finally something interesting -or- Public Home School?

I don't know how it is in the rest of the country/world, but here in our city, the schools get paid for each day that each child attends. So if a child is sick, or goes away on vacation, the school doesn't get paid. Becuase our state government is financially irresponsible, money is really tight for the local schools. Some of them have gone so far as to ask parents to pay them out of their own pockets if their child is going to be absent for an extended amount of time.

Many parents are dissatisfied with the public school system and have chosen alternative "non-public" methods of schooling (such as private or homeschool). Because students equal money to the local schools, the school system is losing money with each child that goes somewhere else. So they came up with this great idea to keep students in their district: "If they want to home school, we'll make it part of the school system, so we can still make money!"

So our city is now offering a "public home school." If we join the school next year, I will still be teaching my kids at home, but i'll get a mentor teacher who will help me plan & set goals each month. There will be optional classes three days a week (including foreign language, art, & some staples: math, science etc). I could do as much or as little of those as I would like. And, I'm told that I can use whatever curriculum i choose!

This is all very exciting to me, because i really like to be able to choose *how* my kids do school, but I feel like i'm drowning in the world of homeschool, and could really use some extra (free!) classes for my kids to be involved in, as well as someone to coach me through it all. This feels like the best of both worlds. I'm a little leary, feeling like this is too good to be true, and there must be some sort of catch, but assuming everything is as good as it sounds, I think i'll enroll my kids for this coming fall! yay!