Virginia Beach woman was home-schooling pioneer

VIRGINIA BEACH

It started with a single word. An expletive that Cherrie Moore's daughter, Joy, learned at school and repeated at a church gathering.

Moore had had enough. She pulled Joy out of the seventh grade and, on a hope and a prayer, started home-schooling the girl.

That was in 1986, when the practice was rare in this corner of Virginia, with few resources and rules. Moore and her tiny crowd of like-minded parents, fearful of the stigma attached to home schooling, wouldn't even take their children to the store during school hours.

Today, home schooling has exploded - more than 3,000 children are schooled at home in South Hampton Roads, by the state's count - and the bookstore that Moore opened in 1987 is the beating heart of the home-school community.

The two go hand-in-hand: As books and resources have become available, more people have been able to home-school, producing a market for publishers to produce curriculum materials.

And in the middle of it all stands Moore. The short, independent-minded and fiercely passionate woman spends her days helping parents find ways of schooling that fit their children's needs.

Her business is more than a bookstore; it's a ministry and a help center. Her free advice helps parents find Christian, secular or other methods of instruction that work best for them. Home schooling can be expensive and challenging, and it's not for everyone.

For those who want to try, Cherrie Moore knows the way.

Before the early 1980s, it was unclear whether the state's education laws even permitted home schooling. Some parents who pulled their children out of school to teach them at home landed in court.

Then in 1984, the General Assembly added home schooling to the list of ways to comply with compulsory education laws. The move followed a national trend, and home-schoolers nationwide grew from roughly 15,000 in the early 1970s to between 120,000 and 260,000 by the mid- to late 1980s, according to the Virginia Department of Education.

Cherrie Moore was one of the first to jump on board. Moore - whose first name is pronounced "cherry" - had grown up in Jacksonville, Fla., and moved to Virginia Beach when she was 19. She studied recreation leadership at Tidewater Community College without obtaining her diploma.

A few years later, she was married, with a daughter who learned "things that would embarrass a sailor" in public school, Moore said. After the incident in church, she gathered books from Christian schools and started class at home.

It was difficult, and it got harder when she became a single parent. Often, her friend Debra Plaster would teach Joy with her own children while Moore worked the printing press at Atlantic Shores Christian School. Plaster still laughs about the time they dissected fetal pigs on her pingpong table.

They had no access to answer keys for their children's schoolwork until they realized the Regent University library kept teacher guides. Then they would camp out in the library and grade papers.

Soon after, Moore began to sell books.

The first batch came from Atlantic Shores, where leaders needed to unload some old textbooks and knew Moore had connections to home-school families. Moore received a commission for selling the books, and she received similar offers from other schools.

In one, she found a gold mine.

A Suffolk school that had closed wanted to get rid of a basement's worth of books. Moore discovered they were from the Christian publisher A Beka.

"These were the books everyone wanted. I said, 'Where there's a will, there's a way,' " Moore said. She sprayed them down with Lysol, cleaned them off and sold them, and the business that would become Moore Expressions was born.

"God gave me this business on a silver platter," she said.

Over the years, Moore Expressions expanded to as many as 25 employees, including a store in Roanoke. Home schooling had taken off.

In 1992, 5,842 students were schooled at home in Virginia. Last year, there were 24,682, not including the 7,296 counted separately because they home-school for strict religious reasons.

Of those 31,000-plus who are home-schooled, 3,033 live in the five cities of South Hampton Roads. While that's only about 1.4 percent of the area's school-age students, the number has grown dramatically from the tiny group Moore first joined.

Reasons for the increase include a dissatisfaction with the public schools' focus on standardized testing and questions about school safety. Moore said that, with every school shooting, she sees a leap in the patrons coming to her store.

Once, parents literally taught all their children's lessons around their kitchen tables. Now, many have formed co-ops, where one who's well-versed in science might teach biology to several children while another picks up the history lessons. In enrichment centers, they go a step further and chip in to hire teachers for advanced classes.

There are more publishers marketing textbooks, workbooks and DVDs to home-school families, too. Virtual classes and extracurricular groups provide social outlets. Churches and enrichment centers hold home-school graduations each year, and the home-school prom that Moore started for her daughter in 1991 is going strong. About 200 teens attended in May.

Home schooling has proved particularly helpful for students who want extra time to focus on their talent. With the time they're not spending in a structured school setting, they can practice or take lessons with groups like the Young Musicians of Virginia, which has a home-school band and choir.

Moore, whose daughter is grown and home-schooling her own children, said that, years ago, her customers primarily taught at home for religious reasons, but that, today, they're more evenly split between Christian and secular. A few are Muslim, and a few are "unschoolers," who shun structured lessons and allow their children to learn by discovery.

Parents are realizing that they don't have to send their children to traditional schools, Moore said. They see home schooling as a chance to pick classes and activities that will help their children get where they want to go.

Patricia Stevens is one. She started home-schooling 25 years ago, and her youngest son graduated this spring. He took band and advanced science classes with Kingdom Education for Young Scholars - a co-op at a Baptist church in Chesapeake - and next year, he'll start a pre-med track at the University of Richmond.

With so many programs to choose from, the challenge for home-schoolers is actually to stay home more, Stevens said.

"Kids are going on computer programs. We can take Advanced Placement classes now online. There isn't anything that's holding back the home-schoolers now."

Moore used to believe that home schooling would be the best form of education for all children, and that the public schools should simply shut down.

She's changed her mind, and she turned away some parents. For instance, a mother said she didn't have time to read through instruction materials, and Moore refused to sell to her.

"I said, 'If you don't have time to read, you don't have time to home-school,' " Moore said. "And so she left."

Most important is finding a method of schooling that will work for the individual child's style of learning, be it public or private, in a co-op or at home, she said. Moore tries to help make it happen.

Once she structured an entire curriculum around skateboarding because it was that child's sole interest. She peppers parents with questions: Is the child a visual learner? Auditory? Or does he need to see and feel what he's learning before reading it in a book?

Moore Expressions occupies a rambling space on Indian River Road. The carpeting is utilitarian, the bookshelves are made of plywood. Moore said she built them when the store opened and never found enough money for new ones.

Her employees are former home-school students and mothers. Before opening the doors each day, Moore leads them in prayer.

One day in June, Joy Vermaak of Virginia Beach walked in looking for two books. Christel Waite, who works at the store, suggested she come back in a few weeks, when a used copy might be available at a lower price.

"Which is probably why we don't make much money," Waite said with a laugh.

Vermaak could have ordered the books from a supplier online, a trend that's challenging Moore Expressions, but said she'd rather come to the store.

In the store's rear, employees sifted through newly published books that Moore brought from a home-school convention in Richmond, where she was among about 11,000 in attendance.

In the past, Moore had sold books at the convention, but this time, she and Plaster went as "curriculum doctors," wearing scrubs and giving free advice to parents.

Moore's staff combed through the new books page by page. That's how they figure out which new editions are worth recommending to customers, and which have only cosmetic changes, Moore said.

With the economic recession, Moore has had to downsize, closing her store in Roanoke and reducing her employees to five. She's undergone double knee surgery, but at 60 has no plans to retire.

All her work is worth it, she says, when students who struggled in traditional school settings come back and tell her how they found their path to success.

"Something worked, and it was following the plan that was right for that child," she said.

"You see it work, and it's great."

Elisabeth Hulette, (757) 222-5216, elisabeth.hulette@pilotonline.com