The modern-day home schooling movement in Missouri was still in its infancy when second-grader Melanie Hadley sat down at a bright blue desk in 1985 to learn under her mother's direction.
For a decade, Melanie has been tutored by her mother, a retired public school teacher, in their home on a bluff overlooking the Finley River in the Ozark foothills.Melanie combined her four hours a day of classwork with a love for music and practiced Chopin on the family's Steinway piano no more than 20 paces from her desk.
No bells signaling the end of class. No hallway lockers or study halls.
"Home schooling offers a great deal of peace - a freedom," said Melanie, now 18. "You're not hurried, as long as you have self-discipline."
Next month Melanie will be honored in Washington by the White House Commission on Presidential Scholars. An accomplished pianist who has competed in Moscow, she is a 1996 presidential scholar in the arts. As part of the honors, she will play "Alborado del Gracioso," a seven-minute piece by Maurice Ravel, at the Kennedy Center.
Melanie also is one of only three home schoolers this year out of 141 high school seniors in the country to be honored as a presidential scholar. When she took her high-school equivalency exam, she placed in the top 1-percentile in the country.
Missouri's home schoolers, who saw the movement take off in the early- to mid-1980s, say Melanie's national recognition is a boost for their cause. Some had to fight the courts and school officials years ago. They got the state law changed to protect them, and they now claim 15,000-20,000 home schoolers in Missouri.
"The home school movement is coming of age because the children who started young are now going into college," says Cindy Redburn of Ste. Genevieve, a board member of Families for Home Education. "Honors like this substantiate that our children are doing well. The proof is in the pudding."
The honor, established in 1964, goes to the nation's most distinguished graduating high school seniors. It was extended to the arts in 1979.
Melanie began playing the piano at age 6. Four years later, she started taking lessons from Jane Allen in University City, Mo., as had her mother before her.
Since then, her family has made the eight-hour round trip once a week so Melanie and her younger brother, Paul, 15, can continue lessons with Allen. The small town of Ozark is just south of Springfield, Mo.
Melanie's mother, Diane Hadley, had enrolled her daughter as a first-grade student in a teaching laboratory run by Southwest Missouri State University. After normal school hours ended at 3 p.m., Melanie would come home and dive into her real love: music. She would practice the piano, eat dinner, then practice the violin.
"I thought to myself, `If she keeps up this pace, she's not going to have a childhood,"' said Mrs. Hadley. "Melanie's a thorough person, and I could tell music was her love. I wanted her to have some time off, and I knew I could do the schooling in far less time.
"So I started home schooling. It was new at the time, and it was a leap of faith to do it."
Mrs. Hadley, a native of Kirkwood, Mo., is certified in Missouri and Illinois to teach English and the humanities. In Missouri, parents who teach their children at home are not required to be certified teachers. Nor are they required to have their curriculum approved by the state.
For her lesson plans, she bought books from the SMSU bookstore and launched in on the basics, heavy on reading and writing. "I taught her how to write creatively, writing love notes," she said.
In the fifth through eighth grades, Melanie got her lessons through the mail from a private school in Baltimore. Later, she took a correspondence course through the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She was in school year-round and studied pretty much seven days a week.
The schedule was flexible. Every morning, after breakfast, she and her brother would start school. There were no set hours. She might play the piano first, then focus on the book work.
Melanie's father, Bruce, writes and produces corporate videos. The family's home, with bright oak floors, skylights and vaulted ceilings, sits on nearly nine acres in a secluded subdivision. Red foxes and coyotes can be spotted darting across the front lawn.
Last week, a few miles away, students at a local high school decorated an overpass in honor of the seniors. They are all abuzz about the prom. Melanie has not gone to a prom. She said it was something she thought as a freshman would be glamorous, but now isn't worried about missing one.
"I've had fun during my high school years, and I've done what I wanted to do: perform as much as I could," she said.
This fall, Melanie hopes to attend Webster University in Webster Groves, Mo., continue her piano studies and teach piano herself some day.
The National Education Association opposes home schooling because it "cannot provide the student with a comprehensive education experience." Critics say the child would lack socialization. But despite stereotypes, most home schooling families like the Hadleys don't just sit at home. Melanie, for example, was on a swim team. She has toured Kentucky on bicycle and enjoys watching pre-1950s movies.
The flexibility has allowed her to travel. She has gone to piano competitions across the United States and in Russia. She appeared as a soloist with the Kapella Orchestra in St. Petersburg and with the Samara Philharmonic in Samara, Russia.
"In a way, you might think of home schoolers as being sheltered," said her piano teacher, Allen, "but Melanie's seen a very adult side of life, and she's more at home with adults."
The Hadleys are Christian Scientists.
Unlike some home schoolers who say the public schools have failed them, Mrs. Hadley is less critical.
"The schools are trying to do their jobs, but I've never believed that the way to educate a person is to put that person in a room with 30 others," Mrs. Hadley said.
When the lesson plan was electronics, her son curled up on the couch with an encyclopedia one day to read more. "In a school, the bell might ring, or the teacher might say, `Tut, tut, now Paul, time to get back to the next question,"' she said.
This year Paul chose to go to public high school but wants to resume home schooling next fall, his mother said. "Too much Mickey Mouse there," she said.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.)