[00:00:00] Brenda Murphy: Everyone is capable of being an incredible educator. For those of you that are homeschool educators, there’s some research that absolutely documents that the parents are the first and best educator a child can ever have. There is no one that can replace you.

[music]

[00:00:25] Gretchen Roe: Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to this episode of The Demme Learning Show. I am so excited to finally have this conversation with my sweet friend, Brenda Murphy. Brenda and I have known each other now for more than 10 years. We met each other in 2016 at an HSLDA event, and we fell in love. We just absolutely had so many things in common.

There are so many things that we want to talk to you about today because Brenda has been a pioneer in the homeschooling world. She’ll tell you a lot more of that today. Today, we’re going to talk about how to capitalize on unique abilities, particularly creating personalized education through a microschool. Brenda’s been doing this for a long time. She’ll have lots of things to say to you. Brenda, introduce yourself, and then we’ll get started in earnest.

[00:01:23] Brenda: Well, thank you, Gretchen. I’m so glad to be here today. I’ve really looked forward to this conversation because it’s really just sharing and giving a little window to a lot of people’s questions we’ve had before. I am Dr. Brenda Murphy. I have been in this field for many, many years, over 30. In fact, I think we were one of the first microschools that began.

In fact, when we started our microschool, there was not a term “microschool,” and we actually called ourselves “tiny schools” because at that time, one of my five sons was involved in the Tiny House Movement, which some people may know about. It just seemed, well, if you’re doing and living in tiny houses, maybe students could come to a tiny school, which is what we called it way back then. Yes, we’ve been doing this and loving it, all the way through.

[00:02:19] Gretchen: Brenda, how many students do you have in a typical year?

[00:02:23] Brenda: Well, in our microschool, and what’s so cool, wonderful about microschools is they are what the founder or their community needs. I have chosen to work in what I call “falling through the crack” kids, the kids who have attention issues but are really bright, and they don’t do well in traditional classrooms. We work with kids who’ve experienced trauma. We work with kids who are really bright but have health issues that disallow their ability to learn in a traditional way.

Typically, our max here, and I am in a little building, it’s a house we purchased about, my goodness, 25, 30 years ago, and converted into a small microschool, the most we’ve been able to have has been 20. That’s about what the facility will handle. Then we have ranged anywhere from 1 through 20, and it just depends on what the students need. For me, the beauty of what we’ve pioneered here at SailAway is that we have always fit what we do to the student. We don’t force any student to fit into what we do. We look at each student individually and create what is necessary for them to learn, achieve, and grow.

[00:03:47] Gretchen: Are all these children in the same classroom, or are you tailoring information so that maybe you have 2 children here and another 10 children across the hall?

[00:03:59] Brenda: It looks different every year. The answer is yes. It often will have that appeal. Sometimes there’s a child that needs special one-on-one in one particular area. That child will be taken away to work in that way or to learn in that way. I have to say I have a prejudice against the word “work.” That’s not what our kids are doing; what our kids are doing, I call them scholars, what our scholars do is they’re learning.

Learning has a different feel to it than work because when you’re learning, it’s like you’re getting in there in that soil, and you’re loosening that hard stuff and making it ready to plant seeds that are growing to something that’s interesting and fun, or is productive and ready for something you can harvest and eat. That’s an approach that we’ve always taken. We look at it as just an exciting opportunity of life rather than “Okay, get your work done.”

As a PhD, I’ll try not to get off too much into that, but the work that I did, my research while I was working in that doctoral, demonstrated that what we say, and I would hear this quite often, is “Get your work done. Do your work,” okay? I’m guilty of doing the same thing.

[00:05:36] Gretchen: I might be guilty as well of saying to my children that their academics were their job.

[00:05:42] Brenda: Well, that’s true, too. I’m not going to condemn that at all. What I noticed in the research is that when the students or the children, or the scholars thought that they were just engaging in learning, which was something that became part of who they were, rather than just getting this work done, getting the work done, often is just doing something for someone else.

It’s like if you were working in a manufacturing plant and you were just hammering out widgets of some sort. That is getting your work done. The payoff is good because you’re going to get a good paycheck, hopefully, at the end of the day. Part of the learning is, yes, you’re going to be able to get a reward at the end of it, but there’s something more, that when you do it for the joy and the delight and the wonder of learning and developing yourself.

We found over the years, because we’ve been doing this a long time, that some of the really reticent kids, when you showed them a different way that this thing called academics could and should be done, that their whole demeanor, their whole lives changed. Their whole world changed. In fact, we often would have parents who would bring their kids here from a very disruptive environment, wherever they were, that they often commented, it was, “Well, I don’t know so much about the academics, but our home is so much better.”

[00:07:21] Gretchen: Wow. Yes, because you’re meeting the needs of the whole child. I think your story is fascinating because you have a tenacity that is breathtaking. You are a mother of multiple children, and you started experiencing this when your children were young. Tell us a little bit of the history of what evolved to what you call SailAway Academy.

[00:07:51] Brenda: You’re right. I have five sons.

[00:07:55] Gretchen: Okay, let’s take a breath. That’s a lot of testosterone. [laughs]

[00:08:00] Brenda: Oh, it is. It is. It is a lot. My oldest son, like many firstborns were Mr. Perfect in everything. When he was young, I put him in preschool. He did great. He did everything he was supposed to do on time and well, and always the teacher’s pet. He’s several years older than my second son. When my oldest son was in school, and he went to public school initially, and had a wonderful experience in many ways, I would take my younger son to the classroom because, of course, I was a room mother.

I went to help. After interacting, the teacher was great, kindergartner, so my young son, one, two years old, was okay, and I didn’t have to get a babysitter. As she got to know my second son, she would take me aside. Finally, at the end of the year, after becoming a good friend, she said, “Do you mind if I give you a piece of advice?” I said, “Sure.” She said, “Please do not enroll him here at Pearsontown because I’ve met kids like him. I know by the time he’s in the second grade, what he’s going to have is a file about that thick that he will never be able to live down.”

[00:09:19] Gretchen: Wow.

[00:09:20] Brenda: I kind of knew that about him because even as an infant, when he was crawling around and exploring, we moved into a house, and we had a bookcase. I put the books on the shelf. He came over and started taking them off the shelf. I said, “No, Nathan, don’t do that.” The kid, he kept doing it, kept doing it. I looked over his daddy, the figure of authority, and so I’m like, “Give me some help here.”

Nathan was doing it. He looked over and caught Nathan’s eye. He says, “Nathan, no, do not do that,” or whatever he said. Nathan turned around, looked at him, looked at me, and pulled more books off the shelf and then looked at us. My husband and I looked at each other, and it was like, “Uh-oh.” We knew we’re in for a real thing.

[00:10:13] Gretchen: You’re in for a ride. [laughs]

[00:10:16] Brenda: I got him in a Mother’s Morning Out program. He was about three and a half, four. He was always excellent with his hand, always a little bit of problems in a preschool program. He didn’t want to glue little cotton balls on bunnies, that kind of thing. He thought that was bad, so that he’d love it when they’d go outside in a chain-link fence. Well, there were woods around that playground, and so he managed to compromise the lock on the chain-link fence.

He led two other little boys into the woods, and they found a rotten log. He turned it over, and they were exploring what was going on under the log. They weren’t doing anything bad, but it absolutely struck terror. It was moms, we worked for each other, and they said, “We’re sorry, he cannot come back.” [laughs] Here I had this bright, yes, independent-minded, a little bit hard-to-control-sometimes son that was kicked out of a school. I didn’t know what to do. Finally, that was in the time in the ’80s, just when homeschool was becoming more popular, or at least people heard about it.

[00:11:40] Gretchen: At least people had heard about it, but you were still on the fringe then.

[00:11:46] Brenda: Yes. He wanted me to homeschool. I said, “Absolutely not.” When that happened, I started looking at it. It was about the time that the First Mary Pride book came out. I got that, scoured it, had a really good friend who was really good at typing and all of that. She sent out dozens of letters to all the companies because there was nothing where we were. There was nothing. Virtually, there were some things, but that’s a longer story. I won’t tell that.

I looked at all the catalogs and found different approaches, and tried dozens of them with my son. One of the wonderful things was I thought, “Okay, he’s going to love this program because all my friends, maybe, there was a group of maybe 10 or 12 that were homeschooling.” He got it. We were working through it. I gave him a workbook with some things to do. He took it, and he looked at it, and he looked at it.

He finally picked up his pencil, but not like he had been taught. He picked it up like this, stabbed it in the floor, went, “Ksh-ksh,” and looked at me and grinned. I had to find an alternative, and that was hard back then. How do you find an alternative? I was able to do that. That led me down the path of alternative ways of learning to read and alternative ways of teaching math.

There was one woman at the homeschool fair. I was in North Carolina at the time. That was one of our commonalities was North Carolina. There weren’t that many people there, but I went to a preschool workshop. There was one piece of advice I still use that she gave because I was terrified. I didn’t know if I could teach because I didn’t know a lot, and it was hard to get information.

You had to go to the library. You had to do all of that. She said, whenever a child said, “Mom, what’s that all about?” and you don’t know, the best thing to do was say, “I don’t know. Let’s find out.” I had never heard that before. It’s pretty common, I think, now. That was the one thing. It gave me permission to get off of the playbook, off of the script, and go with where not only my head knew he needed to go academically, but where my heart told me to go as well.

[00:14:24] Gretchen: That’s so awesome.

[00:14:28] Brenda: That is how it all began.

[00:14:30] Gretchen: That is pretty amazing that you had the opportunity to do that. Look at the legacy now that you have laid. When did you first create a microschool?

[00:14:44] Brenda: It was about 1998.

[00:14:47] Gretchen: Wow, okay.

[00:14:47] Brenda: We predated. We predated.

[00:14:50] Gretchen: It wasn’t even called a microschool then because I don’t think that term was coined at that point.

[00:14:55] Brenda: No, it was not. To my knowledge, from my research, that term was coined about 2016 by Education Week because there were some of those initial people who were building schools. It was really a business proposition as much as a school, about 2008, 2009. Initially, they would say that a microschool was one that would have a different kind of a focus with– I think, if I remember correctly, it was up to 129 students. Now, I started finding that. I said, “That’s not a microschool, in my opinion.”

[00:15:39] Gretchen: No. When I first met you in 2016, you were still saying “tiny school” then as well.

[00:15:48] Brenda: Yes. It was 2018, I think, I met a woman. I’ve been so blessed to have many people to support and help me through. One of the chambers of commerce has helped me in many ways and put me with a mentor who was very successful as an education business entrepreneur. She is the one who discovered that term. She said, “Brenda, I know what you do, no one else is doing, but there evidently are some pockets. Ed Week has anointed it ‘microschool.’ Don’t try to buck the system; just adopt that as your own,” which is what we did.

The reason that we started was, after I’d been homeschooling for a while, I got very interested in alternative ways of teaching reading. I’ve always been interested in that and got certified in one of the multisensory methodologies and was teaching classes, mostly homeschool families, “How do you teach a little bit differently? When your child is not learning to read, what are some other ways?”

I got involved in that and started doing tutoring just in my little community here in rural East Tennessee, and started having students that were not just homeschool. Most of my first students were homeschool students. As an offshoot of teaching parents how to teach, they found they couldn’t and came to me and said, “I can’t teach my child. Would you mind having my child, my son, my daughter, join your four or five kids?”

I already had a school going. When you have four or five kids, my four younger ones, I homeschooled K-12. My older son was a hodgepodge of public school, private school, homeschool, public school. When we moved to a rural community, there were only three homeschool families in our county that I knew of. The other two were girls, and my son was very social. It was a wonderful environment, so he went to a public school, and then some of those.

Then I started just offering tutoring in the community. Some of the tutoring students’ parents approached me and said, “We’re not real happy with the next step for our child’s education. Can my child come to yours?” Then, at that time, I realized that what I was doing was more than an informal homeschool kind of thing and started [crosstalk]”

[00:18:39] Gretchen: Isn’t it fascinating, though, when you’re willing to learn and be out there on the tip end of the spear as far as learning, “How am I going to make this happen?” What bubbles up and how things come to you? Was Nathan the only challenge, or did you have younger boys who were–?

[00:19:01] Brenda: I had younger boys. One of them, a dear friend, is a school psychologist. I was concerned because one of them was really just not advancing. This was before I actually started the microschool. She did some assessments on several of my children. With that one, she didn’t give me any real specifics, but she said, “Keep him at home. Do not put him in a public school because whatever you do for him is going to be better.”

Because she knew that with some of his learning challenges and issues, that he appeared very smart and capable, but knew that what was going to be required of him in a classroom situation would tap into the things he was not strong and good at, and he would end up failing. Once I started teaching him, I recognized that for myself. I did, then, have a second school psychologist evaluate him and learn that there were visual processing issues and auditory processing issues.

Immediately, I could see where, and also because I was having tutoring students who had similar problems but were older, what had happened to them, so I knew that was a wonderful opportunity to keep him, as he would grow as he wanted to. May I share the end of that story?

[00:20:47] Gretchen: Absolutely. Please do.

[00:20:50] Brenda: The end of that story is he’s now an attorney and is the executive–

[00:20:55] Gretchen: I didn’t realize that’s the son we were talking about. That’s amazing.

[00:20:59] Brenda: Well, I have two attorneys now. None of these boys– I hope they don’t hear this. They were pretty average. [laughter] There wasn’t anything professional.

[00:21:11] Gretchen: There’s a difference between saying average in a negative context and saying average in– they hit the norms when you expected them to, and that’s what you’re saying.

[00:21:24] Brenda: Well, maybe; maybe not. I’ll just keep that. That’s a longer private conversation.

[00:21:27] Gretchen: Okay, Brenda, I tried to offer you an out.

[laughter]

[00:21:34] Brenda: That’s what I do see, is that I do see kids. That’s what we’ve been doing for all of these years, and that was the training ground with my own, was that you could see from psycho-educational assessments, which are absolutely powerful instruments to let you know where kids are capable and where they struggle. When you have that information, then you’re able to create your learning environment to meet those needs, and when you end up with resistance. Resistance in a child is not something where they’re trying to really make you go crazy or to ruin your day or anything else; that resistance is because they’re in trouble. They hurt.

[00:22:25] Gretchen: Yes. I’m so glad that you said this because you said this to me when we were sitting out in the beautiful weather on Boston Common last September. This is why I think this is so important. Parents often think that resistance equates with rebellion, and sometimes resistance is fear. “I don’t know what’s wrong. I’m scared, and so I’m going to put up a brave front by pushing back on you.”

[00:22:54] Brenda: Absolutely. You’ve said that in a very gentle way. Often, with the clients that we have here that have children that may end up in an alternative school because they’ve not been quite so gentle in that resistance, is that they’re very much like– I hate this comparison, but it’s really accurate. If you have an animal, a dog or a cat, that you have cornered, they’re not going to gently be there; they’re going to come out fighting because they’re going to protect themselves.

Very often, these combative kids, it’s that they are protecting themselves, and that’s just the human, natural way of doing it. That’s for us as the adult in the room, whether we’re the parent, the grandparent, the teacher, the tutor, the Sunday school teacher, the friend at the house where they’re playing, we’re the ones that need to be aware of that, and rather than storming in with equal force is to diffuse that, especially for smaller ones.

“What can we do? What is not right?” so that we are able to stop that progression. I remember one child that we had here in the microschool came to us. I think, golly, he was in high school. When we got his records from a Midwestern state where he had moved from, they sent everything. It must’ve cost him a fortune to send it. I had these pictures of this little fellow from the time he was in kindergarten, progressively.

Each year, you could see a change in his face from this bright, eager little boy that I know, because I knew him as an older teenager graduating from high school. You could see the opposite of progression, deep, whatever you want to call it, falling until he got in the eighth grade. You could just see this haggard face, discouraged, downtrodden.

At that point, is when that sweet little boy turned and became a different kind of an individual and ended up in trouble, ended up in juvenile court, ended up in all sorts of things. That was why their family moved down here. We worked with him so that we didn’t put him in a situation where he was with his back against the wall.

[00:25:36] Gretchen: I think often we find children that have had a less-than-stellar experience. I don’t want to make a blanket statement here, but it’s going to sound like a blanket statement. We often have situations where we’re putting adult expectations of behavior and outcomes on a child who’s not capable of providing that. Then, when the child fails to meet those expectations, we’re the ones who go, “Oh, see, look at that.” That’s just not fair.

[00:26:15] Brenda: It’s not, and here’s just a real tidbit. Again, this is where this background in these psychoeducational assessments– I know that’s a big word. It sounds scary. It sounds awful, but embedded in that is lots of information. When I’ve done those, there are the kids who have auditory processing problems, and the reality is, those kids often do not hear the words correctly.

[00:26:42] Gretchen: Correct, yes. My dyslexic son is the one who taught me that I needed to say to him, “What did you hear me say?” Because saying, “Did you hear what I said?” is argumentative in their minds. If I could say, “What did you hear me say?” then he could process and try and feel. Often, what he thought he heard me say was not what I had said.

[00:27:14] Brenda: Exactly. Exactly. Yes. Especially for the little kids, the really young children, if we don’t correct that and understand that, then it grows. Over time, I’ve had high school kids where I was working on that kind of a thing and realized that maybe they really did not and could not distinguish vowel sounds. If you cannot distinguish vowel sounds, you can make some really significant mistakes, and that causes you to respond in a way that–

[00:27:51] Gretchen: Well, the other thing I think that’s important, Brenda, and this comes from the conversation we had back in September, is you said educational assessments give you information, but you shouldn’t take that information as a limitation; you should take it as a tool to be able to know how to address that.

[00:28:13] Brenda: Did I really say that?

[00:28:14] Gretchen: You did say that. You did.

[00:28:16] Brenda: That’s really brilliant.

[laughter]

[00:28:18] Gretchen: I actually got my book out from our conversation in September. If you’ll remember, you were talking, and I was busily writing. I went back to that yesterday, last night. Before I went to bed, I thought, I need to know what the things were that you said so that we could revisit some of those things.

[00:28:38] Brenda: Yes, absolutely.

[00:28:39] Gretchen: I wanted you to talk about this because I often encounter parents that once they’ve gotten a diagnosis, they see that as a limitation, and I don’t want parents to see that that way.

[00:28:52] Brenda: Thank you so much because here at SailAway, we do not give a diagnosis or a label. We do not. We look at those assessments. It is a tool. It’s a piece of information to guide us in how to change the trajectory of an individual’s life, and that’s what we look at. Actually, when someone has that label, they will walk in it. They will walk in it. Often, children, they don’t see themselves in that way at all. They’re not really aware of that.

If we don’t broadcast that or shout that with a megaphone, they’re not going to know. The reality, and I’ve just seen it for these 30 years, so many of the children that come to us with these issues, that if you know what you’re doing, by the time they graduate, they no longer wear that label.

[00:29:58] Gretchen: Right. Exactly. I had the privilege this past weekend of having a mom come up to me with her phone. Her daughter had recorded a video. I had met this family a year previous, and I had not met the daughter; I’d only met the mom. Long story short, this child had binocular vision dysfunction.

[00:30:23] Brenda: Oh, yes?

[00:30:25] Gretchen: I had a conversation with mom. It hadn’t even occurred to her. What mom did not realize is her daughter had reached the point of frustration of believing she wasn’t smart. Here we are a year later, mom heard me, sought intervention for her daughter, and her daughter– she was five grade levels behind mathematically, and is now almost at grade level in one year. She’s some up-

[00:30:54] Brenda: That’s enormous progress there.

[00:30:55] Gretchen: -five grade levels. She sent a video to me just to say thank you. She said, “I appreciate the fact that you told my mom that there was an impediment to my learning, and we needed to figure out what it was.” She said, “You helped me realize I’m not stupid.”

[00:31:16] Brenda: Yes. That triggers something that happened many years ago, because often with our families, we also do kind of an intake summary. “Does your child do this or do that, whatever?” This particular one, and this is rare happening, the child was actually in the room, but at a different part, totally engaged in something different. A couple of the questions were about vision. “Does your child see double? Do they ever complain about blurring?”

I think they were two sisters. It was the mother and her sister were there, and they had both been teaching them. They said no, and from the opposite end of the room, we heard this little boy say, “Yes.”

[00:32:02] Gretchen: [laughs] My goodness.

[00:32:04] Brenda: He was 10, something like that. He said he was always seeing double.

[00:32:11] Gretchen: Wow.

[00:32:12] Brenda: If you are seeing double-

[00:32:14] Gretchen: You can’t sort the information.

[00:32:15] Brenda: -you can’t learn. You can’t learn. Everything you’re doing is focused so you can try to figure out what’s in front of you. They got help. They got some vision therapy, and he started achieving. There’s so many things. That story is legion that I’m still surprised that there’s so few people that really recognize that vision. Speaking of vision, if I may go down this, going and seeing the eye chart, and being able to see the letters, is not all there is to vision.

[00:32:55] Gretchen: Correct.

[00:32:55] Brenda: If you look at the chart, that is acuity. Can your eyes literally see it? However, there’s a second part to vision, which is perception, which is the way that your eyes work together and the way that your eyes communicate neurologically to the centers in your brain that control vision. Sometimes there’s probably about 26 different unique ways that that can fall apart in vision, and equally so in auditory.

There are a lot of things that can happen with learning for a really bright child to trip them up and keep them from learning in the way that we consider achievement. Then we can correct those, and they can become more typical.

[00:33:51] Gretchen: Well, I think the other thing that I said to you last September is that I am often confronting parents who say, “Well, my child’s just kind of lazy.” I said to you, there’s no such thing as a lazy child, and you just about jumped across the table at me and said, “Yes, that’s true. That’s not true.” Tell us a little bit, how do you connect with a child when maybe the parents or those who have been around them have had the misperception that that student might be lazy?

[00:34:26] Brenda: Or not paying attention?

[00:34:27] Gretchen: Or not paying attention, yes.

[00:34:29] Brenda: That’s all of those things. Basically, what I’ve discovered is, some of those children work harder than any other child, and I’ll go back to my own personal experience. It’s always hard to share this story because I was so wrong. We have always read books together, and especially when the kids were little, before they got their own reading skills, we read. From the time they were infants, almost, we read books.

We read some of the Little House series, Little House on the Prairie. One of those scenes was, they had great education in those little one-room schools. There was one where the teacher said that they would take the ruler when the child wasn’t paying attention, was lazy, wasn’t doing the work, and always getting it wrong. It meant they weren’t taking– They would always give them either the little whack on the leg or the thing.

I thought, “Well, they really knew what they were doing back there.” One of my sons was exactly that way, and I am ashamed to say that I actually applied that. Then, when I found out that there were real issues, that after about three minutes on task, visually, his brain would shut down. How can you do anything when your brain is not working for you?

[00:35:54] Gretchen: Exactly. That is really true.

[00:35:56] Brenda: There was not anything that he was trying to do. It wasn’t that he wasn’t wanting to do because I later discovered he tried harder than anybody. When a child appears to be lazy, not trying, that’s the child you really have to look at because there is something going on, because there’s nobody who doesn’t want to do their best. There is no one. No one doesn’t want to do the best that they are.

It becomes what I call a learned behavior, and sometimes that starts when children are really little, unfortunately, because these issues, most of them, they’re born with. It’s whatever happens. It’s just the genetic roulette wheel. When you start ascribing those kinds of characteristics to a two or three-year-old, they’re going to start believing what you tell them. If you say, “You’re lazy, you’re not trying,” they’re going to believe you. Sometimes you have to come alongside that child.

[00:37:09] Gretchen: Fortunately, we have the ability to do the diagnostics to come alongside that child. My husband is an acute dyslexic, but he was educated in the ’70s.

[00:37:20] Brenda: Oh, I see.

[00:37:20] Gretchen: He was labeled as lazy and unmotivated because he was exhausted all the time trying to stay focused academically. Ironically, he’s probably one of the smartest people I’ve ever known, but you can’t measure his intelligence in the same way because the words betray him on a page.

[00:37:47] Brenda: Absolutely. You know what’s interesting in that, that just triggers for us because we’ve dealt with some very low-functioning kids as well as those that are very capable. There is one test that is geared that can show ability that is a non-verbal. You do not have to speak in order to show what you know. Oftentimes, especially with the kids that do have some severe areas within their brain that have been damaged, the brain is an incredibly miraculous organ and heals itself in ways that are unbelievable, that it can go in there and work and make another part of the brain operate. If that one’s not working, it will grow into another part.

[00:38:47] Gretchen: Brenda, I know the answer to this question, but I’m setting you up.

[00:38:55] Brenda: Yes, okay.

[00:38:55] Gretchen: You offer these educational diagnostics to families who are not necessarily enrolled in your microschool.

[00:39:02] Brenda: Absolutely.

[00:39:02] Gretchen: If I had a family who had a child and they’re just trying to figure out what on earth is going on, you would have the ability to come alongside that family and help them create some clearer pictures, correct?

[00:39:13] Brenda: Yes, we do. Absolutely. We have a licensed school psychologist that we’ve been working with for almost 15 years, 16 years. We actually had one child who came, did the assessments, and were really upset that the next day, when I was talking to parents, that he wasn’t going to do another assessment.

[laughter]

[00:39:37] Gretchen: Well, apparently then he enjoyed your company.

[00:39:39] Brenda: Oh, he is wonderful, and yes, and we do that. We look at it in a way that a lot of others don’t. When people come to us, it’s private, which means we do not give those reports to anyone. Families have the only copy unless they give us written permission to share it, give us a legal release to share it with anyone else. That way, they can choose to share it or choose to not share it. That gives them, especially when the children are younger, and we can work them out of those issues so that by the time they get to high school or going into college, they can go without having to have any modifications.

[00:40:26] Gretchen: In the closing moments, what would you want parents to take away from this conversation?

[00:40:33] Brenda: Everyone is capable of being an incredible educator. For those of you that are homeschool educators, there’s some research that absolutely documents that the parents are the first and best educator a child can ever have. There is no one that can replace you.

[00:40:53] Gretchen: I love that, no one that can replace you.

[00:40:56] Brenda: Absolutely not.

[00:40:58] Gretchen: Couldn’t say it any better. Brenda, thank you so much for taking time away. We’re in the middle of your school day, but you felt this was important enough to step away and spend an hour with me. When you go back to the classroom, would you please thank your students for allowing you to come share with us so that we can share this message to a wider audience, because I think it’s wildly important.

I think our audience today can see why I wanted so much to have this conversation with Brenda. I want to thank all of our audience for allowing us to come into your room, wherever you are, your classroom, your homeroom, your home, your living room, and allow us to come alongside you in your educational journey. We don’t take this lightly. It’s my very great privilege to find folks like Brenda to come and share with you because I think it makes your journey richer. Brenda, thanks so much for everything. I appreciate it. I’ll look forward to our talking again soon.

[00:41:56] Brenda: Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a joy. Thank you.

[00:41:59] Gretchen: All right. Take care. Bye-bye.

[00:42:00] Brenda: You too. Bye-bye.