The Homeschool Scuttle

Who needs the Department of Education?

Labels: Britain, education, education reform, National Education Service, Prime Minister

Do you ever wonder where journalists get their information?

Many homeschoolers in California are still concerned over the legality of homeschooling in California and have been waiting somewhat impatiently for a ruling from the Second District Court of Appeals in Los Angeles.

In an article published in the Union Democrat, July 10, 2008, "Homeschool parents await judges' decision," reporter Lacey Peterson reported that:

"The court's decision has no bearing on students who attend charter schools or programs like the Home School Academy in Murphys, which runs out of the Vallecito Union School District. However, it could affect parents of homeschoolers."

Obviously, Ms. Peterson didn't bother to do her homework or to actually read the court documents, as most of homeschooling moms have, because this statement simply is not true.

The children involved in this case were enrolled in an ISP. The judge who ruled in the case made it very clear that the children were to be taught by a credentialed teacher, not by the child’s mother. Even children, who are enrolled in one of the hundreds of state-sanctioned charter schools, are traditionally taught at home by a parent; not under the constant supervision of a credentialed teacher. With this in mind, I can’t fathom why this reporter would think that the decision wouldn’t affect charter school members.

Labels: 2nd District Court, California, homeschool, law, Peterson

After an electrical fire and explosion over the weekend, LocalHS is back up and running. Thousands still off-line.

Oh, how sweet it is to be back online. For those of you who may have missed us, LocalHS was totally off-line for more than 35 hours. In fact, if you are or were having trouble reaching your favorite websites, it could be due to a transformer explosion that blew out three walls at The Planet, one of the world's largest webhosting providers.

According to reports from The Planet, it was pretty intense. The fire department came in and evacuated the building for several hours. Crews worked around the clock to repair the extensive damage, once they were allowed back in. Though The Planet has backup power sources, they weren't allowed to use them, which spelled disaster for over 9,000 servers and the untold millions of websites hosted on them.

As Shawn and I sat here unable to do anything at all to resolve the problems all of our own clients were experiencing, we continuously monitored the forums that were feeding information to the masses about the outage. Many companies were reporting that they had received hundreds of calls from some understandably upset clients. It made me very grateful for the terrific bunch of people we serve.

As I started to make phone calls to some of our own clients, I was amazed to hear over and over again that you knew that we were on the case and would correct the problem as quickly as possible. We did not receive one single angry phone call. In fact, we only received a couple of calls of inquiry.

This weekend was very frustrating for us and for our clients to be sure and I really feel blessed by the response. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank my husband for his diligence and for providing updates to our clients as they became available.

On a side note, this outage provided the perfect opportunity for us to reconnect as a family. We spent our unexpected (and unwanted) newly found free time by taking an impromptu shopping trip and getting a grand start on a scrapbook project for my son, of his camping trip from last summer. We didn’t waste anytime finding things to do.

While we enjoyed our time together, it certainly is good to have all our sites back up and functioning. A special thanks to the hard work and dedication shown by staff at The Planet as they continue to work to get everyone back up and running.

Additional Information Available at:

• The Planet
• The Planet H1 Data Center Updates
• The Planet Forums
• 12 Point Design Yahoo Group
• 12 Point Design Professional Web Design & Internet Services

Labels: family time, hosting, LocalHS, scrapbook, The Planet, website