Homeschooling with Hope: Katie Switzer’s ESA Experience

Homeschooling Journeys with Katie Switzer

(Edited for clarity)

[00:00:00] Mike: Hi, this is Homeschooling Journeys. I’m Curious Mike, and our guest today is Katie Switzer from the great state of West Virginia. Welcome, Katie,

[00:00:28] Katie: Thanks for having me.

[00:00:30] Mike: Katie, West Virginia has an education savings account. I think it’s called the HOPE Scholarship. And I wondered, as a homeschooling mom, is that something that you use? How?

[00:00:47] Katie: Yeah, so, I have three children that are HOPE scholars this year.  What’s nice about our HOPE scholarship is that we get the state portion of the funding for it, so this year that’s about $4,900 that each of my three kids gets.  We use it for a variety of things.  (One is) speech therapy, so our like co pays after our insurance.

[00:01:12] And, our speech therapist provider is a vendor, inside (the West Virginia ESA) system. So this is their first year doing it. So we haven’t quite figured out how to actually get the payment to them yet…

[00:01:30] We also use (the Hope) for curriculum.   We buy all of our curriculum through the portal and we also use it for online classes.  There is a certified teacher here in West Virginia who teaches online (live) classes, and my kids go for about an hour a day, four days a week; they work on math and, reading, and they do a little bit of science and different things in that class, and we love it because she’s a local teacher that my kids have met in person, so they have a relationship with her.

[00:02:10] And they have relationships with the other kids in the class because we moved from the area where she’s located. So now they get to stay in touch with their friends, and they see them in class every day, and it really helps boost their learning because they know each other, and it’s fun for them to be learning things together and talk about it.

[00:02:28] Mike: When you get the $4,900 per kid times your three young children, And you said the state portion, meaning in most states, certainly in Massachusetts, that’s the state contribution – instead of going to a local public school, it goes to you and ultimately to your service providers that are actually educating your kids.   Am I phrasing that correctly?

[00:03:07] Katie: Yes, the strongest part about the HOPE Scholarship is that there are three components to funding West Virginia. There’s the local levy part. There’s the state portion and the federal portion.

And when I say I get my kids state portion as part of our HOPE scholarship, their local funding and their federal funding stay with the local school. So it’s like a win-win because I get to use that money to guide my children for the best education that they can get.

And the local school gets more money per pupil because they’re still getting, which is more than half, they get to keep in terms of levy and federal that go towards increasing their per student tuition budget.

I really love this program because it’s helping both the kids who stayed in public school by increasing their per pupil spending. And it helped my children because I can be more involved in their education and help guide them.

[00:04:04] Mike: Yeah, I get it.  Although, I will say, since we’re hitting the policy side of this, that my experience as a Massachusetts charter school founder was that even though the sending district that year would still get its full per pupil amount from the state for the kid who wasn’t attending their school (going now to my charter), the local public schools, they still were like, no, no, no, we just want to get rid of the whole charter school thing.  And we’ll get in a little bit to this fascinating part of your journey here, which is, had you embroiled, all the way up to the West Virginia State Supreme Court. Let’s pause on that and get back to your three youngsters.

So it sounded to me like there’s three buckets. You, Katie, you get some curriculum, you teach your kids in the morning, boom. There’s also a local teacher that you’re meeting online, and that teacher is working with your kids and a few other kids. And then finally, there’s this like special education expert service provider. Is that roughly the way you think about it?

[00:05:30] Katie: we have a fourth bucket, too, which I didn’t get to, which is, there’s a local piano teacher here who’s a provider, so my two oldest children are taking piano lessons with her, and we’re using Hope Scholarship Funds to pay for that, so that’s really nice, too, that they get, some of that extracurricular stuff.

Mike: Got it. So, help us a little bit as listeners to understand, for example, the speech therapist. So, your kids have a need in a traditional school. There may be a service provider who’s skilled in that area. There may not, depends on the school, but in your case, you’re able to shop for and try to find somebody, but it sounds like there might be limits on who you can shop from.

[00:06:18] They have to be an approved vendor and so forth. Just tell us about I don’t know, comparative finding like your kid’s pediatrician, how do you find the speech therapist?

[00:06:28] Katie: There are a number of speech therapists that are in the state who are in the portal, and like some of them even practice online, so you have some choices, even if you don’t have something locally but the biggest thing is the program is so new, that if a If I want to use like Joe Smith who is a speech therapist that isn’t a provider, all I have to do is ask him if he wants to be a part of the HOPE Scholarship Program.

[00:06:52] And then he doesn’t really have to agree to anything crazy or prove. Anything to the state, and that’s the same for curriculum too, like they’re not limited to secular curriculum or there’s no real stipulations on there other than they have to provide curriculum and they have to agree that they’re not going to refund any money back to the parent directly.

[00:07:11] That they always refund back into the educational savings account program to safeguard that money for your child’s education.

[00:07:17] Mike: Oh, pause one second. That’s fascinating. So you’re saying there’s basically a no kickbacks rule. As a parent, I couldn’t say, “Hey, Katie, I’m going to bill you to be my kid’s speech therapist. You keep a thousand and give me back a thousand.” So, the state is already thinking ahead to how do we audit this stuff and make rules. Without making it so that providers that are good faith, really good educators aren’t like, “Oh, this is too much of a pain.” They’re trying to find that right balance.

[00:07:44] Katie: And that’s true for like physical items too. Like if I go buy a laptop for my child and then I return it because it’s broken or whatever, I cannot get that refund back in cash.

[00:07:54] That provider has signed an agreement with the state saying, I will never refund cash back or put it on a parent’s card.

[00:08:01] It has to get refunded back into the ESA account. So refunds have to be done through the ESA account is good for the kids.

[00:08:10] Mike: Yeah, so, and so this is so interesting, I’m sorry to hit all these little details, but I’m so interested in the potential friction and on both sides, like how do you try to make this whole program work so that your family gets what they need? So you pick. This particular speech therapist, what do you think of the job that he or she is doing?  Like, how skilled are they? How are your kids responding to it?

[00:08:34] Katie: Honestly, I picked this therapist before they became a HOPE provider. So like we’ve been seeing this therapist for the last year and they became a HOPE provider this fall, partially because we asked them to become a HOPE provider. Previous to this, there wasn’t one in our area, so it’s really great that there is now one, and, we’re going through some bumps in the road because we, the state switched to a new ESA administrator this year, and, that has not gone very smoothly.

[00:09:01] So, our speech therapist provider is one of the ones that’s helping. So, I think there’s going to be some delays of being able to pay them, but it hasn’t really affected us because they’re basically like, hey, listen, we’re not going to, we’re going to bill you, but we won’t expect you to pay until the provider is all set up and you can pay through HOPE.

[00:09:22] And my experience has been when there’s issues with the administrator, most providers will work with you. Like they’re not going to be a pain about it, which is really nice.

[00:09:31] Mike: Right, so just so I understand and so listeners can understand, there’s buy services as if you would with your own cash, which you were literally doing in the case of this speech therapist before. Although in that case there probably was potential of your health insurance might have covered some amount of it. But basically, the idea is you want to find somebody who’s really good and works well with your kids. As a mom, you figure it out.  “We see progress, we’re really liking this particular provider.”

[00:10:14] And then in this case, you’re ask the provider, “Hey, listen, can you do me a solid, can you fill out the paperwork so that I can just hit a button and pay you that way through the state of West Virginia?” Your therapist agrees, but then, unbeknownst to you, the state of West Virginia is in the middle of switching the software that they use to pay the vendors.

[00:10:41] And I noticed on the West Virginia homeschool Facebook page, a number of parents being like, “Oh my God, this switcheroo has not gone well.”

Some listeners may be familiar with at a national level. The financial aid program for college, the FAFSA form, totally blew up over the last two years.

And so you’re dealing with some of the pain, is that right, both as a parent and an advocate for the program?

[00:11:31] Katie: So, it’s really been very challenging. Like we are almost a month into the school year since the, this year’s school year funding was released.

[00:11:41] Today is September 9th. We got our funding for the school year or half of our funding on August 15th. And, not a single one of my children’s physical items such as curriculum, a laptop, or some of their other stuff, like school supplies, have actually successfully been ordered and delivered through the portal.

[00:12:00] So I was able to pay the local teacher and my kid’s piano teacher, but that’s it. I have not been able to receive anything that I ordered, almost a month ago.

[00:12:10] Mike: I’m so sorry to hear that. That’s very frustrating.

[00:12:14] And I think it’s an important note for the people that are the advocates of this program because from afar, I see, there’s school choice the political debates, and then there’s school choice the reality of the parents on the ground – and friction of operating inside of a government to get things done.

I feel like needs more attention at the policy level.  You’re not alone describing this type of friction.

[00:12:58] Katie: Well, and I feel like the attitude that people have is, “Oh, you should just be grateful that you’re getting anything.” And I can understand that attitude, however, I have to say that not every family that comes into the HOPE Scholarship Program would have been able to make the choice before the HOPE Scholarship.

[00:13:19] Many of these families, they are low income. We are the lowest income state in the nation. And most of the people who are entering the HOPE Scholarship Program today are people with incoming kindergartners or people who had kids in Public schools for at least 45 days, and most of the parents for older kids that are coming in, they’re making that choice because the public school wasn’t a good fit for their kid, whether because they had special needs that the school wasn’t able to fulfill, or because they were dealing with bullying, or maybe they just had a bad situation and they needed to get out of it. And some kids, for health reasons, they’re not doing well in the classroom and they need to get out.

And when you tell these parents and you promise them, you know, when we, it’s a very serious application process to get into the HOPE scholarship program. Like it is set in stone and they’re not flexible about it at all.

[00:14:12] And you really have to jump through hoops to get into it. And parents go through that with the, promise that they’re going to have access to that funding to pay for their kids speech therapy and curriculum and to pay their kids tutor online. And then they can’t use the program, and I would have never in my life thought that I would ever see this, but there are parents in our HOPE Scholarship Facebook group who have said this year, because of the difficulties with the rollout of the new portal provider, that they are going back to public school because they can’t get what they need to support their kids.

[00:14:46] it’s easy to just say, oh, well, they’ll just start a month late, but it doesn’t work that way, because in West Virginia, we have to submit our portfolio reviews or testing by June, not, June 8th or 9th, which is two weeks or more before the traditional homeschool exemption kids, and if you have a child that wants to play sports in West Virginia, they have to test in the fourth stay nine, and they have to do that in a certain time period.

[00:15:11] And so you’re asking all these parents, Oh, you just started a month late. What kid is going to be successful if you’re shoving, 10 months of education into nine months? It doesn’t, it’s not fair to the kid and it’s not fair to the family. So anyway, I’m going to end with that, but I’m really frustrated by that.

[00:15:27] Mike: Yeah, I’m glad we’re tapping into it in a productive way, because for education savings accounts, the great thing about them is they give freedom to families when properly operated.  To be able to make a bunch of choices, including I’m going to homeschool and I’ll provide additional services through these funds that I otherwise might not have been able to afford.

That’s a great thing.

The flip of it, and this is something that often distresses people supporting education savings accounts is, you’re not on top of the state’s machinery to administrate this stuff. You have real life families that at some point, they just get fed up and they say, “you know what, kiddo, we’re just going to walk you down to the school by the street” and give up the ESA.

Once the kid gets enrolled in the nearby school, then they make friends, the switching costs, like you say, are very high.  The cash isn’t there to allow you to do that the way you had expected.  And your backup plan is local school and you shrug your shoulders.

I want to go back to just tell us about the local teacher you arrange for.  What’s a typical lesson?

[00:17:10] Katie: so she normally will do some reading comprehension where the kids will take turns reading slides, and they might talk about, “What does this word mean, how can I interpret this sentence”? and she does different grade levels, so it’s different for like my kindergartner than it is for my second grader than it is for my third grader who’s actually in her fourth grade class.

She tries to do it a little differently each day because it’s four days a week. Some days it might all be like reading and then some days it might be a combination of reading and math.

Something that I love that she does is she’ll do, um, where they’ll be talking about a discussion like, maybe they’re reading a story and learning about koalas in Australia. And she’ll be walking them through how to draw a koala.  So they’re getting like that tactile thing going on where they’re like using their hands and they’re remembering better because they were drawing it as they did it.

[00:18:10] And my kids love that about her.

I was thinking Zoom classes, right?  This is going to be really dry and boring.   But I’ve been really impressed, and my kids, they ask to go, can I go to Ashley’s school? I love Ashley’s school. My kindergartner is super stoked (he gets to go this year).

So whatever Ashley is doing, she’s doing it well. Cause they’re all doing well with their reading. They like to go to her class, they never want to get out of it. So that is like way different than my experience with schooling where I was like, Oh, I don’t want to go today.

[00:18:59] Mike: Yeah, well, you also, you hit an interesting thing about, two things about Ashley’s school. One is, there are a number of elementary school teachers in traditional schools that they could loop with the same kid over multiple years. So at Ashley School, Ashley is with a family where she knows the siblings, she knows you, it just sets up a lot of very teacher friendly things, hour by hour.

And then, the second thing that seems very positive about Ashley School is Your kids happen to really like Ashley, so they’re motivated.

If you went to “Mike school,” and after two weeks, your kids said “I hate Mike school,” you would just cancel Mike school, and you’d look around, and you’d find Ashley school.

When I think about my older kids in public school, they’re teenagers now, some years they loved their teacher, and some years they really didn’t get along, and all we could do as parents in those years is say, “Hang in there.”   We don’t have standing in the school to go and say, “Look, our kid really doesn’t like Mike’s classroom, and can you transfer her over to the beloved Ashley teacher?”

[00:20:38] Katie: Yeah, it, I mean, when I went to public school, in New York state growing up and, I had a fourth grade teacher that he was not there to teach. He didn’t enjoy teaching and he didn’t try to hide it. He was there to be the high school basketball coach. And so he would come in every day and school to me was reading the textbook, that’s what he would do in class.

I loved reading, but I didn’t like sitting in my seat for eight hours a day or six hours a day or whatever. And, I can remember that being like the worst school year ever.

And so I’m glad that my kids may have some opportunities to not have to experience that because it really does like squash your love of learning when you’re just like doing something because you’re forced to do it and it’s not even engaging or interesting.

Mike: It works both ways because, teachers, their number one desire usually is to have students that are motivated, but in this case, Ashley gets to create an experience. Yeah. That she defines, right? She’s able to say, I want to teach the following grades of kids in the following numbers that I’ll know in the following way. And this is what I want my day to day work life to be like. And she can create that so it works for her as well. And that’s how you get some optimal pairings, like it sounds like you have.

[00:22:00] Katie: Yeah. It’s awesome. like I, I super appreciate how they’re having that opportunity.

[00:22:08] Mike: Katie, go back a little bit in time. A couple years ago, you were involved in a court case where you were a plaintiff, that where, the HOPE scholarship was created, let’s say, three or so years ago. A circuit court, I think, said “This is unconstitutional. West Virginia is not allowed to pay parents with school funds to fund their kids education.”

And you were a plaintiff going up against that circuit court ruling and it went to the West Virginia Supreme Court? Is that what happened?

[00:22:55] Katie: So, the defendants on the case were actually our treasurer department, our treasurer’s department, I think, and the attorney general, and then we got submitted, and I forget there’s a legal term for it, where they take somebody who is affected by the result, like us, we would have lost the HOPE scholarship.

[00:23:12] Mike: You had legal standing.

[00:23:14] Katie: And they submitted us into the court as another defendant. and so we were represented by the Institute for Justice. they actually reached out to me because, I was pretty involved in helping getting the HOPE Scholarship passed on behalf of my daughter, who has apraxia of speech, which is, a motor neurological disorder that affects speech, and she’s dyslexic.

So we were looking to use the HOPE scholarship to help us with her, her speech therapy, with her tutoring, and also just to keep her out of the classroom environment where she gets really overwhelmed and she has trouble getting words out.  We knew that there would probably be better schooling opportunities for her outside of a classroom that had a lot of kids in it, just based on what we knew about her and her learning disability.

The circuit court (issued an) injunction that basically said, we’re putting the HOPE scholarship on hold.

[00:24:17] And that was. Really difficult because I actually, they ruled on that the same day that my third child had heart surgery. So I was literally sitting in the hospital waiting while he was in heart surgery when I got the call from our Institute for Justice attorney saying I’m really sorry to tell you this but they put an injunction on the case and we don’t know when they’ll rule on it.

[00:24:37] And in October of that year, it went to the State Supreme Court of West Virginia. So my daughter got to go to the Supreme Court in person and watch them argue the case.

[00:24:50] Which was really an incredible opportunity for both of us.

[00:24:54] It was very interesting to watch. And then we thought it might take a couple weeks to get a, a result back.

[00:25:01] And literally the next day our attorney called us and said, “We won.” We won the case. and it was such a relief because we were worried she was going to lose her Hope Scholarship eligibility. So we had put her in a public charter school because you had to be in a public school to maintain her eligibility because nobody knew with the injunction what they would do with everybody who had already been approved.

[00:25:24] And well, if they went to homeschooling, would they lose their eligibility or not? And I wasn’t willing to risk it because of our, representation in the case because it wasn’t just my family that would lose it. If we, couldn’t be a part of the case, we might have lost it for thousands of families in West Virginia.

[00:25:39] So I put her in a public school against my best judgment, and it was rough. she had a hard time. she would be unable to speak out, and she would cry, and they would, pull her out and let her color Elsa drawings. And then,

[00:25:53] Mike: Katie, just to, just so listeners understand, in West Virginia’s version of the Education Savings Account, there’s a rule. And the rule is something like, families have to be eligible, have had their kid attend 45 days.

[00:26:14] Katie: Or they have to be an incoming kindergarten parent.

[00:26:17] Mike: Or be an incoming kindergartner. And in this case, you were trying to protect your daughter’s eligibility for the Hope Scholarship, which was still in the air.   “If they rule in our favor, but I don’t enroll her in public school, we could lose eligibility on that technicality, and I don’t want to risk that.”

[00:26:45] “So even though I don’t think she’s going to do well in the nearby school, in this case a charter school, we got to hang in there and enroll her in that to protect her HOPE scholarship eligibility.” Am I saying all those pieces right?

[00:26:59] Katie: We were also concerned that if she was not protecting her eligibility as a public school kid because she was, eligible as a kindergartner, but then we didn’t know because of the injunction, what happens if we start homeschooling her, that we were worried they would kick us out of the case, and then they would have to start all over to try to find somebody (as a plaintiff), and it might be too late.

[00:27:23] So we wanted to make sure that she could remain part of the case after all the work that we’d done with our attorneys with the Institute for Justice to get her, represented properly and make sure that they, the court system knew about her and how she would be affected by the HOPE scholarship going away.

[00:27:40] Mike: Yes, and people don’t quite realize that when you’re like a party to this type of suit and you have a question, it’s not like you can say to the Chief Justice: “Hey, listen, this will only take you 60 seconds, but can you tell me if our eligibility would be terminated under the following rule?”

[00:28:00] Katie: Well and nobody really could answer that question except for the Treasurer’s Department and they had been told to stop working on the Hope Scholarship. So it was like there was just no one that knew the answer. It would really depend on what their rulemaking was after the injunction was lifted.

[00:28:14] So we just said we’ll be safe rather than sorry.

[00:28:17] Mike: Your child who evidently really likes Ashley’s school, how’s his heart?

[00:28:24] Katie: He’s fine. It was a little scary, but he’s good now.

[00:28:37] Mike: Okay. Got it. So you’re running quite the family operation over there. I will note that your hubby is covering as you and I do our interview. Props to him. Thank you for giving us this conversation. T

Are there any things that you’ve thought about buying with your education savings account that for one reason or another you haven’t?

[00:29:05] Katie: think the biggest thing, especially for my daughter that has the skills, Special needs learning kind of stuff is her, is that her funding is not as large, so like if she went to a public school, she would be eligible for federal funding for special needs kids that would help the school pay for like her speech therapy and her dyslexia tutoring and pullouts for her.

[00:29:25] And she still gets the same amount of money that any other kid would in the HOPE Scholarship Program. And so as the program develops, ideally, I would like to see kids like her that have additional needs to have some additional funding to pay for those needs.

[00:29:52] Mike: Yeah, absolutely. When we meet people who are combining homeschooling with an education savings account, we see two different stories.

One is hey, the regular school system simply would not work for my kid, and they need a lot of services, and, there’s a question of whether the amount is reasonable given the need of the kids.

Then there’s a second group of families, their kids were doing fine in regular school, but they just thought they could do much better if they did it themselves.

And, so I feel like in the case where the kid has some clear clinical issues to get to where they need to go in life, you know, there should be some kind of index on the scholarship amounts.

[00:30:40] Katie: Yeah. The only other thing that I would say really should be considered as part of the HOPE Scholarship Program, West Virginia is a very rural state and we do not have very good cell phone coverage and internet access.  Technologies like Starlink that make satellite internet accessible are not affordable for most families in West Virginia.  I think that should be covered under the HOPE Scholarship Program, or just covered separately as anyone using the HOPE Scholarship that needs this internet access. we will cover it under the state because I would be willing to bet there’s a number of families that would love to use the HOPE Scholarship, to get their kids some new opportunities, but they can’t afford the internet access.

[00:32:06] Mike: This is Mike Goldstein, Homeschooling Journeys with Katie Switzer in West Virginia.

Katie, it’s been really great to hear your story, and I guess I would close with overall setting aside the HOPE Scholarship piece of this. What’s the emotional cadence that you feel as a parent who’s homeschooling?

[00:32:27] What’s the ratio of, days where you’re like, I pretty much know what I’m doing and it’s going reasonably well versus days where you’re just like, oh my goodness, today was a tough one?

[00:32:40] Katie: Going into my third year, I feel like I don’t have nearly as many of those tough days. I would say in my first year I tried a little too hard to make school like school at home and like doing public school at home doesn’t work.  So you really have to figure out what works for your child and how much time you need to spend with them and what, And I encourage any parents who are struggling with those days, that they’re like, Oh, this is too much.

[00:33:06] after you’ve tried a curriculum and you get to that point, like maybe try something else after a month or two and see what’s a better fit. And, not every kid needs to learn Latin or memorize all of the classical composers, classical is great. I’m not, putting that down, but I’m just saying there are so many different educational systems out there and there’s going to be one that’s going to fit your family.

[00:33:28] And that’s the beauty of homeschooling is that once you find that one, it feels a lot less like, ah, and a lot more like, yeah, this is working.

[00:33:37] Mike: Katie, that’s awesome.

[00:34:02] This was a great session. I think other parents will enjoy hearing it. And thanks for what you do. We really appreciate your time.

[00:34:11] Katie: Thanks for having me.