SHINE

I’m proud of my wife. She has recently made a big accomplishment seem quick and easy. No, she hasn’t done it all alone, which actually makes it even better in my eyes (a good team player!), but she has worked with friends to start something new. It’s not like she has nothing going on in her life – three children at home, homeschool teacher, translation advisor, ESL teacher, swim team coach…

Over the past year, conversations developed among a group of parents participating in a weekly homeschool PE group about the idea of starting a co-op group that would meet several times a month for more focused educational classes. Having had a good experience with our Learning Tree co-op in Pennsylvania, Misha was quite fond of the idea and became a lead instigator of conversations. Fast forwarding a few months with continued interest, she pushed to have an initial meeting to decide what might be feasible. They left that first meeting in April 2024 with a plan to start up classes in the fall. I was shocked with how quickly things came together into a solid plan.

Misha took on some of the critical administrative tasks to make sure things kept moving forward, planning meetings and making sure healthy communication continued. She was wise not to reinvent the wheel and “borrowed” whatever could be transferred from friends in Pennsylvania, keeping a lot of the procedural things similar – policies, class selection processes, volunteer forms, etc.

The participating families submitted name ideas and voted on them, something that was highly debated in our family. The winning name was SHINE, an acronym for Supporting Homeschoolers in Education.

Classes start in a few weeks! I’m incredibly excited that my class proposal was selected. I get to have 11 class sessions with the teenage group on the topic of Countries & Culture. We are going to study four countries well-represented in the Fort Morgan area – Mexico, Somalia, Guatemala, and Democratic Republic of the Congo – with some special guests from those countries. We will have a variety of fun topics, including music and food, and some more serious ones, such as immigration processes and cross-cultural engagement.

It’s going to be fun to see how this first semester goes. Even if things aren’t quite perfect, Misha can be proud of seeing these ideas come to fruition with other families that will benefit in a wide variety of ways, hopefully for years to come.