From the one-room schoolhouse in Ballard to the patios and parlors of Montecito’s glitterati, Maili Halme Brocke has traveled a winding road of hard work and well-deserved opportunities. Today, she channels her culinary talents into a prosperous catering business, while deftly cultivating her children’s well-being and future success through the simple magic of home-schooling.
“My oldest daughter, Melissa, is dyslexic,” Brocke explains, “and at school she was silent and would hide in the bathroom. After all kinds of meetings with her teachers, I realized she’s smart, wonderful and artistic, but that the public schools just couldn’t address her needs.
“I cried for a year when I realized I’d have to give up my career,” she continues. “It felt like I was jumping off a cliff.
“After I made my decision to homeschool,” she continues, “I got a call to cater a big, celebrity party before school started, and I saw it as a sign that I’d made the right decision.”
Since that day nearly four years ago, Brocke has adjusted her schedule to accommodate catering jobs during the summer and a full schedule of home-schooling throughout the academic year. Her children, and her business, continue to thrive, growing in tandem under her inspired guidance.
Even though Brocke’s younger daughter, Katherine, was doing well in public school, she asked to be home-schooled, too. She spent a year at home, returned to the classroom for third grade, but enjoyed home-schooling so much that Brocke let her re-join her sister when she reached fourth grade.
“Each day, we do the academic part that’s required by law from 8:30 to 1:00, with a half-hour break for lunch,” Brocke says. “After one o’clock, the girls play games in their room, ride bikes, or do gymnastics. Often we go to the library or the park, where they offer innovative programs, like chess club and the Wilderness Youth Project.”
One of Brocke’s teaching methods involves scanning the calendar for birthdays of famous people, finding where on the globe they were born and then studying their lives, whether it’s Buddy Holly, Alice Walker or Franklin Roosevelt.
“One time we chose the artist Jacques-Louis David,” Brocke says. “He painted Napoleon, so we went on to learn about Napoleon.
“We go where curiosity leads us,” she continues. “It’s not memorizing and then having it go out of your head. There’s a personal connection, there’s meaning to it. It’s amazing, because things we did years ago, the girls are still solid with.”
During the course of their studies, the trio realized that about 50% of the people they had randomly chosen, including Ansel Adams and Andy Warhol, had been homeschooled. Delighted, Melissa told her mother, “Don’t you know that every famous person was home-schooled!”
Free to organize her own curriculum, Brocke has taken both girls to Hawaii, Indiana, Chicago, and during summer jaunts, to England and France.
She finds her children absorb more information about a place while traveling through it and she augments their learning by playing audio books during road time.
“People always ask about the girls’ social life,” Brocke says, “but I’ve found that home-schooled kids have lots of friends. In public school, they’re stuck with the same 20 kids all day, but at homeschool events and holiday parties there are 70 or more kids. And they’re all sweet, creative kids who aren’t worried about being cool.”
Since beginning home-schooling, Brocke, who lives in Ventura with her husband and daughters, has discovered that over half the mothers in her area’s home-schooling group hold teaching credentials.
She has joined two book clubs organized by the parents and, even better, reports that Melissa now sings while doing her math, is an exceptional artist, and has proved so good at chess that she can set up a play three moves ahead.
“So many people who have kids in public school,” Brocke says, “don’t know what to do with them when they’re home. With home-schooling, there’s something so wonderful and peaceful about being with your kids, you want to be together more.”
According to Brocke, there are “hundreds of thousands” of parents home-schooling their children in California. Her advice to anyone considering it is to “dive in, there’s more support out there than they dreamed. If they like learning, they’ll love it and it’ll be better for their kids, too.”
Brocke recalls attending Ballard School and notes that, with 36 children in six grades studying in a single room, the experience was curiously similar to that of home-schooling.
One of her Ballard classmates was the son of the owners of The Ballard Store restaurant, and Brocke remembers the thrill of heading over to the restaurant for one day each year.
“We got to be the cooks, waiters, guests,” Brocke smiles, “and I, of course, chose to be in the kitchen. It was so magical and had such an impact on me. I’ve always been hungry,” she laughs, “and I’ve always been fascinated with cooking.”
That fascination was likely inherited, for her maternal grandfather was a chef and owned Bray’s 101, in Goleta, while her grandmother, who lives in Solvang, regularly whipped up recipes from Gourmet magazine.
On her father’s side, her Finnish grandmother earned passage to New York by selling her home-baked bread to local woodsmen. “She made the best ham, roast beef, potatoes,” Brocke says. “I learned good basics from her and the value of simplicity, like using just one or two ingredients and that a dish doesn’t need 100 spices.”
Brocke admits that one of the secrets to her culinary success is that she makes her delicacies from scratch, prepping for her celebrity parties in the kitchen of her parents’ Solvang Bakery.
She uses pure, wholesome ingredients, prepares fried chicken with real buttermilk and astonishes clients by using fresh lemons in the lemonade. And she’s grateful to have struck a dynamic balance that works for her both as a popular caterer and an effective parent. Through the magic of home-schooling, she can cultivate her career, while spending precious time exploring the world of learning with her children.