Rhonda Helmreich: 00:00:00.000
You have to find people that are as either– if you’re going to be an academic co-op, are as seriously academic as you are, right? That’s a good question. What is it? Where is it they’re going with their kids? What is the end product desire that they have? And what we’ve always said is it’s not that we’re making children so that they’re all going to go to college and get their doctorate. That’s not it. It’s that we want to educate them well. So whatever it is they decide they want to do or be, they are prepared.

Gretchen Roe: 00:00:39.706
Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to this episode of The Demme Learning Show. This is Gretchen Roe, and I am so delighted to have the opportunity to spend time with my friend Rhonda Helmreich. Rhonda and I know each other because we met on the floor of a conference. She was working for Sonlight. I was working for Demme Learning. And it’s always a joy to see her and getting to spend a little bit of time and getting her story about her starting a group and what might be the benefits for you in starting a group is going to be amazing. The title for us today is Unleash Powerful Bonds: Your Guide to Small Group Success. And both of us, I think, can testify to how a homeschool group is a wonderful place to grow the sphere of influence that you have for your children. So I’m going to let Rhonda introduce yourself.

Rhonda Helmreich: 00:01:34.854
I am the mama of five kids, and I have almost 12 grandchildren. I have one more on the way due in April. So that’s fun too. And I started homeschooling when my oldest daughter, who is now 40, was about 12. And to full disclosure, I was at some point a public school teacher for about seven years. And for elementary age, and then I came home, my own kid, when he was a third grader, brought him home my second to oldest. And I never looked back, honestly. Could get so much more done. And then the younger three were never in public school or private school or anything. The older two had been in public school and private school. And we just took off and loved it.

Gretchen Roe: 00:02:27.161
But Rhonda, why did you make that decision? Because I think it’s always helpful for families to hear that.

Rhonda Helmreich: 00:02:33.379
Well, because I had a child who was outside of the norm, basically. I did everything I could to support the classroom because I got into a situation eventually where I could teach– the public school actually let me contract share. And I was going into my son’s classroom and I was supporting the teacher and helping them because they were kind of a newbie. And basically, my son is freakishly brilliant. And he just needed more. And so I told him, you did nothing to earn– here’s me. I’m such a nice mom. You did nothing to earn that brain. You just have it. So you better use it well, anyway.

Gretchen Roe: 00:03:18.106
I think we’ve had this conversation once before. I actually had a self-same journey. My second child, eldest daughter, number two is a boy. And his kindergarten teacher said, “You’re going to have to homeschool him.” And I was like, “Oh, no, no.” I was homeschooling my eldest daughter, but only to get her to memorize her multiplication tables. And the kindergarten teacher said, nope, anybody who can read the Chronicles of Narnia as a kindergartener and explained the allegorical references for me in a public classroom. So we have a similar journey in that way.

Rhonda Helmreich: 00:03:53.974
Yes, that is exactly. Yes, that’s it.

Gretchen Roe: 00:03:57.736

And we never looked back. Four of of our six were homeschooled all the way through high school. And then number five was homeschooled until he was a sophomore in high school. And at his request, he went to public school. And then the youngest was homeschooled to middle school. So I wouldn’t have traded that journey, but you took a different tack in your journey than I did. You decided to found a group. So tell me about that experience. How did you decide to do that?

Rhonda Helmreich: 00:04:26.100
Well, I did it because my oldest was 14. And I had decided to try to get a little bit of help because by 14, you’re getting to some heavy-duty sciences and some heavy-duty things and kind of labs, things like that. And I just didn’t feel equipped. Well, I could have done it. It just felt like a lot when I had three littles also. So I needed some extra help. So I was in a mom and tots room at another well-established co-op, and I met a friend, and we just got to know each other there. And she also had a 14-year-old daughter. And she was like, “You know, I’ve kind of decided that what we might be able to do to help ourselves here is we could teach the content for the science and then meet together once a week and do the science experiments so that they actually get done.” So it was really– that was such a neat thing. So then what we would do is– she was really actually far more science-y than me. And we kind of made an all groups class for the youngers. And we would just do kind of fun extension type activities or do something around a book or just arts and crafts, whatever. Things that you do want to do with your children. But sometimes you just feel so busy, you can’t. And it was like, it gave us the permission and the time to meet the needs of my particular situation. And maybe other people have this too, where I’ve got a 14-year-old and a two-year-old. That was the span.

Gretchen Roe: 00:06:09.214
So the two of you decided to start this adventure. How did you find the others who got to come along?

Rhonda Helmreich: 00:06:14.953
The others that came along kind of the same way. It was like, “Oh, I know somebody.” Or, “Oh, I have this friend and her kids are–” or some such thing. And we kind of were a little particular about who we let in, to be honest, because you need to make sure that you have somebody who’s like-minded, maybe kind of the same kind of educational goals, maybe the same kind of thought process and what they want for their littles, and really what is their outcome that they’re wanting for their kids. And so that was probably a lot of it, that we just made sure that we had some like-minded people. And as far as finding– I don’t know. I’m telling you what– I remember during those years when we first started, there were about five, six of us eventually got together. So originally, we would meet in a home. And then we got a little bit bigger. And so we were able to get one of the ladies’ church. And we would meet there. And so we could have a nursery area where we would take turns, actually, taking care of the littles. And then we had kind of a mid-age kind of elementary– think elementary school, because we had that group too. And then we would do– actually, we did the same thing. We would teach content, science. We were all on the same science, and then we would do the science experiments together. And then I remember we started having a little writing class. We decided that would be fun. And I remember we would have Authors Day, and I would– okay, this is terrible. I would stack chairs, put a kid on whoever the author was of the week. I would put them on the chairs, and then they could read their story that they had illustrated to everybody, like their author moment. It was like they were king or queen. I don’t know. I don’t know why I did that, but I did it. [laughter] I’m sure it was completely unsafe, but I did it.

Gretchen Roe: 00:08:14.650
Sometimes I think we have moved into an era that what we define as unsafe, our parents wouldn’t have even looked at. And most of us raising our kids wouldn’t have looked at it, and to be a certain amount of risk. And as a child, you need to learn to take risk or you’re afraid to do things, so.

Rhonda Helmreich: 00:08:37.709
Right. So there we were. We had Author’s Day on stack chairs because it was lots of fun. And they could climb up. It was really fun.

Gretchen Roe: 00:08:46.979
That’s great. So you started with science, but then you added a writing curricula. And then, did it evolve from there?

Rhonda Helmreich: 00:08:54.709
It really did. And that’s one thing that I think is kind of cool. We did it around what our needs were. In a way, it was– well, not in a way. Our high schoolers were really driving what it was we wanted. That’s what we did because it was all about, what do we need support in? Right? And so then some of the moms were like, I am completely lost with– and you had mentioned that I had done Sonlight, but I’m completely lost doing upper-level Sonlight curriculum. Well, if you think about it, doing American literature, in high school, this is the perfect time to be hearing other ideas than just your mommy’s ideas, and to have discussion, and to be learning to listen to somebody’s other ideas and gel with your own and get that discussion and things going. So that’s really why– then we were like, maybe we need a upper-level literature class. So that’s what we would do. And then for the youngers, we just kept it simple and fun, like I said, crafts or writing. I think we did do the science experiments. And again, this was all driven by our needs that we felt we needed for our own children.

Gretchen Roe: 00:10:15.100
Interesting. And so when you were as saying these needs, was that an annual event, or were you adjusting by semester, or?

Rhonda Helmreich: 00:10:26.536
It was probably an annual event, I think, because we were using a Sonlight curriculum, then we had like a year’s worth or whatever. And we tended toward– and this wouldn’t be a way you would have to do it. It’s just what we did. We did 32 weeks and got 36 weeks done in the 32. That’s how we did it. And then, we would just adjust it. And we would only meet one day a week. So the kids really got the idea of how to learn. This is, I think, one of the biggest benefits is that our kids learned how to prepare– you’re only meeting once a week for content, but you’re doing all the work and getting all that time management skills in high school, right? And eventually, we lowered it down to junior high, too, but we pretty much kept it junior high, high school driven.

Gretchen Roe: 00:11:25.194
And were all of your instructors-parents who had children in the co-op, or?

Rhonda Helmreich: 00:11:29.402
Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yep.

Gretchen Roe: 00:11:33.928
And you mentioned earlier about finding like-minded parents. What was it like to go out and find people to join your tribe?

Rhonda Helmreich: 00:11:44.303
I think it was just from other– to be honest, maybe like some other, there were big kind of like field trip type of homeschool groups in our area for a whole city, citywide type of thing. And they weren’t really a teaching– they didn’t really have a teaching co-op, but just more cooperative stuff like that. And so we had met people, and you start talking to people and also from our church, some of the gals– it wasn’t me personally, but some of them had some friends at their church who were also homeschoolers. They happened to go to a church that was full of a lot of homeschools.

Gretchen Roe: 00:12:21.905
Did you ultimately decide– did everybody share the financial burden? Or how did you decide financially because this is not free to do this? It’s an investment of your time, and there are costs there. So how did you choose to parse that?

Rhonda Helmreich: 00:12:39.579
So at first when we were just like five to seven families, there really weren’t costs. We were doing in at home and just our own curriculum. Eventually, when we got to the point where we needed to move to a church, then we had something called a family fee. And we kept it as low as possible, and that would be for the year. And we just kind of figured out financially what that would be. And I don’t want to scare anybody. Again, we started little, okay? We did. But eventually, you’re going to need insurance. You’re going to need guidelines. And in this day and age, probably from the beginning, I didn’t do this right away, but as you get larger, you also need to remember as you– because it’ll get more distance where you’re not going to know everybody as personally. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t have kind of intake applications, basically, of asking people about their backgrounds, where they come from, sorts of things like that, what are their child’s needs, why are they looking into wanting to have– why do they want to come. And you need to find out that kind of information. You need to know why are they coming from public school, or why are they switching co-ops. Was there a problem at the– you need to know those things.

Gretchen Roe: 00:14:10.633
So did you ultimately then decide on like a board to administrate that? Or were you and your friends the– you and your friend, the administrators?

Rhonda Helmreich: 00:14:19.555
Correct. We were the administrators– or are the administrators. Yeah, that’s right. There is about four of us. What we did was we kind of divided the workload. We all worked together, but divided the workload according to really our gifts of what we were good at. And my one friend is a fabulous administrator. She’s the one found the insurance. And then I was much more driving curriculum like, “Okay, so if we’re teaching this, we’re going to need this class beforehand in order for those children to be prepared for this class.” And so I started to be driving force of developing curriculum. Essentially, it stayed with sunlight, but we did eventually branch out into other things, again, according to need. Currently we have a– well, what happened is there was a science teacher within our local community, not in my co-op specifically, that that fabulous science teacher ended up– he started ending up closing down. There was a whole bunch of people who were all of a sudden like, “Ah, this is what I was planning to do with my high schooler.” And that is the moment we started opening up to– we call it we opened up outside of our own family nucleus of people we had developed. And then we started letting people in. But what we did was, in some ways, we morphed into not just mom teachers, but we have specific people who are homeschooled parents but we’re choosing who the teachers are and their curriculum. And so now the way our co-op works is so it’s not technically a traditional co-op. So parents can pay another parent to teach their child.

Gretchen Roe: 00:16:18.482
Okay. And let me ask this question, and then I’ll come back around to that because I want to ask something that goes further. But it’s a terrific question. She says, “I would love to know what was a favorite unexpected class you provided for your group.”

Rhonda Helmreich: 00:16:33.935
Oh, favorite. So back in the day, this was like when our first beginnings, we had choir, and that was really fun.

Gretchen Roe: 00:16:44.691
Really?

Rhonda Helmreich: 00:16:44.985
And yeah, and I let it. And it was just a blast. And we prepared little three and four-part songs. And it was kind of– we had elementary school through high school, and we all sang together. And it was really, really fun.

Gretchen Roe: 00:16:59.460
Oh, how fun. Now, did that continue on for a number of years? Are you still doing that?

Rhonda Helmreich: 00:17:06.645
Right. Eventually, we had to stop that because then we got so heavily involved in more. Again, this has got to be, what is your goal? And we really started into heavy academics, like to meet the needs of these parents who are like, “Ah, I don’t know what to do. This is too much math. I need help.” Or, “Math isn’t mathing.” Right.

Gretchen Roe: 00:17:31.738
I got to my co-op experience. I didn’t want to teach high school math, so.

Rhonda Helmreich: 00:17:36.100
Exactly. Or, “Ah, old man, the sea, I want my child to read it, but I don’t know that I know what it means.” And it’s not like we found experts in the field. It’s that you’re adults and you find people and they almost discover themselves what are their giftings, and then they go with it.

Gretchen Roe: 00:17:57.305
Tell me a little bit about getting insurance, because that’s something that a lot of times we don’t think about, but we live in American society and we love to litigate things. So how did you– did you have to give your co-op a name? So it was the entity insured, or was it your board? How did that work?

Rhonda Helmreich: 00:18:18.280
Right. It was the name of our co-op, and that was the entity. And then we also started some– got some business accounts at the bank, got us that. But essentially, we just call, I mean, simple. And again, it doesn’t have to be difficult. We just called our home insurance people and talked to them about what it is we want to do. And they were like, “Oh, okay.” And they figured out how to ensure it. So it doesn’t even have to be scary and tricky.

Gretchen Roe: 00:18:51.707
Right. That’s awesome. And I think that there is a population who would love to do something like this. But when they start thinking– when they start pulling the string and thinking of these things, that scares them off. And it shouldn’t be scary. Yeah.

Rhonda Helmreich: 00:19:07.516
That’s why I really encourage start small and take step-by-step is really, I think, the best way. Instead of starting with like, “Oh, we have to be this.” And starting with this huge vision, we had been for [crosstalk].

Gretchen Roe: 00:19:22.553
Well, you live in Texas. Everything is big.

Rhonda Helmreich: 00:19:24.226
That’s right. Everything’s big. Oh, so true. But the girl that we started with, we eventually moved from her home into her church. And because her husband was an elder and things like that, we were able to get in. And it was a smallish church, but one thing that you’d want to look for, of course, is classrooms that have– these are just like– this is completely so practical. Classrooms that have a sink. Why? Because if you’re going to do science, you’re probably going to need a sink, right? So things like that.

Rhonda Helmreich: 00:19:59.053
And then like a meeting place, so a church that’s big enough that either has a fellowship hall or a gym or something where kids, between classes, if they’re not taking all of them or whatever, they can have a lunchtime period. And we didn’t serve pizza or do anything like that. Do you see how I’m saying? We started small. Well, now we have pizza and some snacks available every week. But we didn’t start there, right? That’s not where we started. But we’ve been around for 25 years.

Gretchen Roe: 00:20:33.255
So in that 25 years, there’s things that happen and things you’re like, “Well, we’re not going to do that again.” So tell me a little bit about what do you think is the single best decision you all made when it went from just a group of you to a larger group?

Rhonda Helmreich: 00:20:54.969
I’m going to say two things. One is since we were no longer a true every mom that’s coming, every family is going to be the teachers, we basically found our teachers. And it’s not that we found people– this is the coolest part. We found dads who worked at TI to come and teach advanced chemistry for us, right? So it’s not that we have– they’re not teachers necessarily. They’re going to be somebody who’s passionate about the field. Or we have a PA who teaches AMP biology, right? So you find the people. And the caveat that we have is they are– okay, they’re passionate about their subject. They don’t necessarily have a teaching degree, but they know their subject and they were all homeschoolers or currently homeschooling their children. That’s what we’ve got. And that has held us steady. So that was a really good decision to do it that way to vet our teachers and the moms that we let teach. So it’s not because you join that you get to teach. It’s we choose you.

Gretchen Roe: 00:22:09.720
So now you have gone from teaching science to how many classes do you offer?

Rhonda Helmreich: 00:22:14.921
Okay. Ooh, I know something that we tried and didn’t work out so well.

Gretchen Roe: 00:22:20.486
Oh, good.

Rhonda Helmreich: 00:22:21.252
As the–

Gretchen Roe: 00:22:21.706
That’s a question on my list, so.

Rhonda Helmreich: 00:22:23.736
Yeah, well, because one thing we figured out, and maybe it could be done if we tried again. But we tried to do foreign language. And we just discovered that one day a week format just was not that conducive to a foreign language. So maybe in this day and age now with all the readily available options online, maybe that could have helped. So we don’t do foreign language. Just didn’t think the work. Yeah. And we basically kept to the core subjects. And so we have general science, life science. We have a full complement. We focused on junior high through high school. So what we morphed into, once our littles grew up, we didn’t take littles anymore. We started junior high forward. with the system of there’s plenty of people that can do a small group with littles. And probably the wisest words I have for you is decide what your niche is. What is your goal? What are you trying to do with this co-op?

Gretchen Roe: 00:23:37.381
You said something earlier that you all were on the same sheet of music. How hard was that to make that happen, that you all had the same goals? Because we’re all different.

Rhonda Helmreich: 00:23:49.094
We’re all different. We’re all different. And that’s true, is you have to find people that are, if you’re going to be an academic co-op, are as serious academic as you are, right? That’s a good question. What is it? Where is it they’re going with their kids? What is the end product desire that they have? And what we’ve always said is it’s not that we’re making children so that they’re all going to go to college and get their doctorate. That’s not it. It’s that we want to educate them well. So whatever it is they decide they want to do or be, they are prepared.

Gretchen Roe: 00:24:29.838
Right. Okay. And so I’ve talked with– I mean, in this adventure that we’ve had here in the month of November, I’ve talked with a variety of different group leaders. And some groups provide grades and some groups lead the grades in the hands of the parents. So what have you all– I mean, you’ve got 25 years of experience. What did you decide to do with that?

Rhonda Helmreich: 00:24:55.838
That is a great question. We do give grades, but the way we sign everything that goes out to the parents, whether it’s a newsletter or whatever, what we say at the very end is, “Partnering with you.” And that’s exactly what it is. We are here to support. We do expect your child to do the class that we’ve set before them unless you tell me ahead of time that we need to make some modifications. If we are going to make some modifications, one thing I have learned is, then you tell that kid, “You do not talk about those modifications with anybody else.”

Gretchen Roe: 00:25:35.827
Oh, that’s a good piece of advice.

Rhonda Helmreich: 00:25:37.652
Right? You do not. If we need to, we will do that. And learning grace. If somebody comes along and they have– sometimes something happens in their personal life and they get behind the eight ball. I have learned sometimes it’s best to just cut your losses and let them start fresh, because otherwise they get into overdrive, they’re overwhelmed, and you lose them for the whole year.

Gretchen Roe: 00:26:04.458
I think that’s a good piece of advice. So is that something that– let’s use a child in a science class. If they get behind the eight ball and that has happened to them, do they have to wait till the cohort begins the next fall to restart that class?

Rhonda Helmreich: 00:26:22.718
Okay, so they would have to probably start over again the next year just because of the skills, so if it’s a skill-based thing where it’s a building type of situation. But what I think we’ve done is tried to salvage before it gets to that point. And that’s what I would say is when you start to notice trouble, the first thing you should do is get in there and start asking the parent, asking the child, “How can I help? What’s going on?” If you see something different, catch it before it gets monumental and way behind. And sometimes you don’t want to do that because it seems like a hard thing to do. But it’s better in the long run to get in there and say something. And what I meant by– what I meant by sometimes if they get behind the eight ball, what I have done with a student, I have looked at, okay, what are the essentials? What does this kid have to know? And I’ll take away– not that I ever give any busy work in the first place, but I’ll take away everything else and I’ll say, “Okay, we need to at least let’s get these things done to help us catch up and get us back on track.” And–

Gretchen Roe: 00:27:35.402
You’re not moving the goalposts. You’re just modifying the play so that they can [inaudible].

Rhonda Helmreich: 00:27:39.639
I am. I’m modifying the play because I can’t move the goalpost, right, because we’re all in a class and we’re all working together towards this goal. So I’m just trying to assist them, support them. Sometimes I can get the parents involved and they can help assist that’s what I usually try to do is lessen their load. And if it’s a literature class, sometimes if a kid has just really lost it, I will just actually maybe axe that book that we’ve done for three or four weeks. And I will just and but that’s a simpler situation than if you’re doing like a science or math class, you can’t exactly do that. So then you need to go back to, let’s just learn whatever this concept is that they have to absolutely have to move forward to the next unit.

Gretchen Roe: 00:28:32.134
You’re on the board administrating this co-op, but you’re also an active instructor in the co-op. So how do you juggle all those plates?

Rhonda Helmreich: 00:28:39.965
I would say what drives me is passion, the passion for speaking, opportunity to speak into the lives of these babies. And they are junior high and high schoolers, so they aren’t actually babies, but they are babies.

Gretchen Roe: 00:28:55.133
Now, do you sponsor a graduation through your [inaudible]?

Rhonda Helmreich: 00:28:59.109
We do.

Gretchen Roe: 00:28:59.883
You do. Okay.

Rhonda Helmreich: 00:29:00.762
We do have a graduation.

Gretchen Roe: 00:29:01.829
Tell us a little bit about that.

Rhonda Helmreich: 00:29:03.864
Yeah, I really like that. The first one was with my third child is when we developed our own graduation. So again, just to those mamas who are sitting there going, “Ugh, I’m overwhelmed.” Again, remember, this took us 25 years to get to the developed place we are now. Remember, so we started probably probably 15 years ago or so into graduation of our own before we would kind of join local ones. But we’ve made it where because we have a certain, I guess, just for our co-op, we want the kids to make sure that before we send them into the world, that they have had our American government, that they have had a worldviews class, or my 20th century lit class, which is essentially a worldviews class. And those are required things. Other than that our co-op is the kind of place where the kids can pick and choose what core classes they need support in, which is the whole point, to support parents and kids. And then we have senior activities throughout the year, like they’re going to– in next week, they’re going to do a– we call it the fall retreat is usually just a day-long retreat that the seniors do together. In the spring, they’ll do a weekend retreat at a camp somewhere.

Gretchen Roe: 00:30:32.191
Do you have a parent who steps up to organize these retreats, or is that your board as well?

Rhonda Helmreich: 00:30:39.487
So I have ball and told some of my teachers. So as part of being part of it, as you said, there’s a lot for me to administrate. So at this point, I oversee a lot, directly do kind of daily discipline type of things, and overall curriculum, things like that. So I have a teacher assigned to that. And I have a teacher assigned to yearbook.

Gretchen Roe: 00:31:04.994
What closing words would you have for our guests today who have listened to what you had to say?

Rhonda Helmreich: 00:31:11.272
Be encouraged and do your research, and you’ll find the things that you need to grow your children. You will.

Gretchen Roe: 00:31:21.346
That is so awesome. I want to thank you for spending this time with me today. This has been amazing, far beyond what I expected. I know we had a whole list of questions we thought we were going to get through.

Rhonda Helmreich: 00:31:32.863
We did.

Gretchen Roe: 00:31:33.566
But this has been exactly what the good Lord would have it to be, because I think it’s been a wonderful opportunity for me to get to hear how the evolution of your co-op and to have a co-op that has been in existence for 25 years is something remarkable. And the fact that you’re still there 25 years later is something equally remarkable. I want to thank you so much for your time today. I really do appreciate it. I want to thank everyone who joined us today. This has been a wonderful opportunity to step into an exploration of co-op life. And I hope you have found merit in it. I wouldn’t have changed the time that I spent in my children’s co-op for anything. And I think clearly you’ve heard that from Rhonda as well. Thank you so much for your time today. I really do appreciate it.

Voice-Over: 00:32:28.831
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