Renton mom Laurie Battermann said that her family has benefited from participating in the Renton School District’s home schooling program.

“We love it,” she said. “It’s been a super good fit for our family. The kids really love it and they’re doing really, really well.”

Her three oldest children, of four, attend the H.O.M.E. program, or Home school Opportunities for Merging Education, at Spring Glen School in Renton. The program hosted its annual open house on June 3.

Battermann, along with other parents and families in the program, led tours and answered questions about the home school curriculum for interested parents. Although home schooling is more work for parents, Battermann said it’s well worth it.

“It is work, but it’s also a lot of fun because I kind of get to relearn things with my kids,” she said. “And we just enjoy being together as a family, so it’s worth it.”

Students in the program attend enrichment classes one or two days a week, covering a wide range of subjects such as fun with math and science, language arts, current events, gardening, drama and others. The rest of the time students are instructed by their parents or families at home, receiving five to six hours of homework per class, for the upperclassmen. The H.O.M.E. program is for kindergarten through 10th grade.

“(Enrollment) has actually gone up the last couple of years a little bit,” said Ginny Knox, director. “We really can’t take more than about 120 kids cap because we only have limited space here.”

The program has undergone state changes to documentation in recent years and today has right around 100 students at the school.

Parents cite all kinds of reasons for enrolling their children in this home school program, said the school director.

“That’s a very interesting question because there’s probably as many reasons as there are families,” said Knox.

When she first started the program in 1998, Knox assumed it was for religious reasons and parents who wanted to protect their kids from public schools as to why opt for home schooling. There are those reasons, she said, but also a host of others having nothing to do with religion or protection from public schools.

Presently at her school, Knox named students who sought out the program because of busy extracurricular activities such as acting and ice skating, which needed a more flexible school schedule.

“They (parents) have really specific things they want their students to learn and they want to kind of control what they’re (student’s) hearing,” said Knox. “But there are so many other reasons.”

Spring Glen’s H.O.M.E. program has four part-time, certificated teachers for the upper grades and certificated teachers, who weren’t hired as such, for some of the lower grade levels. Each student has a written student learning plan that staff monitors by meeting with families once a month. Each parent decides what kind of curriculum they want to use and what activities students are doing for their courses off-site.

Knox estimates that nearly 100 percent of her students go on to college via the Running Start program after they complete 10th grade. More than half go on to four-year colleges after they do their two years of Running Start, she said.

“It’s just a really welcoming place,” Knox said. “The parents have to stay onsite with their kids, if they’re under 12 years old. And so there’s tons of parents and kids all the time. That’s why calling it the H.O.M.E. program, some people call it their second home.”