My wife and I did much the same thing when we enrolled our daughter in a similar program. It’s a structured, online school called Stanford Online High School. It’s schooling is at home, but technically is not “homeschooling“. She has formal classes that are managed with software similar to Skype but geared to emulating a normal classroom situation. Class-size is small, they are given scheduled lectures as in any other class, and they have collaborative projects like at any other school.
Rapport with instructors (most of whom are affiliated with Stanford University) is excellent. This is so at least for my daughter since she takes advantage of her teachers' online office hours every week. She would usually get what was essentially private, weekly tutoring as few students ever took advantage of it.
The course work can be as basic or as advanced as desired although all classes are challenging. Her classes generally only meet for 15 or so hours a week and her class schedules are extremely flexible as the school has to accommodate kids from all over the world in all time zones. The rest of her time is hers.
Most of the kids who go to SOHS are high performers academically and they’re able to supplement their academic experience with other non-traditional methods such as additional university classes. One of her (freakishly smart) schoolmates joined a graduate level study group at Cal Tech which her father drove him to several times a week. He has co-authored academic papers and even presented some of the groups cutting edge work at a conference in nanotechnology. My daughter was able to take advanced classes in mathmatics (which her instructors call “maths” like the British). She’s taken multivariate calculus, and linear algebre. Now as a senior she’s taking differential equations, advanced logic, and number theory. None of this would have been possible in a public school setting. She’s taken economics courses including a “reading” class which would be typical for an upper division or graduate leveel college course.
What’s interesting is that many of the kids are NOT academically inclined. Her best friend attends so she can pursue her love of ballet. She is able to spend over 20 hours per week doing this (more when she's gearing up for a performance). Other kids do it out of a love of sports. Several classmates are Olympics-bound. One of her classmates is a successful child actor some of you may have seen.
The students do have a PE requirement which my daughter fulfilled through jiu-jitsu classes three or more times a week. When Rener Gracie first learned why she was enrolling in his school, his response was “Dang! Why couldn’t I do PE this way!”
Home schooling is not easy as I'm sure Nick and his wife can tell you. We tried it with our daughter for six months years ago and for various reasons we sucked at it. The point in this overly long post is that even for parents who aren't able to take on the incredible responsibility of designing and teaching a curriculum for their homeschooled child, there are other good options to achieve the objectives of getting your kids out of government schools. Quality, tailored academics, outside interests, and enhanced family life were all advantages we were able to reap. Schools like SOHS are not cheap but are cheaper than other brick and mortar private schools...and they're out there.