When her daughter turned five, Chris Hauer thought, “Well, we could do one year of homeschool. We’re doing okay at preschool, we could probably handle kindergarten.” But she knew they needed to find some friends, so she found a homeschool group, the Helena Homeschool Enrichment Co-op. Little did she know where that would lead.
“I showed up the first week, and there was a teacher for the kindergarteners. I showed up the second week, and there wasn’t,” she recalls. “So I taught that week. And every week after that.” She got more and more involved, helping with planning and leading multiple classes the following year. That year, the leader was leaving because her children aged out. Chris and another mom stepped up to the plate to take over.
“That first year we had, I think, 15 kids or so, and it doubled every semester,” she says. It kept growing until they suddenly realized they couldn’t fit any more students. The co-op currently includes around 45 families with 100–115 kids, and there are numerous families on a waitlist. Chris hates turning people away. “I’m like people, start another co-op,” she urges. “Competition isn’t a thing—it’s not an issue. Please start another one.”
The group only meets on Friday mornings. “Our primary goal is healthy relationships. We frame those within fun classes like music or drama and science experiments. But the goal is the relationships, and we actually insist that the parents attend a break time with other parents, because the isolation of homeschooling parents is a huge reason people quit,” Chris explains. “We meet from 9:30, when prayer and pledge start, and we finish classes around 12:10. But we really push hard to have people stay through lunch and recess.”
Chris says her favorite part of co-op is seeing the older and younger kids interacting with each other. “When you see those 15-year-old boys playing with three-year-old girls that are chasing them all over the building, it creates a youngness and a wholesomeness in those teenagers that they feel connected,” she adds.
The co-op has a pretty unique format for choosing the classes offered to each age group each semester. For kids 12 and younger, there are five categories: PE, STEM, performance arts, art, and public speaking. PE is offered every semester, and the others are offered once each year. Since the parents are the teachers, they sign up for one of those slots and can then choose anything that fits within that category.
For teenagers, there’s a completely different process for choosing classes. Each class must meet two of the three criteria the co-op has established: promote interaction between students, be educational, and be fun. Teenagers and parents submit class ideas, then Chris puts them out to the parents to see which ideas have willing teachers. Once she knows which classes she can fill, the kids use ranked-choice voting to pick which ones they want to have offered that semester. “Then I use a ridiculous program I wrote to say, ‘Okay, this class paired with this class paired with this class will allow the most children possible to have a class that they are excited about,” Chris says.
In keeping with its goal of supporting homeschool families, the co-op only costs $5 per student per semester to cover supplies. The low cost is possible because they meet at Chris’s home church, which welcomes educational groups free of charge as long as they have insurance coverage. Annual insurance costs just $500 through a group event policy.
“Just start,” is Chris’s advice to others who are interested in creating a similar co-op. “You don’t have to have everything figured out,” she adds. “Just get five families together and start doing something, and then you can tweak it as you go. The hardest part is just being brave enough to start.”