyles. Those families are willing to render unto Caesar the things that Caesar’s be, but they draw the line at their children. Those of us who have put our trust in the secular state (and effectively surrendered our children to it) recognize this act of defiance as a rejection of our values, and we reject them in return.

Just as the jealous Chaldeans schemed to bring the wrath of the king upon the Hebrew eunuchs, we are happy to sic the state’s bureaucrats on these “trouble makers.” Their implicit rejection of America’s most venerated idol, Materialism, (a.k.a. “Individualism”) spurs us to heat the furnace and feed the lions.

Young families must make the decision: Will junior go to day care and day school, or will mom stay home and raise him? The rationalizations begin. “A family just can’t make it on one income.” (Our parents did.) “It just costs so much to raise a child nowadays.” (Yeah, if you buy brand-name clothing, pre-prepared food, join every club and activity, and spend half the cost of a house on the daughter’s wedding, it does.) And so, the decision is made. We give up the bulk of our waking hours with our children, as well as the formation of their minds, philosophies, and attitudes, to strangers. We compensate by getting a boat to take them to the river, a van to carry them to Little League, a 2,800-square-foot house, an ATV, a zero-turn Cub Cadet, and a fund to finance a brand-name college education. And most significantly, we claim “our right” to pursue a career for our own
“self-fulfillment.”

Deep down, however, we know that our generation has eaten its seed corn. We lack the discipline and the vision to deny ourselves in the hope of something enduring and worthy for our posterity. We are tired from working extra jobs, and the looming depression threatens our 401k’s. Credit cards are nearly maxed, and it costs a $100 to fuel the Suburban. Now the kid is raising hell again, demanding the latest Play Station as his price for doing his school work … and there goes that modest young woman in the home-made dress with her four bright-eyed, well-behaved home-schooled children in tow. Wouldn’t you just love to wipe that serene look right off her smug face?

Is it any wonder we hate her so?

Sonny Scott a community columnist, lives on Sparta Road in Chickasaw County and his e-mail address is sonnyscott@yahoo.com. 

Appeared originally in the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, 6/8/2008,

Home Schooled Tebow Beating the Odds
(Heisman Winner Dodged the Abortion Knife)

By Pat Shannan
American Free Press 12/3/07
Because a physician’s advice to abort a fetus was rejected, Tim Tebow became the first sophomore in history to win the Heisman trophy, given annually since 1935 to a player judged to be the best in college football. 

The coveted Heisman trophy is awarded each December to the nation’s outstanding college football player. It usually goes to a senior, occasionally to a junior, but it has never been awarded to a sophomore.

As a freshman last year, Tebow shared the starting QB duties with senior Chris Leak and the two of them led the Florida Gators to the national title, blasting the favored Ohio State Buckeyes 41-14 in last January’s championship game.

This year, the six-foot-three, 240-pound speedster became the first quarterback in NCAA history to both run and pass for 20 or more touchdowns. This made him the favorite to win the coveted Heisman trophy at New York’s Downtown Athletic Club.

Tebow is the fifth child of Bob and Pam Tebow, both University of Florida graduates and Bible-believing Christians who became Baptist missionaries, which eventually took them to the Philippine Islands. Here—against the will of the family’s doctor—Tim was born in 1987. His family remained in the Philippines until he was five years old. Doctors advised he be aborted, but his faithful parents refused.

Pam had contracted an amoeba—from food or water, perhaps, but she doesn’t know for sure—that had a continuing, debilitating effect on her health. When she became pregnant with Tim, she was advised by her doctors to terminate the pregnancy. Then they decided that Pam had a molar pregnancy and told her that the baby within her was not alive and that she was carrying only a “mass of cancerous fetal tissue.”

She again refused an abortion, relying on her faith in God, fearing the worst but praying for the best. After seven months, an American-trained doctor in Manila confirmed that she was carrying a live fetus, and on Aug. 14, 1987, Pam Tebow gave birth to Superboy.

Back in Florida, the Tebows homeschooled all five of their children, stressing strong character through reading of the Scriptures. In the early 2000s Tim was a growing teenager who developed a love for sports. In 1996, legislation was passed in Florida allowing home-schooled students to compete in local high school sporting events. The Tebows lived in Duval County where Tim played linebacker and tight end for Trinity Christian in Jacksonville, but his dream was to be a quarterback.

For the next two years, Tim and his mother lived in an apartment down the street from Nease High School in St. Johns County—a team that needed a passing quarterback, and a legal residency that satisfied the regulators. With the rest of his family living on a farm in Jacksonville, Tim began playing quarterback for Nease High School in Ponte Vedra Beach and his performance soon began to turn some heads. His senior season he led Nease to the state championship.

Meanwhile, father Bob was director of the Jacksonville chapter of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes and continued to return a half dozen times a year to the Philippines to look after the orphanage he started when the family lived there.

On Jan. 7, 2007, Tim was featured prominently in an ESPN Outside the Lines TV chronicle on home-schooled athletes seeking equal access to high school athletics in other states. In fact, his popularity inspired “equal access” supporters in Alabama to name their bill in the Alabama legislature “The Tim Tebow Bill.” The bill, which is pending, would allow Alabama home school athletes to play for their local high school teams just as Tebow did in Florida.

Win or lose the Heisman, Tim Tebow is without peer as a Christian athlete. He does not smoke, drink, or curse. He may be the first athlete in decades to fit the true meaning of “role model” for the younger kids.

You can bet that the folks at Wheaties can’t wait to get his picture on their cereal boxes.