“We believe in ‘Whole’-listic education, meaning we focus on the whole child-mind, body, and spirit,” said Tremon Muhammad, creator and founder of the Black Star Academy (BSA), believed to be one of the first culturally centered home schooling collectives in the state. “Our educational program deals with the whole human being. We are big on academics, but we also deal with character and moral development.”
Part of the holistic curriculum means students participate in morning exercises, which can include yoga and meditation. “On Mondaymornings, we start our day with Kemetic Yoga and meditate on African proverbs … because you never know,” said April Muhammad, Tremon’s wife, who is director of the BSA. “Sometimes people have crazy weekends, or the children may come in with attitudes, so you want to make sure you check their spirits so that they can decompress before going into the classroom.”
More African-American families have embraced home schooling and are choosing it as an alternative for their children. An estimated 220,000 African-American children are currently being home schooled, according to the National Home Education Research Institute. Black families have become one of the fastest-growing demographics in home schooling, with their children making up an estimated 10 percent of the home schooling population, according to a 2015 article in The Atlantic magazine.
“A lot of people are having trouble with many of the changes in the public-school system,” Tremon Muhammad said. Tremon and April Muhammad founded Birmingham’s BSA in 2015 to “give parents an alternative outside of the current educational system.”
Another quality that sets BSA apart: “Everyone does not learn the same way, so there shouldn’t be a cookie-cutter approach to education,” she said. “Most importantly, we teach [our students] that they are math, they are science, they are history. Subjects are easier to grasp when they are learned from the inside out rather than from the outside in.”
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