Reply #227: Yes, but there are also fixed costs that accrue on a per-school basis

[ProfessorPlum]

as well.

You seem to be deliberately missing my point, here, though, which is this:

When you remove a child from a public school, you continue to pay state taxes into funds for education, and you continue to pay local school taxes for your local school district. The amount of money, total, available to public schools and for education, remains the same. The way it is distributed may change somewhat depending on attendance trends for particular schools. But the pot of money stays the same.

At the same time, the number of children needing services goes down. There are, overall, fewer children competing for the same amount of money. Therefore, spending per student in the public schools goes up.

Also, if it is done conscientiously, teaching kids at home provides the benefit of an educated populace at no cost to anyone else except the parents. So, society wins at that level too.

The only way I can see that teaching kids at home hurts a public school is that it removes active, conscientious families from the public school community, and I do admit that that is a loss. We remain active in our community and involved in fundraisers and other events at our local public school, and we also help other people deal with some of the issues we faced there, whether they choose to stay in or to teach at home.

But I don't think there is any way we've hurt our school financially. We have certainly spared them from having to actually teach our kids, which we had been asking them to do for years, which would have cost them money.