Home-schooled students have a path toward OTC

There are more than 4,500 families in the Ozarks who home school their children and when they look for advanced education, they can look to OTC for those opportunities.

Recently, the Southwest Home Education Ministry (SHEM) and representatives from OTC’s Dual Credit Program met at the Library Center in Springfield to review what’s available for high-school aged students.

“The OTC presentation in collaboration with SHEM, was a huge success,” said Teri Shepard, SHEM board member. “Not only did we have a packed house, but following the event, we had additional requests for a second event.”

Kim Greene, coordinator of dial credit and high school admissions at OTC, said southwest Missouri has an extremely active homeschool population.

“Many parents and students know the options for secondary education, but are not aware of all of the college programs a student can begin before achieving a diploma,” she said. “It is definitely an area of outreach OTC wants to pursue to better serve our area students so they can get a jumpstart on college and complete more quickly which in turn, gets them out in the workforce, which is ultimately OTCs goal.”

Greene said there are options for home-schooled students to consider when deciding on dual-credit courses.

“The most popular option is our online dual-credit courses. Students work with OTC’s Dual Credit department to get enrolled in online courses. These courses are $35 per credit hour with a $65 online course fee,” she said.

There are also many on-campus options for students. Any student who is at least 16 can attend classes at an OTC campus as an Early Start student. They pay regular tuition, but it does provide those students a jump on their college education.

Tracy McGrady, OTC’s dean of academic and student affairs at Richwood Valley and who oversees dual enrollment programs, said its OTC’s goal to extend the same opportunities to home-schooled students as to those offered to area high school students.

“We started asking ourselves how we could serve this population better, and it was an easy decision to extend the same dual-credit opportunities to them as well,” she said.

More information on dual credit classes is available at www.otc.edu/dualcredit/dualcredit.php. For local home school information, go to www.shemonline.org