Typical Homeschooling Day

“My day usually starts about 5:30 a.m. with a walk with our four dogs. When I get home, we eat breakfast as a family,” says Gretchen Roe of Severna Park, during the afternoon phone interview she has managed to squeeze in between homeschooling her children and working for the Calvert School, where she is a community liaison. “Today, I took my eldest daughter, an avid horsewoman, to the barn, came back for three hours of school, did a webinar for Calvert, then went back to the barn. I’ll come back for school from 2:30 to 4 p.m. and then my son delivers newspapers at 4 p.m. So, I’ll probably finish with my kindergartener then.”

“It kind of looks a little like a wrestling match around here,” she says. “People tag each other in.”

Roe and her husband Pat have six children ranging from age 6 to 25. They first turned to homeschooling 18 years ago when she was told that her then third-grader didn’t need to know her multiplication facts.

“We began homeschooling literally in the middle of the academic year,” she says. “We’ve had kids in public, private, and parochial schools, but homeschooling was the best fit for our family,” Roe says.

Thirty miles north of the hustle at the Roe household, recent homeschool retiree Adrianne Hills of Pikesville is just as busy. She and her husband, David, homeschooled their two sons for the past 19 years. Now, her youngest son, Victor, is a plebe at West Point. She finally has time for herself, and she is taking advantage of every minute.

“I made a massive plan over the last three years. It’s three pages long. Number one goal: make sure my husband feels like he’s number one again,” she says. “Things that I put on hold to homeschool, I’m returning to for my own pleasure.” Some of the items on her carefully crafted schedule include teaching violin lessons, playing in a community orchestra, scrapbooking, knitting, and taking a religion course at a nearby synagogue with one of her neighbors.