Cape Coral parents home-schooling sons in wake of new history standards

Cape Coral parents are moving their children out of Lee County public schools and into home schooling due to Florida’s new educational standards for history.

It’s one thing when politicians fight over politics, but when the battle is over education, Southwest Florida parents have found themselves shielding their kids from the crossfire.

“My husband opens up the news app to see the new Florida curriculum, and he sent it to me, and I said, ‘Absolutely not,'” said Astrid Shover.

Shover is an international real estate agent and a Haitian American, but she said the title of “mother” comes before everything else.

“I’m raising two boys… it’s important for them to understand who they are, you know, the good, the bad, the ugly of both races and not just be lied to to make other people feel comfortable,” Shover said.

That’s why Shover withdrew her two sons from the School District of Lee County in favor of home-schooling them.

“I get emotional,” Shover said. “I’m 43 years old. How did we get to this point in America?”

Her breaking point came during discussions of Florida’s updated standards for teaching American history.

“The verbiage in there was that slaves benefited from slavery by learning skills that they can then use once they were free,” Shover said, “and it’s almost like a slap in the face.”

Florida’s new standards call for middle schoolers to be taught “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”

Gov. Ron DeSantis said politics had nothing to do with the new standards. Vice President Kamala Harris came to Florida and called the curriculum “an insult.”

Shover told WINK News her sons, going into fifth and seventh grades, are not going to hear that lesson.

“This is not just a Black thing. It’s a people thing. It’s a truth thing,” Shover said, “and that was really what honed us into making that decision to home-school our children.”

Shover showed WINK the home school setup in her Cape Coral home. She said she researched it and formed a plan to set both her sons up for success, minus the controversies contained in the state’s new education standards.

“They’re going to be learning a new language this year; one is doing French, the other one’s going to be learning Spanish,” Shover said. “Is it just going to be the online curriculum for home school? We’re definitely going to supplement with other real-life experiences and traveling the world and just showing them that there’s more to life than just here in Florida.”

Shover’s sons had their first day of home school on Monday.