Community : Meet Our Students
Megan Black
Age 17
Olympia Washington
With their eyes set on good colleges for their four children, Jim and Lisa Black knew that strong high school credentials were a necessity. The challenge was in finding a high-quality, accredited secondary education in the rural town of Gembu, Nigeria, where the Blacks were serving as missionaries.
"We thought we would have to go away to boarding school, but living away from our family is something we weren't ready to do," said daughter Megan, now 17. "Wars are ongoing there, and the area is pretty unstable."
Then some friends -- fellow U.S. missionaries -- recommended Keystone National High School, a fully accredited, independent study program serving students in all 50 states and around the world. Keystone offers at-home, self-paced study and education to more than 20,000 students each year.
"Our friends' children were doing really well with Keystone, and we looked into it and decided it was the right choice for our children, too," said Jim. The three oldest children: Amanda, now 19; Megan; and Stephen, 15, were all Keystone students during the seven years the family spent in Nigeria.
"The Keystone faculty has been very flexible with our family and understood our special needs when we were overseas. They were also very accommodating with the time difference and understanding about the problems we had with mail service in our correspondence."
Since the Blacks returned home to Olympia, Wash., last year, Amanda has graduated and moved on to college. Now a sophomore at Northwest Nazarene University in Nampa, Idaho, she is majoring in chemistry and biology. Megan and Stephen continue in their studies at Keystone, and Daniel, 13, will enroll, too, when he's ready for high school.
The Blacks plan to continue with Keystone, even though other options are available to them now that they're home, because they appreciate the school's individualized instruction, its high-quality curriculum and the benefits of learning from home.
"The Keystone faculty has been very flexible with our family and understood our special needs when we were overseas," said Jim. During the Blacks' stay in Nigeria, sometimes an assignment would require doing research, but they didn't have access to the Internet or even a library. "The instructors were really good about changing assignments to make them work for us," said Megan. "They were also very accommodating with the time difference and understanding about the problems we had with mail service in our correspondence," added Jim.
The Keystone teaching staff provides guidance to students using telephone, email, electronic bulletin boards and online chat. Megan says she finds herself contacting her instructors from time to time, when she and her parents are "stuck," and she is consistently met with friendly help from instructors who are eager to see her succeed. "They always encourage me to call or email them whenever I need help and they get back to me really quickly," she said.
Jim adds with a laugh that it's a "shocking revelation" to their children that he and Lisa don't know everything, "and it's nice to have instructor help available to them when that happens."
"[My instructors] always encourage me to call or email them whenever I need help and they get back to me really quickly."
As for the Keystone curriculum, Megan describes it as "a lot of work, but definitely worth the effort," and with an occasional nudge from her mom, she's mastering time-management skills while she tackles it. She keeps a steady schedule, setting a timer for an hour at a time on one subject and then moving on to something else. "I can't do the same thing for three hours in a row -- I keep switching to stay on task and focused," she said.
Megan said her friends in public school spend their days at school and their evenings doing homework, and if they play a sport they don't have much time for anything else. "I always have time in the afternoon to do fun things like play my violin," she said. She also enjoys getting outside on her rollerblades or bicycle or to play softball in her church league. She and her mother sometimes spend their free time taking on artistic endeavors, such as drawing, painting and sewing. "We get together and get really creative," said Megan. "We enjoy our time together."
Keystone's flexibility allows Megan to set her own vacation schedule, too. This summer she's taken off a little time from her studies to visit her grandmother in California, go to camp in Oregon and spend time with her sister when she was home from college.
Megan's looking forward to graduation and plans to study special education in college. "I feel like I really have a heart for special-needs kids and would enjoy the challenge of working with them," she said.
For now, it's another year of Keystone, and then she'll have a special piece of paper to mark her achievements -- a high school diploma. "I think it's great that you can home-school and then earn a diploma that means something when you're finished," she said.
