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What do we do all year?

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Monday, October 14, 2013

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The busy registration time has ended.  We are no longer working at a furious pace trying to keep up with all the applications in the mailbox.  The middle of July through the middle of August is undoubtedly the busiest time for us.  But that is not to say that we don’t keep busy during the rest of the year.  So what do we do all year?

  Well, after the volume of incoming mail slows down a bit we take a deep breath.  Then we get busy helping the families who decide right before or right after the beginning of the Public Schools’ start that they should homeschool.  Lisa and Monica are available by phone and email to answer questions about how to get started, where to get books and how to inform the school that a student will not be attending.

  Our other major fall project is making the high schoolers’ transcripts.  We type in all the grades that were submitted at the end of last school year and now Martha is going through and checking and rechecking each transcript to be sure that everything is correct.  Fall is also busy as our new seniors are preparing to apply to colleges.  Everyone needs something a little different so we work with parents to make sure the transcripts reflect what the colleges are looking for.  Then we print and mail them – to parents, to colleges, to the NCAA, to the military academies. Fall is also when we see who has qualified for the Palmetto Fellows Scholarship.  We await the test scores almost as eagerly as the students do.  The first scores from the fall testing are coming available online and we just discovered that one of our students qualified with the higher test scores and helping them put together the submission.  The submission goes in the mail the first week of December.

  After that we all heave a sigh of relief and take a week or two to spend with family and celebrate the holidays.

  January is district count time.  We must submit the number of students we have registered (no names or addresses –just numbers!) in each school district to the school districts.  This makes a nice four or five hour job for someone, counting rows and rows of grade levels.  Then we check to see if the school district address has changed (Greenville’s office has moved three times in the last four years!) and we send those off.

  February and March are our quiet months.  Not many applications come in, and the phone calls and emails are usually questions from parents who are already registered.  We spend this time putting stamps and return addresses on hundreds of envelopes so they will be ready for the mailing in April and the registering in July.  We normally need about three thousand envelopes on hand.  We also prepare the envelopes to mail our soon to be graduating seniors their records.  Each senior’s file will have a large mailing envelope with copies of the Disposition of Application ready to have the transcripts inserted when we complete them in early June.  All this preparation allows us to be more efficient at the busy times. 

  In April we turn our minds to the next school year, updating and improving the application as needed.  Then we print a thousand renewal applications and fold and stuff them into envelopes.  Each envelope gets a label and then heads to the post office.

  We start gearing up for the second Palmetto Fellows Scholarship submission in May.  We work on a much tighter time frame for this one as we have to type in all the grades and calculate the final senior class ranking between the middle of May and the second week of June.  When that is done, Martha disappears into the office and prints and prints and prints all those transcripts to be sent to the families.

  By the time we finish the major transcript work it is July again and we are getting ready for an avalanche of applications.

  So all in all we manage to keep quite busy all year.  What is missing from this broad description is all the little things that happen occasionally, but can make a big difference in the life of a homeschool family.  In addition to the general questions about homeschooling, we also help take care of our families whose homeschool has been questioned for one reason or another by the authorities.  While this doesn’t happen terribly often, when it does, Martha spends a lot of time talking to the family and talking to whatever entity is concerned about the homeschool, helping to make sure that the rights of the family are protected.

  Martha also spends a good bit of time talking with people from many realms – from school employees checking to see if a family is registered to people at the Commission on Higher Education to ensure that the high school transcripts we produce meet the requirements for both state scholarships and for colleges around the state and from admissions staff at various colleges to parents trying to decide if home schooling is the best choice and how to go about it.

  Through the years we have come to see just about every facet of homeschooling.  While much of our day to day work centers on the high school students – the seniors in particular, yet we are very in touch with young families as well.  If we can help you in any way don’t hesitate to call!
 

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