More Nebraska parents are choosing homeschooling over public schools

Children roller skate and ride scooters across the carpeted rec space in the Peace Presbyterian church in Elkhorn, an Omaha neighborhood. Families intermix throughout the building: teenagers disappear to their hideouts, kids grab toys and climb on the playground, and parents converse over coffee in the corner. Most of them are moms, but a rarer find in homeschool communities sits among them: a homeschool dad.

“They treat me like the annoying little brother,” Michael Raulston said with a laugh. “Which I kind of am.”

Raulston has been homeschooling his only son for 13 years. But he fits in well with the 20 or so homeschool moms at the Omaha Homeschool Explorers Co-op. The explorers meet up for weekly play sessions, regular field trips and the occasional presentation from community organizations, like fire departments. Raulston suggested the idea of homeschooling to his wife when an illness kept him from working. She worried about their kids’ socialization, which is a common concern for homeschoolers. But Raulston sees co-ops like this one are the perfect solution.

“We’ve become less a group of families and more one big family,” he said, adding that the families show up for each other when times get hard, even outside of co-op.

Homeschooling has become more popular in Nebraska in recent years. In 2019, around 9,400 students were homeschooled, according to the Nebraska Department of Education. Then came the COVID-19 pandemic. That number shot up to more than 14,700 in 2020. While it sank back down to just under 14,000 from 2021 through 2023, homeschooling is back on the rise, up from 14,600 in 2024 to 18,000 this year. Many parents who spoke with Nebraska Public Media News point to the pandemic as the catalyst for the trend.

“Parents kind of stepped back and were like, ‘Wait a minute, I can do that,’” Rachel Tran said.

Tran is a postpartum doula and a native to Omaha. She started the Omaha Homeschool Explorers Co-op in 2019, and she said while the pandemic gave parents the opportunity to take another stab at how their kids are educated, everyone has their own reasons for taking on the challenge.

“I wanted to be able to craft my children's education to meet each of them individually,” Tran said.

For Dannielle Oestreich, it was about her kids’ happiness.

“We decided to pull Trip from the traditional schooling that Trip was doing because he was really starting to hate learning,” Oestreich said.

Trip asks lots of questions, and his mother says he is a hands-on learner. But the pace of a typical classroom didn’t allow him to dive deeply into topics he found fascinating. Oestreich said he has a chronic cough, which his peers bullied him for. She saw the effect it had on him when she volunteered at his school when he was in third grade.

“On my way out the door to leave, he was just sitting at the table by himself, over away from his peers and just he was hunched over,” Oestreich said. “I have never seen him look so sad in my entire life, and I, right there, was like, ‘This is not healthy for him.’”

Trip’s parents pulled him out of school to homeschool. Not only did it get him away from the bullying, he finally had time to ask all the questions he wanted.

“We found that he actually started to love learning again,” Oestreich said.

Sunshine Metschke is a trained teacher with years of experience in Nebraska schools. But for the last 14 years, she has been homeschooling her three boys. She said she wanted to be the one teaching her kids.

“I didn't want to give away those light bulb moments that teachers love,” Metschke said.

For Metschke’s family, homeschooling can fall into a rhythm. Her students enjoy quiet mornings where they read together or watch student news. Now that they are getting older – her youngest is 10 – they are starting to be able to teach themselves, and everyone’s day looks different.

“My high schooler might work on his math while my middle schooler is working on history, and then I work one on one with my soon-to-be fifth grader on math,” Metschke said.

Kathryn Dillow runs the Nebraska Homeschool home educators network, known best by its shorthand of Nebraska Homeschool. The group connects families with homeschool resources and guides them through filing with the state to homeschool. Dillow said that homeschooling looks different for every family, but at the core, homeschool parents are often filling out the place laid out for them in Nebraska law.

“Here in Nebraska, education for a child is ensconced in the constitution,” Dillow said. “The parent is the primary educator of the child. Schools are told that they will work with the parents. Yet parents feel like they're being pushed out of that setting of having a voice in the education of their child.”

Some parents who spoke with Nebraska Public Media News worry that their school district does not have enough funding, or that they emphasized standardized testing too heavily. Some said their kids did not have enough time to relax and just be a kid in school.

To homeschool in Nebraska, parents must file for an exempt school status with the state and provide a copy of a birth certificate, which is also required for public school. Dillow said all parents really have to do is inform the state who will be homeschooled and where.

“What you're doing is the parent is actually choosing or electing to be exempt, step aside, out from under the rules and regulations that the Department of Education runs their approved and accredited schools with, and stand over in the category called exempt,” Dillow said.

Some homeschoolers simply study at home. But Dillow said exempt schools include other models. For example, learning centers are run like businesses, inviting homeschool kids to take classes under a university-like model. The schools file for exempt school status and only accept exempt students. In short, Dillow said all homeschools are exempt schools, but not all exempt schools are homeschools.

Tess Ulrey, executive director of the Coalition for Responsible Home Education, said Nebraska is one of only a few states tracking how many students are getting alternative schooling. Eleven states do not track how many students are homeschooled at all.

“That's pretty significant,” Ulrey said. “So while our best guess, based on a lot of factors, is that homeschooling is growing across the country, we can't really quantify it because so many of these states are missing that sort of basic piece of accountability.”

The coalition believes what’s happening in Nebraska reflects a national trend: that homeschooling is also on the rise, especially among more conservative, Christian circles, but Ulrey said the pool of people considering it as an option is diversifying.

“We're really seeing a rise in homeschooling for a lot of other reasons,” Ulrey said. “Whether that's dissatisfaction with the public school, whether it's neurodivergence, or all sorts of ways that homeschooling is really the best fit for children.”

Dillow said that in her experience, if things kids learn in school conflict with what the parents want them to learn, that’s often taken as a reason to start their own school. One of the most common reasons is religion conflicting with public school.

“We see that all across our culture, in that they're promoting, you know, different ideology on how you know gender, or they might be promoting a different ideology on you know deity or no deity.

“It's more of a white Christian traditional family movement in Nebraska,” Homeschool mom Michelle Ender said. “I think that parents choosing non-religious homeschooling, like me, is rare.”

For Ender, who homeschools five kids from preschool to fifth grade, becoming a homeschool parent was a difficult choice after her own experience being a homeschooler.

“I was abused and neglected outside of the public school system in the ‘80s and ‘90s,” Ender said. “Even though I was raised Christian, I'm not homeschooling for religious or political reasons. Now, for a couple of my kids, it's just a really good fit.”

Ender hopes to be part of a new trend in Nebraska that counters age-old stereotypes. She is working on starting a new, non-religious and non-political homeschool group, which she believes will represent a growing sect of homeschoolers in Nebraska.

Seventeen-year-olds Adelynn Helff and Kate Tran have been homeschooling their whole lives. For them, it’s been an all around positive experience.

“I think it's really good for kids, especially with parents helping you out,” Helff said. “Like building your kid up in their own way and stuff like that.”

And like Ender, they also wanted to counter some misconceptions about homeschoolers. Kate Tran took a hold of the microphone to emphasize her point, raising her voice.

“Homeschoolers aren't weird!” Tran said. “Most of them.”