The short answer is YES! But you might not like the long answer – let me show you how to do both.
Homeschooling for College Credit parents look for ways to bring college credit into a homeschool. Fun fact: even public or private school students can earn college credit! The not-so-fun fact is that if someone else determines the “high school” credit piece, you might be looking at a lot of added work for your teen. As an independent homeschool, you are awarding high school credit for college credit and your teen’s college classes replace high school ones in their “time slot” each day. In other words, a 12th-grade student isn’t doing 12th-grade English AND English 101; they are using English 101 to earn college credit and high school credit. An independent homeschool parent gets to determine how much /which college credit and high school credit your teen earns- ALWAYS.
But when you involve other schools or organizations in your high school process, you do give up control over what will qualify as high school credit. In the case of using an online academy, they have control over whether or not they’ll award high school credit for classes outside of their program.
A LOT of online private high schools heavily market to the homeschool population. They do this because it’s easier to offer perks to a homeschool family than it is to try and convince a public school family to leave school. I’ve even encountered two different homeschool families who “accidentally” enrolled in private school after thinking they were only enrolling in an online dual enrollment program. The marketing can be tricky, so you’ll want to know for sure what you’re committing to when you sign up for any type of online school.
Say you’d like to sign your teen up for a college class through your local community college. If you’re an independent homeschool family, your teen’s class will count as college credit and high school credit (assuming you want to award high school credit). If you’re in an online academy, your teen is earning college credit, but the academy may or may not recognize that course as *also* being worth high school credit. To be fair, it’s in a private school’s best financial interest to deny all outside credit and require your teen to take ($) classes directly with the high school. Outsourcing high school credit is very, very tricky and often backfires.
Resourceful Planning Tip: CLEP
In the situation where your student’s high school credit is determined by someone besides you, my advice is to have your teen take CLEP exams that line up with their current high school schedule. For instance, if your teen is studying United States History this year, you can have her study for both of the United States History CLEP exams and possibly even the Social Sciences & History CLEP. That set (3 exams) can yield up to 12 college credits without much extra work beyond their normal high school schedule.
Credit by exam is then held in an account with The College Board for 10 years (or until your teen goes to college), and there are no age or grade restrictions for taking CLEP exams. Since CLEP exams are currently free when you obtain a waiver through Modern States, any student in any type of school can rack up HUGE amounts of college credit even if they’re enrolled in an otherwise restrictive high school program.
