It’s the third week that public school buildings across the nation have been closed, and many parents fear their children are falling behind as some districts struggle to keep up via the internet.
Amid the unprecedented disruption brought by the coronavirus pandemic, actress Sam Sorbo has a solution.
Sorbo – who educates her three children at home with her husband, actor Kevin Sorbo – is partnering with the Texas Home School Coalition on a website called CoronaVirusHomeschooling.com
It’s described as the first phase of an emergency COVID-19 response plan to offer Americans free home-education resources.
New materials are being rolled out every week for children of all ages.
On March 24, the site debuted a daily home-education lesson plan for Kindergarten through the 5th grade.
The home page asks: “Schooling from home during the coronavirus?
DON’T WORRY, YOU’VE GOT THIS! We’ve schooled from home for decades, so we know the ropes. Here are a few steps that will help. Just take them one at a time.”
There’s also a Facebook community and information about homeschooling laws in each state.
Sorbo said the response has been “fantastic,” noting one happy parent wrote from Greece.
“People love the site,” she told WND in an interview. “It’s really easy to navigate and it’s free.
“It’s soup to nuts; it’s like, ‘Here you go. This is how you do it.’ Which is what people crave.”
Parents, she said, will discover they can take the lead in educating their children and then wonder, “Oh my gosh, what was I afraid of?”
Sorbo sees the possibility of a major spike in homeschooling in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.
“I’m very hopeful that this fall, we’re going to have a bunch of parents who will say, ‘I’m not sending my kid back into that institution,'” she told WND.
She wonders why shows like ABC’s “The View” aren’t talking about homeschooling at a time when schools have shut down.
“I think they might be afraid that the parents would succeed,” she said.
Work, as well as education, has been a family affair for the Sorbos. In the 2017 film “Let There Be Light,” Kevin and Sam played a husband and wife, and their two sons, Braeden and Shane, played the couple’s children. Sam also was a co-writer of the film.
The Sorbos met on the set of the television series “Hercules: The Legendary Journeys.” Kevin, who starred as Hercules, also had the lead in the television series “Andromeda.” And he’s known for his lead role in the film “God’s Not Dead.”
She currently hosts a daily podcast, “The Sam Sorbo Show.”
School is not necessarily an education
Sorbo, who’s been a speaker and writer on homeschooling for almost a decade, said the Texas Home School Coalition reached out to her to help promote the website.
The author of “They’re Your Kids: An Inspirational Journey from Self-Doubter to Home School Advocate,” she has been producing daily videos on homeschooling since the COVID-19 lockdown began.
Her aim is “to encourage parents to embrace the opportunity they are being giving to have a stronger relationship, a stronger bond with their children as a family.”
“It’s an uphill battle, though, because parents are afraid,” she said.
Sorbo believes some parents are reluctant to try homeschooling “because they been taught that they’re incable of doing anything that they haven’t been formally instructed on by a teacher at a black board.”
“They think education is school, but it’s not,” she said.
A better name for homeschooling, Sorbo believes, is home education.
“School is not necessarily an education,” she said. “We have kids graduating schools that don’t read.”
Sorbo urges parents to seize the hour.
“Maybe this is your golden moment to rethink the future of your children and your family,” she said.
“And what a blessing that would be.”
