A major think tank recently published a report highlighting a Helena homeschooling cooperative that’s so popular it’s getting overcrowded, which got me thinking about this fast-growing educational alternative and how it’s impacting Montana.
Did you know that the number of homeschooled kids in Jefferson County has nearly doubled in recent years? It’s true, from just 78 in 2020 to 143 today, according to state education data. Over the same period, Lewis & Clark County saw a more modest but still strong increase of about 28%, up to nearly 600 students.
This echoes national trends. The rate of homeschooling in the U.S. has doubled in the past quarter-century, from 1.7% of K-12 students in 1999 to 3.4% in 2023, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. And uptake may be accelerating: Forbes last year asserted that the number of homeschooled U.S. students had leapt from 2.5 million in 2019 to 4 million. In Montana, more than 9% of students are homeschooled, behind only Alaska and Tennessee, according to Johns Hopkins research, and the share continues to increase.
