One woman went from being a parent reluctant to homeschool to a beacon for school choice in her community. Bernita Bradley is the founder of Engaged Detroit, which brings together homeschooling parents, education providers, coaches and others.

Her work in education started when her daughter asked if she could be homeschooled. Bradley had not seen many homeschoolers and was skeptical of the idea. “All these misconceptions people have about homeschool, I had a lot of those,” Bradley says.

Her daughter’s COVID-19 schooling options helped change her mind. She thought her daughter was taking online classes through her public school. But she found out that her daughter and others in the class had instead been teaching themselves.

When her daughter later said she would drop out and try to get a graduate equivalency diploma, Bradley was surprised. “She was dropping out because teachers weren’t showing up for her. My daughter loves education. So that was heart-wrenching to me,” Bradley says.

“I had emailed the school several times, and they made every excuse they could think of for why the teachers weren’t coming on,” Bradley says. “It was my forced hand that has now turned into something so powerful and so wonderful.”

She started working with other parents in the same situation as she started homeschooling. And she also got support from homeschool coaches to help her with her own daughter. “And I’m like, ‘Hey, we’re not a group. We’re just helping people.’ But then it became a group, and we labeled it ‘Engaged Detroit.’”

They started with a 12-family microschool and three coaches. The coaches provided some structure, answered parents’ questions and helped them solve the problems that arose as they became parents-turned homeschool teachers.

Bradley found their success exciting. One of the mothers sent to a group chat photos of her son, on a Sunday evening. He was sitting with his mom on the couch — excited to be learning math. “This was the same mom who was sitting on the bathroom floor crying because she was trying to get teachers to engage with her child online,” Bradley says.

Bradley says that parents did not know that they could work and do homeschool and ensure that their kids learn as much and more as they would in school. “Help them get what they need to get to that next level and they’ll advance quicker,” Bradley says.

The participants of Engaged Detroit also work with engineering programs, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the Arts and Sciences Academy and others. And she helped boost the connection between community partners and parents through an event she called the unconference. “It was a conference designed by parents to give parents tools to understand school choice,” Bradley says.

“We are trying to be that tool to help them leave and do it in a way that’s going to make the children thrive and be successful,” Bradley says.

She wants policymakers to understand that parents matter. Too often, lawmaking is about making decisions for other people. During the pandemic, she says, schools were open to feed kids, but not to teach them. That’s now where parents needed help, however. They were struggling more with education than their children’s nutritional needs.

She has some advice for parents: Leave any school that is not educating your child. “You can find co-ops in your community. You can find libraries. Local churches have homeschooling groups. There are unique schools, like the aviator school in Ann Arbor. If homeschooling is not your niche, then there are other spaces,” Bradley says.

“We’ve grown from twelve families to over 411 families in five years,” Bradley says. “Be bold. Do what your children need done.”

Check out the conversation at the Overton Window podcast.

Permission to reprint this blog post in whole or in part is hereby granted, provided that the author (or authors) and the Mackinac Center for Public Policy are properly cited.