A Review of Hybrid Education

We recently moved to a new state. While we found a traditional high school that is an excellent fit for my daughter, we decided to put my son in a hybrid program. After a month, we have pulled him out and will be finishing the year homeschooling. I thought it might be helpful to others to hear some of our reasoning behind these decisions.

At its heart, hybrid education is an attempt to mix the best of homeschooling and traditional schooling. It usually involves a couple of days of school and a couple of days of schooling at home each week. Each hybrid school develops independently, however, so they're all different. Others may have vastly different experiences than we did!

In our case, we ended up with some issues specific to this particular school, but I also had some difficulties with the hybrid format. I don't think we would have been as quick to pull him if there hadn't been this combination of factors. I could have tolerated my dissatisfaction with the format if we were happy with everything else, and we would have worked through the school specific issues if we were happy with the format in order to preserve the relationship and continue at the school. But the combination of issues made it difficult for me to find a reason to face the daily struggles. I won't detail the incidents specific to the school publicly, but if I know you personally, I'll be happy to share that privately.  Below I've listed some of the things that attracted us to the hybrid approach, and my review of how those actually worked out for us.

Time at Home and Time with Peers

My son is a homebody; if he has the choice between going anywhere and being at home, he'd almost always prefer to be at home. But he's not an introvert. He has resisted the idea of homeschooling because he didn't want to leave his friends, and, in moving, he wanted to be able to meet people and make new friends. This was a good mix for him, and we are currently struggling a bit to find a way to replace the time with peers. (And Mom is struggling a bit with the loss of the days at home alone!)

Small Class Size

My son had a small class at his previous school. It was a private school, with two classes at each grade level, and he usually had less that 15 kids in his class. Even so, the group of boys could be loud and disruptive, and he was eager for an even smaller class where the kids would hopefully be under more control or at least less overwhelming. We were told he would be one of a class of five; when we got here, though, we found out he would be one of just three. The other two students were boys who had been in school together already for several years. This turned out to be a less than ideal situation to jump into.

Curriculum

One of the benefits (and the challenges!  There's so much to choose from!) of homeschooling is that you have complete control over the curriculum that you use. This isn't a benefit of hybrid education, since curriculum is chosen by the school, but the school we chose used very similar curriculum to what my son used at his old school. It was a good fit for him, and we will be using almost the same curriculum as we continue with homeschooling. 

I did think we would have some flexibility in how we used the curriculum on our home days, and I expected we would get a lesson plan for the week that would show not just what we were supposed to do, but a little bit of explanation of what they would do in class on the school days. Neither of these things happened in our situation, though they probably would in some other hybrid programs. We basically got a list of the work he needed to do on our home days, sometimes with no explanation of what had been done at school. He joined a class that was working two levels ahead in math, as well, so that was a constant stretch to push him ahead unnecessarily, instead of us being able to work at the level and pacing that was best for him (and that is still ahead of grade level! The relief on his face when I explained all this to him when we had decided to homeschool and settled what math book he'd be working on. Even though he was succeeding, he still felt behind all the time, and was starting to believe he wasn't good at it.)

Lesson Planning

I love lesson planning. It's easily my favorite part of teaching, getting to put the curriculum together and figure out the best way to turn it into days and weeks of lessons. Finding the fun and the learning and adjusting to meet the needs of my students. As I said above, I expected to be able to do some of this in a hybrid program, but I really wasn't able to. I'm definitely enjoying it now that we're homeschooling.

Community

Along with the small class size, we expected a few families to get to know. Unfortunately, because of the difference in when school starts in the North where we lived and the South where we moved, and because of some travel plans we weren't willing to cancel when we decided to move, I missed the meetings that were held before school started. School drop-offs are different down here as well, and there wasn't a walk-up option at his school, so that was really my only chance to see or meet other parents. I am quite sure this would be different in other places. There was probably more I could have done to find the community at this school, but there was not an obvious way to get to know other people.

Flexibility

We did have flexibility in our time. Every week, we had a four day weekend, with just a day's worth of work to accomplish whenever we felt it fit! For families who are looking for flexibility of time, but aren't interested in as much flexibility in curriculum, hybrid education could be a great fit.

School decisions can be so difficult.  We are not opposed to public school, and would likely have considered it for one or both of our kids if we hadn't moved. That just seemed like too big of a change for our son on top of everything else he's been through, especially since he would have been starting middle school. If we hadn't gone through such a difficult time with our daughter as we have in the last few years, I don't know that we would have made a change so quickly with our son. We expected the hybrid program to work for us, and some parts of it really did. Other parts should have worked for us, and maybe could have, if we had continued to bring them up and work for the change we thought was needed.