quasi-10th grader

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jennyfutris
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Location: Mckinney, TX

quasi-10th grader

Postby jennyfutris » Thu Sep 22, 2011 9:07 am

Hello, I'm in a sticky situation. I have a friend who has a troubled teen living in MI. She is contemplating resigning her parental rights to this 15-year-old daughter and I cannot allow this to happen as she will be "lost" in the system. I am currently living in the Dallas, TX, area and in order to establish guardianship of her, I would have to incur thousands of dollars that I don't have. She did not complete the 9th grade and would require repeating most of the curriculum. She is not enrolled in school at all at this time but if she were to come here, I would enroll her in some sort of home-schooling curriculum. I don't even know where to start here as I cannot even discern what grade level to put her in, let alone what curriculum to buy. I contacted the TX K-12 program and I can't enroll her there unless I establish guardianship. Can someone please help me and give me a clue as to how to proceed?

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Theodore
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Postby Theodore » Sat Oct 08, 2011 12:15 am

Sorry for being this tardy in posting a reply - haven't been on in a while. To answer your questions - Texas is fairly friendly to homeschooling:

Homeschools must be conducted in a bona fide manner, using a written curriculum consisting of reading, spelling, grammar, math and a course in good citizenship; no other requirements apply.
http://www.hslda.org/laws/analysis/Texas.pdf

In regards to specific curriculum choice, that's largely a matter of personal taste and how close to a single grade level your friend's daughter is. A packaged curriculum will work if she's more or less the same level in everything; mixing and matching may be necessary if she's good in some things and really bad in others. The major homeschool curriculum publishers offer placement testing for identifying grade level, for instance Alpha Omega, Bob Jones, Calvert, Sonlight, etc. There's also the question of learning styles and whether she's visual, auditory, kinesthetic-tactile, has dylexia problems, etc. If you can, attend a local homeschool group meeting and/or homeschool convention and take a look at all the different curriculums people are using.

As for guardianship, you should take that up with the office of the public defender and social services (if you don't have money for a private lawyer, anyway). For purposes of getting guardianship, it'll probably be easier to choose one of the packaged curriculums and say you're going to placement test her and use that, rather than trying to come up with something custom on the spur of the moment. Once she's in Texas and you've had time to breathe a bit, you can look at swapping out any parts you don't like for other subject-specific curriculums (for instance, I like Saxon for math up to Algebra II or so).


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