For Stephanie Lovett, a Maricopa mother of four, there will be no back-to-school nights or parent-teacher conferences. She doesn't need to purchase extra tissue boxes for the class or navigate through student drop-off traffic.

Lovett's kids are quietly back in homeschooling.

In Arizona, an estimated 22,500 students are being homeschooled, including more than 9,300 in Maricopa County.

The growth has been dramatic.

In 1989, there were 750 homeschooled children in metro Phoenix, according to the Maricopa County Education Service Agency. That number peaked at 10,775 in 2005.

"A lot of families are second-generation homeschoolers," said Carol Shippy, board member of Arizona Families for Home Education, one of the state's largest homeschooling organizations. "We're starting to see a lot of people that are grandparents that homeschooled with their kids who are now homeschooling."

A major growth area in homeschooling is among high-school students - a group that typically leaves homeschooling for public and private schools.

"I think that it mostly hinges on the fact that the high-school-level curriculum is more challenging," Shippy said.

Families that were once anxious about homeschooling during the high-school years are discovering new resources.

"There is no issue any longer with access to high-quality materials or information," she said. "A financially challenged family can provide so much through the Internet and public libraries. Some excellent institutions are putting up lectures on YouTube."

About 1.2 million youths are homeschooled nationally, said Luis Huerta, an education-policy professor at Columbia University's Teachers College.

"The latest numbers from the feds report that homeschooling has grown about 30 percent in the last 10 years," he said. "That's pretty significant."

In Maricopa County, families interested in homeschooling must file affidavits with the county Education Service Agency.

Tracking homeschoolers in other counties is not as easy, Huerta said.

"Homeschoolers have been elusive for many years and often been unwilling to participate in these surveys," he said. "But now we have better data-tracking systems."

Parents seeking autonomy in their child's education are fueling the homeschooling growth, Shippy said, as evidenced by the 5,000-plus families that attended a homeschooling convention in Phoenix.

Those families do not receive any government funds, so their kids' education is not under government scrutiny.

"Oversight of homeschooled students, such as tracking their academic progress or whether homeschooling is indeed being provided, is not a power/duty given to county superintendents by Arizona state statute," said Tracey Benson, spokeswoman for the county Education Service Agency.

Shippy's organization does not support the use of public funds for homeschooling, but that doesn't make it hostile to publicly funded education.

"We know that our taxes fund the public schools (and) that public schools are a good thing for the community," Shippy said. "We don't seek to tweak the nose of the public-school system or other parents who use public schools."

Cindy Fox, governing board member of the Home Education Network of Arizona, agrees.

"The more choices people have, the better. I support whatever works for people - charter, public, private, online, whatever," she said. "I just don't think there's one answer for every family."

For Diana Hayes, the answer is with parents.

Hayes is director of North Valley Phoenix Classical Conversations, an affiliate of a national homeschooling network focused on classical education.

"Parents know their children better than anyone knows their children," said Hayes, a former private-school teacher. "And they can speak to that through educating them at home and identifying their interest and teaching to their child's style of learning."

Lovett leads Tempe's Classical Conversations. Although her 13-year-old son often works alone, she homeschools her 4-, 7- and 11-year-olds together.

"There's a common misconception that homeschoolers are not socialized, but I would say that homeschooling mirrors real life in many ways in that we are not usually surrounded by peers of our own age," said Lovett, who is in her eighth year of homeschooling. "Homeschoolers interact with a variety of ages and backgrounds and learn to get along with people older and younger than themselves."

Debbie Wiener, a Scottsdale mother of four, enjoys the freedom to homeschool on a schedule that fits her children's needs. While she homeschooled through the summer, other families started after Labor Day.

"We had a lot of time on our hands (in the summer) and I just felt like we could be using our time more wisely," said Wiener, president of Eastside Explorers, a northeast Valley homeschooling organization. "We can take more breaks when we need them and it makes us better students and teachers."

The growth of online charter schools and online education in public schools could redefine homeschooling, professor Huerta says. While the academic progress of Arizona's homeschooled students is not tracked, he said home education that is publicly funded should be better-monitored by state government agencies.

"A lot of people aren't even aware that public resources are sponsoring private homeschooling," he said. "There's a lack of accountability and oversight of what is going on in homeschool charters."

Arizona laws define homeschooling as a non-public school conducted primarily by the parent or legal guardian, Shippy said.

"Homeschooling is family-funded," Shippy said. "This causes strife among our community, because parents who enroll in a full-time, distance-education program think they are homeschooling when they are not."

The Home Education Network of Arizona includes kids in publicly funded online education, but Fox does not consider that homeschooling in the most traditional sense.

"It is important to separate online charter schools," she said. "They are not homeschooling. I tell them (parents) you can do that, but that's a charter school. Their kids are being schooled at home, but that's not the same."