We received a letter from the North Carolina education bureaucrats at the Department of Non-Public Education (DNPE) just before I went to Mexico. The way it works in North Carolina is that each homeschool has to be ready to set an appointment for one of the bureaucrats to visit the school to check three things for each student. Those three things are 1) Attendance records, 2) immunization records, and 3) nationally normed standardized test scores. The way it is supposed to work is that the bureaucrat sets an appointment to visit each home where they stand on the porch and review the records. That has not worked out so well because so many people in North Carolina have chosen to homeschool their children due to the abysmal state of public education here.
The system has just gotten swamped so the DNPE has started asking the homeschool administrators to go to their offices with the required records. In spite of the fact that they asked us to bring more than is required, they asked nicely, so we will make this accommodation for them this year. Part of what makes it a little more palatable is that the DNPE is not part of the government school establishment, rather it is the department within the government that watches over the different private schools in the state. If the government school bureaucracy were in charge of this, we would probably be less accommodating. I have blogged previously about the systemic problems with government school education in North Carolina. Nationally normed test scores are very low relative to the scores earned by homeschools, many of the schools are year-round schools, many kids get bussed many miles from where they live to perform racial balancing, there are problems with violence and teen pregnancy, etc.
So, the upshot is that we will take our documents into the DNPE in early November. If it is at all interesting, I will report how it goes.
On another note, many in the company where I work now use RocketDock and Launchy on their Windows computers due to some investigative work performed by NerdHow. I am hoping NerdHow will take a look at the Gnome Do tool for Linux. I think it is a Launchy equivalent.
October 11, 2004 – Anniversary weekend
October 12, 2004 – Today was another regular day