Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

A mother’s journey to not leave her kids’ education behind has become a homeschooling movement.  

On Saturday, Emberglow in LaGrange will host Dr. Annise Mabry, award-winning author of the bestselling book, Educational Disobedience: A Mom Who Became A Movement.

Dr. Mabry’s book published in 2018 tells the story of her journey of how she had to homeschool her children because the schools in her area were not able to provide the resources needed to educate her two special needs children. Her oldest child suffers from mental illness and her youngest child is autistic.

“My oldest developed mental illness from being bullied so severely in school that it created a psychotic break. When I tried to get the district to allow my child to use hospital homebound services, I was told that hospital homebound services were only available for medically fragile children. The fact that my child had been bullied and had a psychotic break and attempted suicide 13 times in 12 months, didn’t qualify my child for receiving homebound services,” Mabry said.

Mabry said they tried working through it but every time her child would go back to school, it became a trigger and they had to go back to a mental health hospital for adolescents. 

Because of this, her youngest was missing a lot of time from school. An education coordinator at the hospital later told her as long as they had a doctor’s note, she didn’t need to worry. But she worried.

“I have a PhD in education, and I’m looking at the amount of time that my child is missing out of school, and I know that there’s a direct correlation between attendance and performance. So, regardless of whether or not the absences are going to be excused, my child was missing valuable instructional time,” Mabry said.

Mabry said it was her child who initially suggested homeschooling.

“Homeschooling is hard. I had all of these reasons in my head of why I couldn’t do it. I will always remember we were driving down the road, and my child was in the backseat of the car. They looked up at me and said, you have two PhDs and five master’s degrees. Why are you scared? And I said, ‘You know what? You’re right? So I told my child, ‘If we are going to be on a sinking ship, then I’m going to be the captain and we will go down together.’ That’s how everything started,” Mabry said.

She said her youngest child then came along and was diagnosed as autistic with written expression language disorder. At the time, none of the schools in Georgia served children with written expression language disorder. Some served autism, but in rural Georgia in 2012, none of them were serving students with her youngest child’s diagnoses at all, she said,

Teachers told her she needed to be okay with her child only being able to read and understand about 50 sight words.

“I said, ‘No, ma’am, not today, not tomorrow or the day after that,’” Mabry said. “What really was the straw that broke the camel’s back with my youngest son in public school was every other year we were playing Russian roulette with the teachers. One year we would get an incredible teacher who loved teaching, and she was phenomenal … then the next year we would get a horrible teacher who was just there to collect the paycheck.”

Mabry ended up homeschooling both of her children but needed to build a program for two children who were at very different academic levels. She said her oldest was academically brilliant but her youngest struggled to read. She began researching different curriculum providers and found one that she loved but when she called the provider to purchase the curriculum they told her they only sell it to nonprofit organizations and school districts.

“I did what any reasonable, normal parent would do. I picked up the phone, called my attorney, and said, ‘I need you to build me a nonprofit organization so that I can buy the curriculum to homeschool my child,’” Mabry said.

Mabry said she soon learned why they only sell the curriculum to schools and nonprofits. They only sell the curriculum in blocks of 25. Fortunately, now that she had a nonprofit, she was able to take advantage of the extra curriculum licenses and began providing them to other parents homeschooling their kids.

Mabry created the Tiers Free Academy Homeschool Cooperative after researching homeschooling laws and learned that she and others could help parents homeschool their kids.

In Georgia, if a parent has a high school diploma they can homeschool their child and sign off on their diploma at any age. If the parent doesn’t have a high school diploma, they can hire a tutor or partner with a homeschool cooperative, like the one Mabry created, to homeschool their child and then they sign on the diploma.

Now Mabry is helping countless parents homeschool and get their kids graduated.

“When I started doing graduation ceremonies, I did them in my living room in a full doctoral robe and everything with students marching into the living room in cap and gown. Now when we do graduation ceremonies, we do them all over Georgia, and we pack out auditoriums,” Mabry said.

And it all came from a single mother’s unwillingness to let her kid’s education slide.

Dr. Annise Mabry is bringing her highly anticipated book tour, The Sweet Taste of Change: A Life of Educational Disobedience to Emberglow, located at 2 E Lafayette Square, on Saturday, March 1 from 2 to 4 p.m.