I Didn't Pull My Most Struggling Daughter Out of Public School First

For 14 years I worked in the public schools as a teacher and principal. For a moment there, I was all in on the public system. I thought this was the way to educate people.

Then there was my oldest daughter. School was never her thing. She’s the kind of person who does not like being told what to do. I love those people. We need them. But public schools tell you what to do all day long.

During one quarter of her 7th grade year she had all D’s and F’s. The school counselor called us in to talk about getting her grades up. The counselor asked my daughter what she could realistically get her grades to by the end of the quarter, in 3 weeks.

My daughter: I can get all A’s. The counselor: Well maybe we should shoot for B’s and C’s. And if you do that you can come into my office for a prize. (Remember: this is 7th grade.)

My daughter came home furious. She basically told us that she would prove that counselor wrong. Her final grades that quarter were all A’s or A-’s, with one B+.

She didn’t go back for the prize.

The school’s requirements would follow my daughter home. She would typically have hours of homework, and my wife and I were like, “Well the school says you have this, this, and this to do.” That left us as parents telling her what the school wanted her to do.

It turned into arguments over and over again.

In 7th grade, she struggled hard in math. We luckily had a great teacher who picked up on that. Instead of recommending her for special classes or ignoring the problem, the teacher came up with a great solution. She taught the class, then had my daughter sit through it again the next period. It worked.

Her 8th grade year, the teacher didn’t continue this practice. At the end of that year, COVID shut down the schools.

When my daughter came back for 9th grade, we were trying to decide what we wanted to do. We didn’t like the masks, so we tried the district’s online program. For this daughter it was a fail. Too many distractions to let her concentrate. She went back the 2nd quarter, but like many families, the learning had been disrupted, and she was not ready for 9th grade material.

To add to the complexity, my 2nd daughter was starting to struggle in school, not with the schoolwork, but with the crowd she was hanging out with.

By the end of that year, my wife and I were asking, “Should we just homeschool?”

If you’re tracking which daughter needed it most, you’d guess we pulled our oldest first.

We didn’t.

We homeschooled our youngest three. We put my 2nd daughter, the one struggling with her crowd, into a local microschool. Our oldest, the one who’d fought a counselor to straight A’s out of spite, stayed in public high school. Full time. That whole first semester.

She wanted the social side of it: the friends, the routine, the dances. And honestly, she was afraid homeschool would just mean more of the same fight.

But the high school wasn’t better. Three years after a counselor told her to aim for B’s and C’s, a different adult did the same thing in a different subject. Her English teacher told her it was fine if she read books like Diary of a Wimpy Kid or My Little Pony for his course. She rolled her eyes.

Halfway through that sophomore year, she came to us and asked to try some online classes. We readily agreed. She took an anatomy class through BYU and did excellent.

My daughter had seen that her younger siblings were done with schoolwork before she would ever get home from school. She kept one high school class, but she also wanted something practical. She took a nail technician course through the local applied technology center.

Her senior year became completely customized. I won’t pretend it was clean. There was a lot of brokenness in how she felt about education. Years of arguing about homework can do that to a student. We slowed everything down. Our goal went from learn this topic, to learn to love learning. We rebuilt by reading a book together for the joy of it, not because it was assigned. She finished with a stronger desire to learn and her nail tech certificate in hand.

Now she’s serving an LDS mission. She’s been living on her own in small towns across Texas. Mom and dad aren’t there, so she has to figure things out herself. We’ve watched her mature.

For a long time, she felt to me like a ship without a rudder. I’d ask her about goals and get nothing back but uncertainty. She didn’t know what she wanted out of her life.

The combination of pulling her out of public high school and sending her off to serve a mission gave her a direction. She wants to be a paramedic. She’ll get her EMT certification first.

Here’s what I’ve learned from my daughter.

Kids need a voice in what and how they learn. That matters more as they get older. No one can learn something through force.

I keep coming back to an idea from the book A Thomas Jefferson Education: build a love of learning young, then in their teen years, hand them the wheel.

We’ve since done the same with our other kids. We sat down with our 2nd and asked her what she wanted. She said she wanted to write.

When we put her in a program we thought would be great and she hated it halfway through, we pulled her, even after paying the tuition, because forcing her through it would have defeated the entire point.

Eventually she told us the microschool itself wasn’t serving her goals anymore. So she came back to homeschool, joined the Young Writers Workshop, and wrote a novel. 117,000+ words. She graduated this year. Now she’s preparing to serve her own mission, revising that book while she waits to leave, hoping to self publish a few copies.

Both of my two oldest ended up choosing missions. Neither path was forced.

My 3rd loves the traditional skills. She’s raising pigs and has become an excellent seamstress.

So if you’re a parent going through something similar but not sure what to do, I have this advice: ignore your fear. Pulling your kid out of public school and doing something else is scary. Do it anyway. You can try something for half a year and see if it works. Your kids won’t be missing much. So just ignore your fear.

We want to help families find something different for kids who have lost their love of learning. Students attend 3 days a week, grounded in Christian values. We built it on the principles our own daughter’s path taught us the hard way.

So if you’re watching your own kid lose their curiosity and joy in learning, you don’t have to wait years like we did. Come learn more about what we’re building at Horizon School.

Thanks for reading.

Principal Jon