Homeschooling Inquiries Skyrocket After Gov. Newsom Announces Statewide Student Vaccination Mandatehttps://californiaglobe.com/articles/california-homeschooling-inquiries-skyrocket-only-hours-after-gov-newsom-announces-statewide-student-vaccination-mandate/Only hours after Governor Gavin Newsom announced a COVID-19 vaccination mandate for all schoolchildren of FDA approval age in California, homeschooling and tutoring inquiries shot up dramatically, with some homeschooling sites even going down to the sheer volume of users searching for help.
While the mandate, which covers all public and private school children, does allow for either independent study or homeschooling options if they don’t receive the vaccine, many parents in California have seen the new mandates a concerted effort to increase vaccinations. As the Globe noted last month, parents have already pulled 160,000 students from public schools due to the pandemic, fueling a homeschooling boom since last year.
...
“Since this morning, I’m at 3,000 e-mails from parents asking for homeschooling help,” said Alyssa Hutchinson, an Orange County homeschool transfer advisor who helps parents move to homeschooling options online, to the Globe on Friday. “That is an insane number of inquiries.”
...
Tonya Pulaski, a stay-at-home mom who homeschools her kids in Modesto, and runs a website giving information to parents on how to homeschool their kids, said in an interview with the Globe that she experienced something similar on Friday.
“My website has been down since about 10 this morning,” said Pulaski. “So many parents went there for help. And I know my server can handle a lot of traffic. My daughter runs some YouTube and Tiktok things that get a lot of views, and she never crashed it before. This did. She even said she was jealous of my traffic which she has NEVER said before.”
“This just shows just how many desperate parents are out there. There’s a lot of sites you can go to for help, and right now California parents are looking for anything.”
Like in other states, homeschooling is a networked "movement" rather than having centralized hierarchical leadership structure. There are statewide orgs, but if they ceased to exist homeschooling would not go away in CA. There are hundreds or thousands of support groups, private independent study programs, all of which have leaders and knowledgeable people who can help newcomers. If Goobernor Noisome is planning to use Covid (or some other issue) as a wedge to take out homeschooling, he'll learn the hard way that ad hoc networking is less vulnerable than formalized hierarchical structures.
By the same token, all of those hundreds or thousands of support groups, private independent study programs, and knowledgeable people are available to help new homeschoolers in getting started.
This was a conflict Goobernor Noisome should have been smart enough to avoid, but pride (from not being recalled) can be as blinding as anger or hatred.
