Help Kieryn Finish Their Associates Degree

I'm Kieryn Darkwater and you may know me from the Kitchen Table Cult podcast, the Coalition for Responsible Home Education, my writing Project 2025 for Prism, or about Christofascism at Autostraddle. If you know me from the podcast, you already know why I'm here, but if you're new, here's the TL;DR:

I need ~$12,000 to finish the associates degree path I started in 2017. $2800 is due by Jan 25, 2025 to enroll in the full-semester class I need.

I was an educationally neglected homeschooled kid and have spent my adulthood re-educating myself.

In 2017, I finally started an associates degree program at my community college after a decade of getting by as a freelancer with just my high school diploma. I was about a year and a half away from getting my AA when I had to drop out due to illness, and by the time I was well enough to return, COVID shut everything down. Shortly thereafter, my spouse and I were relocated to Germany.

Unfortunately, due to being homeschooled, my high school diploma isn't valid or accepted for admission to university in Germany, which means I cannot access the legendary public education system without some kind of proof that I have a legit education.

However, since I’ve been here, the community college I started at in 2017 has put many of the core classes I need to finish my AA online, and I can still enroll and participate in them from here as a student.

Which brings me to this GFM.

Right now my options are limited. I could: 1) spend the next year getting a GED and then I could dedicate myself to ??? number of years to get myself to the level of fluency in German required to enroll in an undergrad program here in Berlin, or 2) finish the AA requirements I need from the community college so that I can transfer to another online school and finish my BA remotely.

Since I'm so close to my first degree I've decided I'd rather finish that program, instead of starting over from scratch in a new language.

Here is where you come in:

Because I am doing school online, out of state, I have to pay a higher tuition rate than I did the first time I took classes at this college. Which means a full year of classes that (before) would have cost me about $1,150 alone, is now going to cost about $12,000 between tuition and books.

As a disabled freelancer I don't make that much money, and Germany heavily penalizes freelancers with a ridiculously high tax rate. As a result, a significant portion of the money I do make goes back to the German and US Governments. I can't both pay taxes (which have so far been almost 50% of my income combined) and also shoulder the additional expense of tuition for more classes (at ~$1,350/class) when I make approx. $14k/yr and still have regular bills to pay.

The amount I’ve set here as my target would pay for a full year of classes and access to books in 2025. This would be enough to allow me to complete my first AA in Social Sciences and participate in the 2026 graduation. Anything above that would go to the rest of the classes I need to meet the transfer requirements for a BA in communications elsewhere.

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The Longer Version

When I was 15 years old my parents told me that I had learned everything I needed to be a wife and mother, and therefore, I had graduated high school. It was December 2006. In May of 2007 I walked across the stage at the Georgia Homeschool Convention with about 100 other homeschooled teens and was handed the diploma my parents paid $10 for the convention to print on cardstock and put a shiny Deuteronomy 6:7 sticker on it. This is legally recognized as a valid diploma in all 50 US States.

I took no tests. There was no sign-off on my education by a certified teacher, and to my knowledge, no report to the State that I was no longer a student (this isn't always required! See the CRHE map of homeschool laws for more). I am a studious person and had been self-taught since I was 10. My math was atrocious because I couldn't teach that to myself and as the eldest daughter in a quiverfull family, my ADHD and learning disabilities were never flagged. My inability to understand pre-algebra eventually got my mom to throw the book at my face in rage and switch my math curriculum to "consumer math" (AKA: how to balance a checkbook and scale a recipe) because that was more practical and "wives don't need to use algebra".

For most of my adulthood I carried this shame with me: I felt like I was inherently not smart enough because that's what I was told was true of women. I'm not a woman, I'm not a wife, and I'm not a mother; and to be honest I have never wanted to be any of those things. But because I was born with a uterus to a family that believed in strict gender roles and "traditional family values", my educational path was incredibly limited from the start.

I am now in my 30s and still paying the price for my parents decision to homeschool me.

In 2013 I co-founded an organization with other homeschool alumni to help prevent my experience of educational neglect from happening to other homeschooled kids in the future. Children have the right to an education that prepares them for an open future, not one that limits their options once they leave the nest.

When I was 24, I was tired of feeling shame for my lack of mathematical education. I recognized that a lot of the skills you learn when you learn algebra are transferable: it's logic. When you realize that the most threatening thing to patriarchal power is any non-man thinking for themselves and being able to problem solve, it makes sense that higher math was removed from the table. So I took a remedial math class at a community college in Seattle and learned that I am actually good at it, and also do well in a classroom environment.

I got divorced and moved to the Bay Area when I was 25, and the following year started an immersive trades program for Industrial Maintenance and Machining. I wanted to get out of my comfort zone and learn and apply the maths and sciences I'd been denied access to when I was younger.

I was one of the few out trans people on campus at the beginning of Trump's first term. Anti-LGBT sentiment and bathroom fearmongering made it to my campus in my otherwise liberal city. As my transition progressed, using the gendered restrooms became less safe and the only all-gender toilets were in the admin building, a 10 minute round trip from the workshops I had my classes in. Instead of skipping valuable lab time or risking harassment for using the restroom, I only ate and drank enough to not pass out during the 8-10 hour days until I got home.

But I didn't stop there. I let that experience radicalize me and dedicated my spare time to making campus more openly safe for the LGBTQIA+ community. I knew I wasn't the only one suffering. By early 2018, I started the Laney Queers club which culminated in a district-wide queer prom, and from that the Lavender Project (which has now become the Queer Community Center on campus!) was born.

I became involved in Student government as a Senator, served as the Vice President of the Inter-Club Council, and participated in the Social Justice Student Organizer program to organize resources for undocumented students. I did all of this while battling health complications, maintaining a high GPA with a full course load, navigating late-diagnosed learning disabilities, freelancing for my day-job, and doing community organizing for housing off campus.

There have been a lot of ups-and-downs in the last almost-decade since I started this educational journey. It has been slow and taken up many of my therapy sessions. I have been really tempted to just give up, but it is impossible to make it in Germany as a disabled immigrant freelancer with no formal education to their name.

My dream is to eventually get a BA in Communications and learn enough German on the side that I could find myself a job in a union, organizing workers or building community here.

Because of how hard I've had to fight to access the most basic of education, I need to prove to myself that I can at least finish the degree path I started in 2017.

I can't do that without help.