Colleen Hroncich
Colleen Hroncich
“It’s the best of both worlds in my opinion,” says Jessica Peterson, director of St. Thomas Aquinas Tutorial (STAT), a part-time homeschool program in Millersville, Maryland. As a former public school teacher, she had first-hand experience with conventional schooling and found it lacking.
“I had taught for about eight years. We moved to where we are now, and I was staying at home,” she recalls. Her daughter was in second grade, and Jessica realized, “She doesn’t really need to be there for seven hours. I’m missing out on time with her, and she’s already getting a lot of homework. And I just saw this kind of hamster wheel that we were starting on even at the age of seven. And I just thought, ‘This can’t be the best thing.’”
Jessica had friends who attended Saint Thomas Aquinas Tutorial, so she looked into it and was impressed with what she saw. She says the children seemed different—free to be themselves. So Jessica and her husband decided, “We’ll try it out, and if it doesn’t work we can always go back to what we were doing.”
They loved it. Jessica became a third grade Latin tutor, which she describes as “very beginner Latin … the only one that I was willing to do.” Then she served as science tutor for grades 5–8. This year she became the director of the whole tutorial.
STAT was founded in 2011 by homeschoolers who wanted a part-time program for their kids that was rooted in the Catholic faith. It offers in-person classes on Mondays and Wednesdays for students in grades 2–8, and the children work at home the other days. After the in-person days, tutors send parents a summary of what they did in class as well as assignments for the at-home days.
The tutorial started with 26 students and has grown to 82, » Read More
https://www.cato.org/blog/friday-feature-st-thomas-aquinas-tutorial