Before moaning about public school fees, look at home-schoolers

My wife and I could buy a 42-inch plasma HDTV with the money we spend on fees required to send our three kids to public schools.

There's the "instructional materials" fee of $205 for each of our middle-schoolers, the $76 grade-school version of that fee, the "lunch supervisor" fee of $84 and myriad charges for gym uniforms, musical instrument rentals, field trips and general whathaveyou.

Topping it all off, we are required to send our kids to school with treasure troves of school supplies that include glue, Scotch tape, soft soap, a 54-function scientific calculator, a 512 MB flash drive and more Crayons, markers, colored pencils, pens, binders, folders, notebooks, scissors, erasers, highlighters, correction fluid, paper and sharpened No. 2 pencils than our kids can carry in their humongo backpacks, which are of a weight usually associated with sherpas.

When I was a grade-schooler, I included a pencil and maybe even a back-up pencil in the Swisher Sweets cigar box that carried all my supplies to school. Now, in this age of computers and printers, our sixth-grade twins are required to cart a mind-numbing total of 18 dozen pencils, pens and markers to school.

Not that I'm complaining.

Even if I am, a simple phone call to Cheryl Janik gives me a new perspective.

The Elgin mom is founder and director of the Heritage Home School Workshops, an intensive co-op of 225 suburban students, from pre-school through high school, who meet one day a week at the Elgin Evangelical Free Church. Monday was the first day of this school year.

Janik pays the same taxes as the rest of us, supplementing our kids' public school educations. But she also has fees.

"Home schooling is far more costly," Janik says, adding, "As long as the government stays off my back, I'm happy with it."

Home-schooler parents pay for complete curriculums for each student. At Heritage, the parents also pay the workshop teachers. And just because a kid is schooling at home doesn't mean he doesn't need pencils, paper, a calculator, books, a computer and the usual list of supplies.

It adds up.

Just for Janik's six kids, including the 3-year-old twins who take only two preschool classes each, the cost of teaching her kids at home and through the one-day-a-week instruction at the workshops is about seven grand a year, she says.

"Home schooling families that do not choose to use a co-op have less expense, but probably spend money in private lessons or park district-sponsored classes such as gym and swim at the Rec Center in Elgin," Janik says in an e-mail. "There are many programs available to home schoolers, but it all costs money that is over and above what we pay in taxes."

A check of on-line home school companies offered sixth-grade curriculums that ranged from the discount price of $490 to several thousand dollars for each kid. One 2001 study at City University of New York estimated that it costs $2,500 to home-school one child, with each additional child costing almost that much.

For some families, where a spouse quit a job to stay home and teach the kids, the loss of a salary adds a minimum of $30,000 in lost wages to the cost of home-schooling.

But there is some good news for home-schoolers. By not having to backpack all that stuff to school every day, kids might save on chiropractor bills.