09/19/2026
Long Island homeschooling has more than tripled since 2009. It’s rising again
Mike White • September 16, 2026
The numbers reveal a surprising pre-COVID surge
Long Island’s homeschooling population has more than tripled over the past 15 years, according to state data.
And after retreating from its pandemic-era peak, it is climbing again.
There were 4,093 homeschooled children across Nassau and Suffolk counties during the 2025-26 school year, according to a Greater Long Island analysis of district-level data published by the New York State Education Department.
That’s up from just 1,218 in 2009-10, an increase of 236%.
And while homeschooling numbers statewide have essentially leveled off, Long Island’s are still moving upward.
The Island’s home-instructed population increased from 3,575 children in 2023-24 to 3,828 the following school year before reaching 4,093 in 2025-26, a nearly 15% increase in two years.
Suffolk County accounts for more than two-thirds of the current Long Island total, with 2,803 children instructed at home. Nassau County had 1,290.
Statewide, by comparison, the number slipped slightly from 53,967 in 2024-25 to 53,905 last school year.
The numbers tell only part of the story.
For families who have made the switch, the reasons range from flexibility and individualized instruction to concerns about curriculum and state vaccination requirements, as well as the amount of control parents have over their children’s education.
• A different classroom
Maureen Carrig knows both sides of the district and homeschooling divide.
Carrig, who lives in the Longwood school district, spent 18 years as a public-school teacher, working in second, third and fifth grades, as well as special education.
She has homeschooled her 8-year-old son for five years.
For Carrig, one of the biggest advantages is the ability to tailor lessons to where a child is academically — rather than structuring an entire day around the needs and schedule of a classroom.
“We meet every kid where they’re at,” she told Greater Long Island.
That can also mean learning outside a traditional classroom. Carrig described incorporating gardening, cooking, tools, incubating chickens and hands-on history activities into her son’s education.
Homeschooling, however, doesn’t necessarily mean a child spends every day learning alone at the kitchen table.
Carrig is involved with the faith-based Rise Up Collaborative in Sayville, which she said serves about 50 students with six academic teachers, a physical education teacher and a music teacher, along with involvement from parents.
Homeschool cooperatives and similar programs allow families to pool instruction, activities and resources while giving children opportunities to regularly learn and socialize with other homeschooled students.
Carrig said homeschooling comes with its own challenges. Parents have to navigate state and district paperwork, find or provide instruction, arrange activities and, in many cases, figure out how to make the arrangement work while earning a living.
• The pre-COVID surge
Buried within the state’s 16 years of home-instruction data is a striking turn in the Long Island trend.
The biggest one-year surge didn’t come during the COVID-19 pandemic.
It came immediately before it.
The number of children instructed at home across Nassau and Suffolk jumped from 1,819 during the 2018-19 school year to 3,117 in 2019-20.
That was an increase of nearly 1,300 children — or more than 71% — in a single school year.
Greater Long Island asked NYSED whether a change in its collection or reporting process could have accounted for the sudden increase.
The department reviewed its BEDS Institutional Master File District collection materials for both school years and said they show the same general reporting structure.
“The materials do not indicate that the increase was due to a change in how districts reported or counted Children Instructed at Home,” NYSED’s Data Support Helpdesk Team told Greater Long Island.
The timing is notable for another reason.
On June 13, 2019, then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed legislation eliminating New York’s religious exemption from vaccination requirements for children attending public, private and parochial schools.
Medical exemptions remained, although the state later tightened and clarified the process for obtaining them.
Carrig said she believes those changes played a role in pushing some Long Island families toward homeschooling.
“A large majority of the homeschool population that I have encountered was looking for medical freedom,” she said. “After 2019, religious exemptions were removed completely and medical exemptions became increasingly difficult to get.”
She also pointed to families who believed the public-school system was failing their children “academically, emotionally, socially.”
To be sure, the state data does not identify why individual families choose home instruction and cannot establish that the 2019 vaccination-law change caused Long Island’s 71% increase.
What the data does establish is that the Island’s homeschooling surge was already well underway before COVID-19 closed school buildings across New York in March 2020.
The pandemic then accelerated it further.
Long Island’s home-instructed population climbed to 4,352 in 2020-21 and reached a high of 4,662 in 2021-22.
As schools returned to more normal operations, the number fell, reaching 3,575 in 2023-24.
Then it reversed course again.
The Island added 253 home-instructed children in 2024-25 and another 265 last school year, bringing the total back above 4,000 for the first time since 2021-22.
For Alex Vamos of Holbrook — owner of Vamos MMA, a Holbrook mixed martial arts studio — homeschooling his two sons was never about a single issue.
Vamos, whose boys are 4 and 6, said concerns about vaccination requirements and school curriculum factored into his family’s decision. But so did a particularly important advantage his family already had: his wife is a former teacher.
Having her teach their sons made homeschooling an appealing option, Vamos said, as did the freedom to educate them from different places and organize school around the family’s schedule.
His own perception of homeschooling also changed before his family took the plunge. Vamos, like many, once associated it with children spending their days isolated at home and missing out socially. But the homeschooled children he encountered through friends and the broader community struck him as articulate, smart, creative and social.
Today, he said, homeschool communities, groups and co-ops give children regular opportunities to spend time with other kids.
• What the numbers mean
What the growth says about New York’s public schools, if anything, is less clear.
Zilvinas Silenas, president and CEO of the Albany-based Empire Center for Public Policy, has argued that families should have substantially more freedom to choose alternatives to their local district schools.
Silenas said Long Island generally performs better academically than New York as a whole, but cautioned against viewing the comparison in isolation.
“Long Island performs better than New York on average, but unfortunately, the New York average is a low bar,” he told Greater Long Island.
In a recent Newsday commentary, Silenas pointed to national assessment results showing New York trailing Mississippi in fourth-grade reading and Alabama in fourth-grade math. He has also argued that Long Island’s roughly $35,000 in per-pupil spending, nearly twice the national average of about $18,000, should produce stronger results.
Silenas also believes some families would choose homeschooling regardless of the alternatives available.
“I suspect there is a subset of parents who would choose homeschooling over any other option,” Silenas said.
• He also argued that COVID exposed more parents to what their children were learning each day, contributing to dissatisfaction among some families.
But homeschooling comes with its own considerations.
Dr. Connie McReynolds, a licensed psychologist, told Greater Long Island that co-ops, sports, clubs and other activities can provide meaningful social experiences for homeschooled children, particularly when they participate consistently and develop ongoing relationships.
“The difference is that these experiences may need to be created more intentionally,” McReynolds said.
Traditional schools naturally expose children to the same peers repeatedly and require them to interact with people they might not otherwise choose, she said, providing opportunities to learn cooperation, conflict resolution, leadership, compromise and independence.
“Those experiences can occur outside of school, but they generally need to be deliberately built into the child’s life,” McReynolds said.
• Across the Island
The growth is not concentrated in one corner of Long Island.
Sachem reported 194 children instructed at home during 2025-26, the largest raw total of any Long Island district, followed by Longwood with 188, William Floyd with 169, Middle Country with 160 and Patchogue-Medford with 124.
South Country reported 92, Riverhead 90, Levittown and Smithtown 85 each, and Brentwood 78.
Those figures require context.
Many of the districts with the highest raw numbers of home-instructed children are also among Long Island’s larger school districts. But those numbers are not simply a snapshot of where things stand today. Several of the districts reporting the most homeschooled children have seen their counts grow substantially over the past 15 years.
Sachem’s count increased from 53 children in 2009-10 to 194 last school year. Middle Country went from 43 to 160. William Floyd increased from 53 to 169, Longwood from 73 to 188 and Patchogue-Medford from 31 to 124.
For families considering making the switch, Carrig said the decision ultimately comes down to what parents believe is right for their children.
Vamos offered one more consideration: Homeschooling is a big commitment for parents, too.
“You have to do the work,” he said.
— Jayden Meadows contributed reporting to this article
