Minnesota homeschooling leaped during COVID and counts continue to climb
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Nancy Bjorkman remembers her surprise one day in March 2020 when she pulled up to her Elk River homeschooling supplies business to find a line of mothers waiting to get in.
It was an odd scene, but the times were odd and uncertain. Gov. Tim Walz had ordered Minnesota public school buildings closed to try and slow the spread of COVID-19. The line outside Bjorkman’s shop, Heppner’s Legacy, told her change was in the air.
“We weren’t yet open that day, but we had a whole bunch of moms standing outside, listening to the governor’s announcement, because they’re like, ‘Oh my goodness, what are we going to do?’” Bjorkman recalled. “After that day, it just never stopped.”
Five years later, data confirms what Bjorkman glimpsed that day outside her store. The number of Minnesota families homeschooling their children jumped from fewer than 20,000 in 2020 to more than 30,000 in the pandemic.
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Those numbers dipped when schools resumed in-person learning, but this year homeschooling counts are up by 2,000 students.
Public schools remain the most popular choice for Minnesota families. Nearly 90 percent of K-12 students statewide attend public schools; 7 percent attend private institutions. Less than 4 percent are registered homeschoolers.
Still, since 2023 the number of homeschool students is up 18 percent while the number of public and private school students has grown less than 1 percent.
“Since COVID, more and more people are exploring it, because it’s more and more common, right?” Bjorkman said. “Because the trend is up, and it’s not, you know, totally weird anymore. Everybody’s got a neighbor who’s homeschooling.”
‘The community has changed’
The homeschool movement in Minnesota has many of its roots in conservative Christianity. MACHE, the Minnesota Association of Christian Home Educators, has been around since 1983 and exists, as its website explains, to “come alongside parents as they ‘teach diligently’ and pass on a Judeo-Christian heritage to the next generation.”
For Jamie Lundell, who lives in Bemidji with her husband and seven children, her Christian faith is a big part of the reason she chose to homeschool.
“I want to teach them a biblical worldview,” Lundell said. “And I don’t believe what we’re teaching as fact in school is correct either.”
Beyond her desire to teach her children about creationism, she likes having her kids at home with her and relying on family and friends for learning and community. “Our house is like a revolving door. I always have kids in and out. We babysit extra kids. We have people over all the time.”
When Lundell first started homeschooling her oldest, who’s now 11, she didn’t know many other families who’d made the choice she had. Bemidji has 469 registered homeschool students now, according to state data.
“The community has changed dramatically,” Lundell said. “More (homeschool) co-ops are opening. We all have waiting lists, so we’re probably gonna have to split again.”
Busy parents found they could handle homeschooling, she added. “It’s like, ‘Oh, we own our own business, we can do math when we’re placing orders, we can do math when we’re baking. It seems like since COVID, it gave people the confidence that, yes, I can keep my own kids home, and yes, I can actually do a really dang good job by just looking at life as school.”
Not everyone who homeschools does so for religious reasons, Bjorkman noted.
“You have this stereotype of the Christian conservative family who chooses to homeschool for those kinds of reasons. That’s really where the trend began in the modern homeschooling movement,” Bjorkman said. “I’ve seen it shift a lot. It’s diversified a lot in the demographics of who’s choosing to homeschool. I love that it’s become more diverse in that way.”
‘We kind of just never went back’
Jamie Wagner had planned to send her daughter to public school in kindergarten, but that changed when the pandemic hit.
“They were trying to do school over Zoom or keep the kids apart, and I just figured there’s got to be a better way, and I’m already home with them. So we decided for the following school year that we would home school her because she was preschool age,” Wagner said.
“We fell in love with it, and it’s been such a joy to us, and we kind of just never went back.”
Wagner, who lives in New Prague, said she’s not religious and that it took some work to find a homeschool curriculum or homeschool friends that weren’t focused on Christianity. She has a circle of friends now from a variety of backgrounds. Online searches have helped her select secular schoolwork that meets her kids’ needs.
“It takes a little bit of digging,” Wagner said. “But there’s so much out there right now. It’s a completely different time than, you know, 20 years ago, when every homeschooler I knew was religious.”
Wagner admits there are sometimes hard days homeschooling, but said she loves the opportunities it’s given her to spend more time with her kids. Her daughter is testing a grade ahead of her peers but still has plenty of time to get up from her desk in the middle of the day to play outside or take other breaks.
“I don’t think it’s for everybody, and I understand how lucky I am to have a husband who can help support us mostly while I stay home with our kiddos,” Wagner said. “I’m not sure that I would take that route if I were a single parent. So I do see, yeah, I realize it’s a privilege, but I do also make quite a few sacrifices to make sure that we can still homeschool our kids.”
In Elk River, along with selling books, microscopes and dissection kits, Bjorkman offers walk-in consultations and leads seminars for families trying to figure out the legal requirements and resources needed to educate their children.
Families drive for hours, sometimes from multiple states, to visit her shop in-person. She hears many reasons why parents decide to pull their students from public or private school classrooms.
Bjorkman said she finds parents are often dissatisfied with something in their child’s school — a concern with academics or their child’s mental health. In many cases, parents are worried the curriculum won’t fit their worldview.
“A lot of (the concern) is content-based, where they have a more conservative view and want to be able to help their children to follow the values that they hold as a family,” Bjorkman said, noting that parents seem to have become “more reactionary” since the pandemic.
When Bjorkman encounters families wanting to pull their children from public school because of dissatisfaction with content or a bad experience in a classroom, she tries to get them to think it through.
“We give every one of them a home homework assignment … an opportunity to step back as parents and consider, ‘What are my actual parenting goals?’” Bjorkman said. When they look at the choices, “often they end up choosing to homeschool for a positive reason, because they get to shoot for those goals.
Craig Helmstetter leads the APM Research Lab, a sister organization of MPR News focusing on data journalism and visualizations.
