Meet My Teachers: Mom and Dad

BusinessWeek Online
2/20/2006

A growing number of affluent parents think they can do better than any school

Slater Aldrich doesn't attend any of the top-shelf public or private schools near his family's Madison (Conn.) home, not even his mother's alma mater, the $18,000-a-year Country School. Instead, the 11-year-old spends his days playing the role of town zoning officer, researching the pros and cons of granting approval to a new Wal-Mart (WMT ). Other endeavors include pretending he's a Sand Hill Road venture capitalist, creating Excel-studded business plans for a backyard sheep company, and growing his own organic food. "It's kind of like living on a white-collar farm," says his dad, Clark Aldrich. Aldrich vowed he'd never put his kid through the eye-glazing lectures he endured in school, even at prestigious institutions like Lawrence Academy and Brown University.

Like a growing number of creative-class parents, the Aldriches homeschool Slater, splitting the duties. (Aldrich père, who co-founded interactive learning company SimuLearn, handles math and science; his wife, Lisa, a stay-at-home mom, does the reading and writing. Slater's friends come over after school and on the weekends for pickup games.)

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