i was also thinking the same thing, someone in an earlier post said she never heard of a homeschooled child that was violent... well now i guess, sadly, she has.

My homeschooled kids know how to function as part of a team...they participated in the soccer program at the YMCA for years, and interacted with from all races, religions, and economic backgrounds.

My homeschooled kids do not have a problem using locker room facilities, as they took swimming lessons at the Y for years, and are quite acclimated to changing in the presence of others.

My homeschooled kids are not retarded socially, as they play every day with non homeschooled kids their age in our neighborhood, and attend various social clubs in the evenings. they also attend a home school co-op one day per week, where they recieve instruction with other children their age in subjects considered difficult to teach at home, such as physical science. Two of my children are currently taking a class in dissection taught by a retired surgeon.

My homeschooled kids are not sheltered...My thirteen year-old daughter went on a ten-day volunteer trip to New Orleans to help with Hurricane Katrina Victims. Another of my children takes acting and voice lessons, and has appeared on stage at F&M's performing arts center and was recently in the cast of a production at Sight and Sound Theater.

My homeschooled kids don't skate out of doing schoolwork. We are responsible for maintaining a portfolio of all of our children's work during the year, and are evaluated yearly by a licensed education evaluator (at our own expense). The evaluator's report and their portfolio are then forwarded to the School District for approval. They take the same standardized tests that public schooled children take, at the same age milestones.

Now substitute "Nearly All" for "my" in the past paragraphs, because nearly all homeschool parents I know can make alot of the same statements. We don't homeschool our kids to keep them away from non'christian kids; we could send them to a Christian School for that. We homeschool to teach our children using cirriculum of our choosing, at a pace appropriate for each child.

With all of the talk about socialization, teamwork and such, I am reminded that my own children have been involved in Rec. Center and community activities as well as public school activities. The very recent memory of my daughter's cheerleading is definitely a bad one for a parent. For my money, I'd pay the cost of registration in a community activity ANY DAY prior to promoting a school sport to one of my kids and they all attend public school.

My experience, as a parent and as a participant, has been that school activities are based solely on skill. Skilled students with problems with attendance, behavior or grades are given special treatment to accommodate for those issues whereas the rest of the students are left to fend for themselves.

I have coached slow-pitch girls' softball for four years and played community fast pitch hard ball for twelve years myself, among others, along with my kids' participation in other community activities. In the community leagues we can focus of teaching skills, encouraging effort, promoting competition but most importantly teamwork and sportsmanship. So far as I can tell these last two are stressed less than anything else in the public school systems but, are the most important aspects of being involved with a team sport. I'd much sooner that my child learned to loose like a good sport than to win like a hot dog. Let the schools teach, let the parents be responsible when the student doesn't fill the requirements to learn.

There have been countless studies to show just how important extracurricular activities are in the overall development of a being as well as aiding in the learning process that we can't afford not to give our children the opportunities to be involved. And study upon study indicates that the more educated your kid/your neighbor's kids is, the stronger your whole community will be. It hurts not only the child but, all of us to deprive them of these activities.

One further point, parents have become entirely too zealous about sports and are increasingly taking the fun out of these activities for their children. Much of this discussion has seemed like a confirmation of the same.

This is the generation of Helicopter Parents.

What about these two Lititz homeschooled shooters?