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Thank you for taking the time to watch this video, which I hope will help you to choose and identify a home ed program that will be a really good fit for your family. In this video, I’m going to suggest three criteria items that you can use to evaluate the home ed programs that you have to choose from, and there are many here in Alberta. Let me just list those three criteria items for you as we get started. The first is going to be the **philosophy** of the home ed program. The second is going to be the **supports** that the home ed program offers to you, and the third is going to be the **programs** or **specialties** that that home ed program may be able to offer to you.

I want to provide you not only their criteria but also some comments from our existing parents to let you know how THEE is matching up to those three criteria, because I can talk for a long time about how I think THEE can do things well, but I’d rather you hear from parents. So if you’d like to read along from the testimonials, you can download the testimonials page by clicking on the link that appears below this video. I’ll be referring to several of these testimonials to let you know what the parents are saying because, again, I can say that THEE is great and wave the THEE flag all day long, but I think it’d be more important that you hear from the parents who are experiencing these criteria in action.

### Philosophy

Let’s start with that first one, which is philosophy. What do I mean by philosophy? How does the home ed program that you’re looking at joining view you, the parent? Do they view you as the ultimate source of authority for your home ed program, or do they view you as just maybe an extension of a school where you’re doing school at home but you’re not in charge of the program? Hopefully, those programs you’re considering joining view you, the parent, as the authority. Here at THEE, we certainly view you as the authority. You answer the questions, and you get to determine the who, the what, the where, why, and how. We are here to support you in that, but at the end of the day, you own those decisions. You don’t ever have to ask us permission to do anything; that authority rests squarely with you.

So what do our parents say about our philosophy and how it works its way into how we support them? In the testimonials, you’ll see the word “freedom” come up quite often, sometimes just the single word “freedom” and other times “freedom” worked into the whole statement. So, “freedom” by itself as a stand-alone comment, “the freedom to choose our curriculum and styles of teaching,” “flexibility,” “the freedom I have to teach my boys at their pace,” and “the support to allow parents to be 100% in charge of their children’s education,” and so forth. So we have many testimonials here that back up the claim that I’m making that THEE views the parent as the authority in the entire home ed program. If that’s important to you, then we may be a good fit for you and your home ed program.

### Support

The next thing on the list of criteria items is the **support** that we provide to you, or the home ed program provides to you. I’ve broken the supports into a few specific ones. One would be **general support**, one is **facilitator support**, the other would be **communication support**, and then rounding out that list would be **systems support**.

Let’s look at the first support, which is just general in nature. By “general support,” I mean just how we generally interact with families in a very kind, helpful, friendly manner. How does the home ed program that you’re considering joining treat you, and how do they view you? Here at THEE, we know we exist because of our homeschooling, home educating parents, and we want to respect you. We want to respect your time and everything about your program. So what do our parents say about how we support them just in a general way? Well, one comment says, “Everyone seems nice.” Someone else says, “You guys know what you’re doing and super friendly staff when you call.” Another one says, “The helpful staff and service to get started in the school and at the beginning of the school year.” So another parent says, “The happy supportive staff.” So that’s how we want to support you just in general. We want to be encouraging, we want to be uplifting, we want to, yeah, just treat you with respect and help you with whatever it is that you’re asking about. So that’s how we support you, generally speaking.

The next way would be how we support you with your **facilitator**. Now there’s another section a little further down below in this video page that talks about facilitation and evaluation. So for more details on the facilitator role, please view those videos. But in this section of this video, I want to say that we support you by providing facilitators who are fellow home ed parents. So we want to support you in in your role in your responsibilities with providing to you a facilitator who’s been there and is likely, and sometimes is currently, home educating their own child. So your facilitator is not someone who is perhaps a classroom teacher for 90% of the workload and then has been given a home ed job responsibility for 10% of the time. That’s not what we do here. We know that the best way to support you is through our personal experience as well outside of the administrative things. It’s something we value. We want to be able to support you from a point of or from a perspective of experience, like we’ve been where you are. We’ve had the bad days, we know that not every day is great. We’ve had experience with different learning resources. We can suggest learning resources, we can suggest things, but it’s from our own experience. It’s not just theoretical, right? We’ve been there, we’ve lived through these experiences, and we want you to benefit from our experiences as home ed parents. So our facilitators are certified Alberta teachers, which is a requirement, but more importantly, they are fellow home educating parents.

So what do our parents say about the support that they received from their facilitator? I would say by far, comments about facilitators are the most common comments. I’ll read the very first one is a facilitator comment. The first one says, “I really loved our first meeting with our facilitator. She put me completely at ease that this was the best choice for us.” Later down it says, “Our facilitator, I love how there’s no pressure, and our facilitator has been wonderful. Any and all of my questions are always answered right away.” So it just, it goes on. “You know, the facilitator is great.” “Our facilitator, Jackie,” who’s one of our facilitators, “and that’s just all the person said when they when we asked them what’s the number one thing you like about THEE.” The first thing the parent says is the name of the family’s facilitator. So the reason why we can be so supportive is that we we’re talking to you as a fellow home ed parent, and because our philosophy, like that one mom said, “there’s no pressure,” and there isn’t any because we believe, going back to our philosophy which does permeate and affect how we operate, you have the authority. There’s no pressure. There’s more to say about that, but you’re getting support from a fellow home educating parent who’s also a teacher in this role. So that’s how we support you, generally, and then how we support you with the facilitator.

The third way we support you is with our **communication**. We have two forms of communication: one would be active and the other is passive. So the active way that we communicate with you is through phone calls, answering your phone messages, answering your email. Those are all active ways that we communicate with you. Our goal, we don’t always reach our goal, but our goal is to communicate with you within the same day or at least within 24 hours of getting your phone message or email. Again, we don’t always hit that goal, especially during the very busy time of, you know, the second half of August, all of September. That’s just a really, really busy time. So other than that period of time, we’re really, really good about getting back to you quickly. We make that a priority. Our parents will oftentimes comment about how how quick we are to get back to you and how we, not only is it quick, but it’s thorough. So we don’t want to just give you a minimum answer just to check off the list, you know, delete the email from our inbox. We really want to spend time answering your questions and giving you a full response. So you can you can find testimonials in in here that that attest to that. The second way that we communicate with you is passively, and that’s through our website and these videos. So I want to be transparent. I want to give you, the parent, as much information as possible. So that means a website that’s full of detail, the video is full of detail. I really want to communicate to you why we do things, how we do them, what’s required, the why. Oftentimes is regulation, it’s not always just an internal policy we’ve made. Some things are out of our hands, we have to do things a certain way. So just the goal is to make it all transparent. Definitely want to give you information about learning styles for your children, teaching methods, teaching strategies, learning resources. All of that information we want to make available to you either through the website, through webpages or video because I believe, again with the philosophy, you are in charge. You’re making those decisions, and we’re here to support you, so I want to be able to give as much information to you as possible in an organized manner. And throughout the testimonials, you’ll see parents talk about how informative the website is and how helpful these videos are.

The next way, the next criteria is how we support you is through our **systems**, and by systems, I mean the registration system all the way to our reimbursement systems. So what kind of systems, what kind of procedures do we have in place to support you? So starting from the very first day that you join us, which would be through our online registration process, all through the, you know, end of May when you’re submitting your your receipts for those those last reimbursements, we want to support you with systems that are that are intuitive, easy to use, and efficient. So you’ll find that our notification system, which is our registration system, is all online. You’ll get a parent account in our PowerSchool system. You can send us things through email, you know, scan an email, mail, fax even. So we just make our systems, our procedures, as easy to follow as possible. And again, throughout the testimonials, you’ll see comments from parents that talk about how easy our systems are. Like this one mom says, “I can’t pick just one thing. The staff are fantastic. They make the sign up process, which is registration, and reimbursement process, and everything in between easy and headache-free. The best decision we made for educating our three kids.” So that’s a great comment about our sign up, which is registration, and the reimbursement process. There are other videos in this video page that talk about both those things: the registration notification process and then also reimbursement. So there are many more videos that explain all the details, but I just want to let you know when you’re evaluating a home ed program, what kind of systems are there in place for you to use that supports you from an administrative standpoint.

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### Special Programs

So that’s the criteria for support. The next criteria is the **program**. What I call programs or special services, does the home ed program that you’re considering offer anything special? Are they known for anything special? At THEE, I would say we’re known for the homeschooling through high school services and supports that we offer. There is another section in this video page that talks about homeschooling through high school, but that’s something that we really focus on. One mom comments that “I appreciate how helpful the staff is. Natasha and Brett went out of their way to help out my oldest to achieve his diploma.” So we definitely go out of our way to help students earn course credits and the diploma as homeschooling as home education students. So please refer to the section further down on the video page if that’s a priority for you to learn how we do that. But other things that we offer here at THEE are a **shared responsibility program**. So that’s something that several other home ed programs offer. We’re not, I’m not saying we’re unique in that, but that is something that we offer, so if that’s important to you, you can check that off your list. And I do have a whole section of videos that talk about our shared responsibility program, so more details are there for you if you’d like to see that. But do ask the home ed program that you’re interested if there’s anything special that they offer, anything that they’re especially known for, that would be something good to ask.

So that’s it. Hopefully this video isn’t too long for you to watch or hasn’t been too long for you to watch. I do thank you for hanging in here to the very end. And just to recap, I’m recommending to you three criteria items for you to consider when you’re evaluating your the home ed program that you’ll join. Again, that’s the **philosophy**, the **supports**, and then **special programs** or **special services** that they provide. If you have any questions about anything that I’ve said, please contact me. My contact information will be below on this video, and certainly feel free to investigate further any of these topics that are on this virtual open house page. So again, thank you for watching this video.