There is a growing number of students leaving school, year after year. Instead of getting backpacks ready for the new school year, more than 2,000 students in Florida are preparing to sleep in, stay at home, and complete their lessons with their parent in the same room as them. For the 2017-18 academic school year, there were 89,821 kids that were homeschooled in the state of Florida, a huge increase from the 2016-17 academic school year, which was only 87,462 students, a 2.7 percent increase for Florida alone. Across the United States there were 1,642,027 students, a 43,000 student increase from the previous year of 1,598,905 students. That's 2.1 percent of the student population of the United States that is being homeschooled, a 2.6 percent increase in homeschooled students overall for the past academic year.
The increase of students shifting from public or private schools to homeschooling is rapidly increasing and needs to be taken into consideration before granting so many individuals the ability to enroll in homeschooling. Students that take part in homeschooling lose an abundant amount of social development and real world application of knowledge. In a research journal article by Samantha Lebeda, titled "Homeschooling: Depriving Children of Social Development," Journal of Contemporary Legal Issues that discussed the study of socialization of homeschooled students, socialization is defined as the process by which individuals learn to establish and maintain relationships with others, become accepted members of society, regulate their own behavior in accordance with society's codes and standards, and get along with others. Kids that are deprived from the public, charter, or private school systems lose so many components of social development. With no exposure to peer pressure, lack of communication skills between colleagues and elders, there is an absence of exposure to culture and trends, and an overall missing out of real-world predicaments.
Such scenarios consist of relationships and partnerships, working with diverse individuals on long-term projects, and developing efficient time management. Aside from becoming socially impaired due to homeschooling, there is also the logistical effect of it all. The increase of homeschoolers has the negative effect of there being a decrease in physical bodies that are in a classroom. As more and more kids head back home to learn, less and less students are coming to the classroom. There is a shortage of students in our public schools, causing class sizes to become smaller and smaller. This, in effect, reduces the diversity of classes offered in schools and the diversity levels of the student body. The reduction of student body numbers has a negative effect on the employment of teachers. Every year, dozens of teachers lose their jobs due to the fact that there just isn't enough budgeting going to schools anymore. Another similar aspect of homeschooling students is the financial problem. A schools funding is directly in correlation with the number of students, teachers, faculty, and extracurricular activities offered at each individual institution. With a smaller student body, one that is continuing to decline in numbers, comes the costly effect on teachers salary, funding for clubs and athletics, and overall budgeting to the public schools. There becomes less resources available to students such as new computers or class sets of calculators. The Art programs have been shut down, in example as schools theatre programs, band and choir classes, and computer and engineering courses.
Eventually, at the rate we are going, all extracurricular activities will be cut and we will be reduced to purely teaching the four basic core classes. Teachers pay will be reduced significantly along with the number of job opportunities in the field of education. This is all because students are leaving the classroom and heading back to their houses to learn. The effects of the growing movement of homeschooling could be very severe. Between a whole generation of unsocialized individuals and no support for the public school system, we're headed into a time of uncultured, uneducated, unprepared individuals. We need to limit the number of students enrolled into homeschooling and place our students back into the classroom and back into the real world.