As a new homeschooling parent, Nicole Doyle did a lot of homework, attending conferences and trying to learn what made it work. It didn’t take long to realize there was a critical ingredient missing from many of these meetings. 

“Many of the conversations around homeschooling felt very political, and all I kept thinking was, ‘It really wasn’t a political decision for me to homeschool,’” she said. “It was more of, this didn’t fit my child, and so I just started something new.” Instead of feeling supported, Doyle felt “that I just didn’t have a place.” 

As a mother of Black and neurodivergent children with specific educational needs, Doyle started her homeschooling journey in 2013, pulling her four kids out of pre-K, first, fourth, and sixth grades. 

For her, homeschooling was a way to offer a flexible curriculum that met each of her children’s needs. One of her sons was so advanced in math that Doyle found herself staying up late at night to study the textbook ahead of him so that she could offer an accelerated learning pace. Another son has ADHD and is on the autism spectrum. Homeschooling allowed her to give him the targeted attention he needed.

“I have four kids who are all very different,” Doyle said. “I’ve used a lot of different curricula over the years to get to the end result.” 

The more she attended homeschool conferences and met with other parents, the more Doyle heard the same refrain: Parents often found themselves unsure of where to turn for support and yearned for a stronger sense of community.

“I wish I had a way to be in a space where I could see all the different offerings of diverse homeschool curriculum and maybe even partner with providers who understand my story, respect my culture, and are listening to what I desire as a parent,” Doyle said, paraphrasing the words of other parents.

Doyle started the Georgia Black Home Educators Network in 2022 to meet that need. The network acts as both a resource center and a community hub for homeschool educators.

It empowers parents by:

• Helping families navigate the balance between teaching and personal life.

• Providing curriculum models and practical tools.

• Organizing events that cultivate lasting relationships for parents and children alike.

It’s designed for any homeschool family struggling to access the tools and connections they need. 

“We equip parents as educators, encourage them to create community, energize the ecosystem of support, and then we empower them to be personal advocates for their children,” Doyle said, explaining that homeschooling depends on the power of community. “It is a mindset. It is a shift. It is you working slowly through your confidence to end up homeschooling those little people and understanding that if you do it in community, diligently, you’ll be able to do it well.”

A community where all are welcome

Getting started with homeschooling can be challenging for any family, but it’s especially complex for those navigating specific needs — whether supporting children on the autism spectrum, adopted or foster children, or children from Black and other minority communities. 

The Georgia Black Home Educators Network addresses those challenges. Over 325 people attended the first conference in January 2023. 

“We realized right after the conference that other people may have been taken aback by the name, because it’s the Black Family Homeschool Conference,” Doyle said. “And I was like, ‘Well, everybody was welcome.’ We were just issuing a call to tell people who look like us, ‘You can homeschool too.’ … The first question Black parents had was, ‘Can I really homeschool and [it] be legal?’”

To make it more welcoming, the organization changed the title of future gatherings to the Flourish Family Homeschool Conference.

At the conference, families can find practical advice that might not be obvious, like turning an IEP into a Student Education Plan; how to tailor homeschooling toward students who want to enter the military, go to college, or any other specific future goal; curriculum offerings that uplift a family’s ethnicity or heritage, such as Black or Native American history courses; and how to work with students who have never attended a traditional school versus those who have. 

No matter a family’s unique circumstances or goals, the central idea is to ensure families can make informed decisions before they exit or enter any school choice option.

“We decided to focus on the underserved and the under-resourced, whoever they may be,” Doyle said. “Fixed-budget families, grandparents as guardians, parents of neurodiverse students, single parents, and of course Black, brown, ethnically and culturally diverse students. We just wanted to make sure we focused on, ‘How can people do this well?’”

That also meant bridging a specific gap Doyle noticed many families struggling with. These days, it’s just not feasible to succeed as a homeschooler without at-home technology. But many under-resourced families can’t afford these tools. The Georgia Black Home Educators Network partnered with computer company Compudopt to distribute 231 laptops and 129 hotspots to families in need. 

“That was pivotal because so many parents said, ‘It’s hard to homeschool if I don’t have a device,’” Doyle said. 

Her experiences helping homeschooling families thrive made Doyle realize that society often “speaks of [homeschooling] in a ‘pulling yourself up by your bootstraps’ type of thing,” she said. But instead, she is often reminded of a Martín Luther King Jr. quote: “It’s all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.”

“We do have school choice,” Doyle said. “School choice is a freedom in many places, but it’s not true freedom until you give someone the resources to be able to take hold of that freedom. So we define agency as freedom plus the resources to make a well-informed decision for yourself.”

A huge piece of that is providing a community where parents can engage with and share ideas with other homeschool families. That can be critical in helping each other through uncertainties, obstacles, and questions along the homeschool journey. 

“You will know that you’re a homeschool parent’s friend when they tell you the truth about their curriculum,” Doyle said. “I found that some of the younger moms are scared to be judged for whatever curriculum they’re using. But when you have a more experienced mom, she’s like, ‘Let me tell you, this is what I’ve used for literature for this child, but I’m using something different for this child, he’s actually good at diagramming sentences.’ You just go through the whole process of letting people know there is no rule saying you have to use one type of curriculum.” 

Those conversations can help families understand just how many shapes “homeschooling” can take, from traditional to classical to Christian to unschooling models.

“In [traditional] school, the textbook you get is the textbook you get,” Doyle said. “But to be able to sit here in this space and actually research and experiment with pedagogy and different types and different practices.

The end goal of the network is to create a “Parent as Education Movement,” as Doyle called it, in which parents are empowered with the resources and knowledge they need to explore all options and choose what’s best for their family — whether that’s homeschooling or not. 

“We love our microschools,” Doyle said. “We love the options for private school and charter school and Montessori and all the things. … [The network] also helps you to say, ‘If this is homeschooling in the traditional sense, it may not be what we need.’ We want to give you some choices.”

“There’s no vacation Bible school program, no school program, no after-school outreach program that can do the work of the family when it comes to rearing a child,” she continued. “No matter what that family is and how they’re shaped, there’s no organization that can do that work. We believe that starts with the parent.” 

Why homeschool students don’t have to miss out on friends, fun, or opportunities

Besides support for parents, the Georgia Black Home Educators Network also provides important support to homeschooled youth, ensuring that they don’t miss out on key experiences that traditional schools provide. 

Chief among those experiences are social connections. The network puts on multiple events every May that bring to mind a classic school experience.

“We always say the best day of school is field day,” Doyle said. In several communities across the state, the network puts on events where dozens of kids can come together for games, friendly competition, and, most importantly, bonding with other homeschool students. 

The goal of successful homeschooling, in Doyle’s eyes, actually starts when homeschooling ends. The Georgia Black Home Educators Network is working to ensure that homeschooled students don’t miss out on opportunities for career development that other students may benefit from. The group has started a workforce development program in collaboration with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, the Employer Provided Innovation Challenges Initiative, in which students work together to design creative solutions to employer-sponsored problems across a variety of industries. 

“The employer issues a problem and a set of parameters around a problem,” Doyle said. “The kids come together in a team, and they try to solve these problems,” providing valuable hands-on work experience. 

Currently, students are working to design and implement business solutions for farmers, partnering with Georgia Life Sciences and the Blue Heron Urban Farm and Sanctuary to explore ways farmers can grow commodities and generate profit. 

Doyle pointed out that with the current state of the educational system, the number of students who need personalized education models fitted to their unique needs is only set to grow, making these services even more crucial. The Georgia Black Home Educators Network helps parents and communities serve a wide variety of learners.

Regardless of a family’s circumstances, the Georgia Black Home Educators Network is grounded in a core belief: Community is essential to uplifting one another and empowering both parents and students to share their unique gifts.

“When you are decentralizing schools, you’re breaking a lot of the preconceived notions you had about what happiness is,” Doyle said. “What are the cultural norms and constructs that keep you from asking, ‘What do I really want to do?’ And you’ll find that then you can really focus on where your zone of genius is as a human being and parent.”

Georgia Black Home Educators Network is supported by VELA, which as part of the Stand Together community supports everyday entrepreneurs who are boldly reimagining education.

Learn more about Stand Together's education efforts and explore ways you can partner with us.