Home School and Truant Officers

In September 1979, when I should have been starting 3rd grade at Bath Village Elementary School, we left the Colonial Inn in a white VW camper bus towing a canvas pop-up camper. We took our time traveling down the East Coast, and finally stopped for a while at my Aunt Virginia's place near Sanford, Florida. This is where I started 3rd grade home school. I captured this in my journal - my mother insisted that I keep a journal of our travels, saying, "you're going to want to write about this one day."
 

The Calvert School is a correspondence school based in Baltimore, Maryland. The way it worked then is that they sent the entire curriculum for the whole year - textbooks, a manual for the teacher, drawing paper, and a ruler. My mother administered the lessons, which were planned out in detail. Once a month, I took a test and sent it to the school for grading. There were also quarterly exams for which I received an official report card.

Over the course of the next two months, we traveled to Hot Springs, Arkansas, where we lived in two different motels, and then back to Florida. We stayed for a few months at Camp Bayou, a campground on the Little Manatee River in Ruskin, Florida. Every morning, my mother would spend about 4 hours giving me the lessons out on a picnic table or in our camper if it was too cold. We stayed out near the "crazy oaks," an area with with a lot of low, twisted oak trees that were good for climbing. Here's a snapshot of me there:

One day after I finished my lessons, which was usually by lunch time, we went to go a nearby town to go grocery shopping. On the way, Papa told me, “watch out for truant officers, they might catch you and make you go to school.”

“What’s a truant officer?” I asked.

“A truant officer is a person that works for the school and goes around looking for kids who are playing hooky from school. One time my brother and I got caught by one and they dragged us back to school.”

“But I’m going to school,” I said. The lessons were harder than they were in regular school, and my parents said I was getting a better education, better than other kids, because I got to travel around and see the country. We did the lessons five days a week, sometimes on Saturdays if we spent a weekday traveling.

He replied, “They don’t know that you're doing home school. You could be anybody. All kids your age are supposed to be in school. So be careful.”

Thereafter, every time we went anywhere before 3:00 PM, I slumped low in the seat of the van so no one would see me. When we went into the supermarket, I wished I could make myself invisible so that no one would see me and report me to a truant officer. I rehearsed what I would say if someone stopped us, “I do lessons every day, and it’s harder than regular school, it’s an accredited correspondence school, and the lessons only take a few hours without breaks for recess and gym class, and we’re only staying here, not living here! Please, please officer, don’t take me away!”

I did Calvert again for 5th grade and 7th grade, and I never encountered a truant officer. But the fear never left me, and by 7th grade my speech to the imaginary truant officer was well-rehearsed.

Comments

[Dolly Cummings]

I would love to know if you have any other photos from your time at Camp Bayou in Ruskin. Our non-profit, the Ruskin Community Development Foundation, Inc. manages the Camp Bayou Outdoor Learning Center, the current incarnation of the old RV park, in partnership with the ELAP program of the Hillsborough County Parks, Recreation and Conservation: www.campbayou.org . One of the future exhibits there will be a photo display of its campground past. Perhaps a little anecdote about your thoughts about the place...

[ron]

I quit school after 6th and studied on my own. Getting a easier education without bullies which is why I quit. I hated going, getting bossed about by some idiot from a college trying to brainwash me into thinking Im no good if I am not 'educated'. RUBBISH!