Listen to Executive Director, Rachel Coleman’s interview with KNX1070 opposite Mike Smith of HSLDA.
Transcript below:
TRANSCRIPT BEGINS AT 00:16.
CHARLES FELDMAN: Inspections: Would inspections have discovered the home in Perris where thirteen siblings were found in torturous conditions, not enough food, some chained to furniture? The house was a home school, but in California no inspections are required except for the fire department and even that apparently did not happen. So, we will go in depth. Also, it’s not every day that the President of the United States is compared with the former Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, but today is that day. It was an extraordinary speech by a Republican US Senator on the floor of the US Senate.
MIKE SIMPSON: Later on we’ll be talking about two stabbing deaths, a college student over winter break and a transgender woman, and the hate crime investigations that could surround them. And then as the President hands out his fake news awards, many Americans really don’t know the difference between real news and what’s fake.
(01:07)
FELDMAN: We begin with the tragedy in Riverside County. Thirteen brothers and sisters found malnourished in what authorities described as “their filthy family home.” Some of them chained to their beds, their parents under arrest, the big question – how could this happen, and why didn’t anybody outside know?
SIMPSON: So these siblings were homeschooled by their parents. So in hindsight many are asking, why weren’t there inspections – some rules for homeschooling that might have shed light on this situation? We have two guests: Rachel Coleman, executive director of the Coalition for Responsible Home Education, and Mike Smith, attorney for the Home School Legal Defense Association.
FELDMAN: So Rachel, let’s begin with you. As I understand it, you were homeschooled. But, and I know that states differ, should a state such as California have apparently no, or if there are any, very little, regulations that would require some sort of state input, some sort of state inspection into these so-called home schools?
RACHEL COLEMAN: Hi, yes, so we have a set of policy recommendations you make- that we make, but I think to understand our position – we are actually – our board is all homeschool graduates. And we founded our organization in 2013 because we kept seeing cases like this. This is not the first case like this, not the only case like this, and as homeschool graduates we were sort of appalled to see this education method that had served us, in some cases, well – my own experience, I had a great education – to see it used to hide abuse in these ways. And so we do call for accountability. We tend to call for accountability in ways that reflect the sorts of things responsible homeschooling parents already do. We would like to see, for example, mandated annual doctor visits, and annual assessments by a certified teacher. These would be points of contact with a mandatory reporter that could have identified these children’s situation, especially with as malnourished as they were.
SIMPSON: So Mike, Rachel says that her group kept seeing cases like this one. Do you think there needs to be more rules out there to prevent this kind of thing?
MIKE SMITH: Well, I think there, I think there needs to be a better, better way to address child abuse and neglect, but I don’t see that as the same thing as homeschooling. In other words, there – in order to prevent child abuse, you can’t prevent all of it, but to do a better job, basically you have to try to figure out what the risk factors are. And homeschooling has never been declared a risk factor by the Mayo Clinic, which has done research on this. The [muffled], the World Health Organization and the US Congress basically commissioned a study in 2014 to eliminate child abuse and neglect fatalities and they found that the number one risk factor is whether a family has been investigated previously or they have – they’re under suspicion of child abuse and neglect. And homeschooling, in none of these studies, in none of these surveys, has been mentioned as a prime risk factor for abuse and neglect. So that’s where I take issue with what’s being proposed with the kind of regulations – especially the regulations I’ve heard, and I hope Rachel would even agree with me on this – inspections of the home. In other words, we’re talking about basically a Fourth Amendment issue. So I do not believe that all of the fine homeschool families in California, and there are thousands of them, should have to be subjected to this added regulation because of what this family did.
FELDMAN: Well Mike, and let me, and then we’ll get to Rachel’s response, but let me ask you. Whatever studies may or may not have shown, and I’m not going to dispute that from the past, I think you would agree that even one horrific case such as the one that we are talking about here is one too many. So, so long as the regulations are not too onerous, what would be the objection? Everything in life is regulated. You can’t drive a car without regulations, you can’t get married without regulations, you can’t get divorced without regulations. Why not have some regulations that would at least give some sort of protection to students who may be, if not abused by their parents, perhaps just not well educated by their parents?
SMITH: Well, I would say that, I disagree with your statement if you could just eliminate one-
[crosstalk in italics]
FELDMAN: (no, no I didn’t say)
SMITH: I would like to eliminate all
FELDMAN: no I didn’t say that
SMITH: I would like to eliminate
FELDMAN: Go ahead
SMITH: -to eliminate all child abuse and neglect, just like everybody here would. This is abhorrent to me, because I’m in homeschooling because I love children. But I also believe that the liberty issue is important for the rest of the families that are not abusing and neglecting their children, especially when you, you’re talking about the need for individualized education and a tutorial method of education. If we’re going to have the state come in, you’re gonna [muffled], you’re going to see that the test scores that are tremendously high right now on standardized achievement tests by homeschooled families could suffer as a result, and so I see no need to, to bring further regulation. Especially, I’m really concerned about this proposal that’s coming forth that, that homes would be inspected. That’s, that’s just not acceptable.
SIMPSON: Alright, Mike, let’s put you on hold for a second again and get Rachel’s response here. Rachel, doctor’s visits or test scores and standardized tests aside, let’s concentrate on the state coming and knocking on the door and doing the inspection for a second, do you think that should be happening?
COLEMAN: We do not support home visits for these cases. We believe that the primary emphasis in a case like this should be ensuring that they have contact with mandatory reporters. And we believe we can do this by having annual assessments by certified teachers and also regular doctor visits. These kids were so malnourished, that would have been picked up. I do want to touch on a few of the things that Mike Smith just said. First of all, risk factors. Every one, every one of these reports he just mentioned list isolation as a risk factor, and there is no better way to isolate a child than to homeschool them. Now I want to be clear – most homeschooling families do not isolate their children. I was not isolated – I was homeschooled. But there was a study in 2014 by Barbara Knox that found that – specifically she was looking at child torture cases, child abuse so severe you could call it torture – and for the school age cases she looked at, 47% of them involved children who were pulled out of school to be homeschooled, followed by an increase in isolation and an escalation of the abuse. So ,you know, clearly the isolation that homeschooling can enable in these abusive cases is a risk factor. I also want to mention the issue of risk factors being previous investigations by, of the family, by social services. That’s absolutely something we’ve found true in the cases in our database. That’s one of the reasons we recommend requiring a background check for homeschooling parents to check: was there a previous case of child abuse that was founded by a judge – or were children removed from the home in the past? And I want to mention that Mike Smith’s organization has opposed these measures. So he’s sitting there saying that he thinks that we should pay attention to risk factors like previous investigations – they oppose background checks to ensure that families previously founded with child abuse, previously convicted with child abuse, they opposed these regulations, or these proposals, to bar these families from homeschooling when there were these risk factors present. So I don’t think there’s complete honesty there. Also his comment about standardized tests wasn’t fully honest. Homeschooled children, there are no standardized test scores that you can look at for all homeschooled children, because they’re not required to be tested. The studies –
SIMPSON: Okay we’re going to have to hold you there because we do have to take a break, and when KNX In Depth continues we will have a lot more on this unique story.
(END SECTION ONE)
SECTION TWO
(00:07)
FELDMAN: You’re listening to KNX In Depth with Mike Simpson, I’m Charles Feldman.
SIMPSON: As we continue our discussion, a reminder: coming up after news and traffic at the bottom of the hour, a look at two crimes. Did arguments lead to the stabbing deaths of a college student home for winter break and a transgender woman or were they hate crimes? And then: President Trump calls it fake news but many Americans, they don’t know the difference between what’s news and what’s news with a spin.
FELDMAN: Okay, so we’re going to go back to our discussion about what happened in Riverside County with those thirteen siblings who were found in, at home in deplorable conditions. They were being homeschooled, and the question on the table is whether inspections, some kind of inspections, might have found this, discovered this, at a much earlier state. We had been talking with Rachel Coleman, who’s Executive Director of the Coalition for Responsible Home Education, and Mike Smith who’s an attorney for the Home School Legal Defense Association. Uh, you know, we can go back and forth – which in fact we’ve been doing – on studies and each of you can probably cite a study that is in opposition to the other person’s study. I don’t want to get involved in that too much at this point, I want to just confine our discussion to this one particular case that happened at this one particular house, where it happened that these particular children and young adults were homeschooled where there was no real inspection, no intervention, from local or state authorities, and what in each of your opinions could have been, should have been done to perhaps prevent that. Mike, why don’t you take a crack at that?
SMITH: Okay, thank you. In, in California, in order to be a legal home school, you have to file a private school affidavit or be involved in some other program, oversight program. But like this family, they filed a private school affidavit, and they have to comply under penalty of perjury that they’re going to comply with what that private school affidavit says. Now, had anyone reported this family, had suspected something because their children – one of the reports I saw was that at 2:00 in the morning one of the children was out doing, I think they were planting sod in the front of the yard there. So let’s say a neighbor would have been concerned, I never see these kids out, I never see them go to school. If they called the public school or the department of social services, they would be obligated to go out and confirm that this family in fact had children, be able to see the children, and determine that they were legally being homeschooled, meaning they had filed a private school affidavit. If that had happened in this case, I’m assuming that there would have been an investigation and that this probably wouldn’t have happened. So that was available and it’s something that didn’t happen, and I think some of the neighbors are obviously wishing they had done what they kind of thought they should have done.
SIMPSON: You don’t always know your neighbors though, and we’ve talked about that on this program. Does the state not have some sort of responsibility for these kids though? They’ve got to make sure they’re getting, number one, a good education. So I mean, how do you make sure that home schooling isn’t being used as a way to shield kids from anyone’s oversight, as Rachel has pointed out?
SMITH: Well, the state is not responsible for these children’s education. Because they’re being privately educated. The state has an interest in seeing that every child either becomes literate or self-sufficient when they graduate. So the responsibility was with the parents, and this is the way homeschooling is done in all the states. In some states it’s more regulated than others and some of the states are less regulated than California. So I dis- I don’t think that this a homeschool case. This is an abuse and neglect situation, and to bring homeschooling in is unfair to all the other families in California that are very responsibly homeschooling their children.
FELDMAN: Well Rachel, do you agree with Mike that it’s unfair to bring in the setting in which all of this occurred, which was a home school setting? Do you think that that is not relevant to the discussion?
COLEMAN: It is completely relevant. If those children had been in school, someone would have noticed that they were constantly hungry, that they were behaving weird socially. A teacher would have said something. Those children ended up in that situation because they were homeschooled. Without homeschooling, their parents could not have done that. And I also disagree with the idea that the state has no interest here. Every child has the right to an education, and the state has a responsibility to protect the rights of its citizens, and that includes children. So the state absolutely has a role here.
SIMPSON: Why is it hard to get more regulations passed? I mean there are some lawmakers that are talking about it now after this case, but is there a, is there a homeschool lobby that fights back?
COLEMAN: Yeah, Mike Smith’s homeschool lobby –
SIMPSON: Mike’s group?
COLEMAN: – the Home School Legal Defense Association. They oppose regulation every step of the way. They are the reason that these bills keep getting shot down.
(crosstalk)
FELDMAN: I’m just curious – yeah, Mike,
SMITH: Can I defend my, can I defend myself there –
FELDMAN: Yeah, Mike, go ahead, sure.
SMITH: Well, I’m not the only one, HSLDA’s not the only one. Every state organization that is involved in homeschooling, that I’m aware of, takes the same position we do. That this is a liberty issue and unless it can be proven that home – that parents are not responsibly teaching their children at home, the state has no interest. They do if that can be proven, but that requires probable cause and reasonable suspicion. So, and the other thing is the, whether we like it or not, in America, there’s no fundamental right for a child to have an education. Do I believe they should be? Absolutely. That’s the reason I’m in homeschooling, because I wanted my children to have a superior education, and they got it because my wife taught them, quite frankly. And that’s the reason most families are involved in homeschooling, they want their children to have an excellent education and they want to be able to guide them and direct them. And if you bring the state in, once they get involved, and this has been our experience in representing families for over 35 years, the state simply wants to take more and more of that liberty. And liberty, without liberty, homeschooling will not exist.
FELDMAN: But Mike, let me ask you something. You’re an attorney, and you know that the state, every state really, has some extraordinary powers when it concerns certain individuals, children in particular for example, states can take children away from parents if it can be proven that the parents are harmful to the health and wellbeing of their children. So if the state is vested with that sort of authority vis-à-vis children, why shouldn’t it have the right to make sure that children who are being homeschooled, are being homeschooled in an environment that is one that is helpful for them both physically and mentally?
SMITH: Well, because that’s what California has right now. The private school exemption. The legislature has determined that this is sufficient to protect the state’s interest. And as I indicated before, California is not an aberration, there are other states that are very much like California, there are some states that have more regulation, and several that have less. There are even states that don’t require notice. So we can’t say that California is out of step. So I’m just saying that this is basically a situation where we’re either going to recognize the liberty of parents to direct the education of their children, or we’re going to let the state come in and eventually they will determine how these children are educated.
DV HOST: Alright, that’s Mike Smith, attorney for the Home School Legal Defense Association. We also heard from Rachel Coleman, executive director of the Coalition for Responsible Home Education.
Last Updated: 30 October, 2023 by Rachel Coleman
Hawaii SB 2323 Is a Positive Step toward Protecting Homeschooled Children
For Immediate Release: Senate Bill 2323 is a productive response to a nationwide pattern of abusive parents misusing homeschooling to hide abuse
Canton, Ma. 02/07/2018—This week, Hawaii State Senator Kaiali’i Kahele introduced Senate Bill 2323, which would create a screening process designed to ensure that children with elevated risk factors are not removed from school to be homeschooled. Kahele told reporters that he introduced the bill in response the tragic 2016 starvation death of 9-year-old Shaelynn Lehano, who lived in his Hilo district. “We are pleased with Sen. Kahele’s proposal and urge the Hawaii legislature to put homeschooled children first by supporting SB 2323,” said Rachel Coleman, executive director of the Coalition for Responsible Home Education (CRHE), a national nonprofit organization that advocates for homeschooled children. “Homeschooling should be used to lovingly prepare children for an open future, and not as an avenue for abusive parents to isolate children and conceal torture and abuse.”
Under SB 2323, the complex area superintendent would run a background check on each individual residing in a home upon the receipt of a notification of intent to homeschool; families with a history of child abuse or neglect would have their notification of intent denied. In the bill’s introduction, Kahele references “Peter Boy” Kema, who died in 1997 after his parents were allowed to homeschool him despite their history of child abuse and neglect. Shaelynn’s case was eerily similar. In a 2014 study of child torture, Barbara Knox, a pediatrician at the University of Wisconsin, found that 47% of the school-aged victims she examined had been removed from school to be homeschooled, an act “designed to further isolate the child” that “typically occurred after closure of a previously opened CPS case.”
CRHE maintains the Homeschooling’s Invisible Children database, which catalogues cases across the country where abuse and neglect occur under the guise of homeschooling. In many of these cases, parents withdrew a child to homeschool after teachers demonstrated a willingness to report signs of abuse, thus preventing future reports. “We have seen case after case where abusive parents have used homeschooling to conceal abuse,” said Coleman.
Currently, two states bar homeschooling based on certain risk factors. Pennsylvania bars parents from homeschooling when an adult in the household has committed a crime that would prevent them from teaching in a public school; Arkansas prohibits homeschooling when there is a registered sex offender in the home. SB 2323 would make Hawaii a national leader in the protection of homeschooled children. The background check and flagging process proposed by Sen. Kahele is in line with CRHE’s recommendations.
“Previous child welfare services involvement is one of the top risk factors for future abuse,” said Coleman. “Children at elevated risk of child abuse should have access to mandatory reporters and a support system.”
The Coalition for Responsible Home Education is a national organization founded by homeschool alumni and dedicated to raising awareness of the need for homeschooling reform, providing public policy guidance, and advocating for responsible home education practices.
Last Updated: 30 October, 2023 by CRHE
New Hampshire: Don’t Exempt Homeschooled Children from the Protection of Child Labor Laws
For Immediate Release: Exempting homeschooled children from the state’s child labor laws renders them vulnerable to exploitation
Canton, Ma., 01/25/2018—Lawmakers in New Hampshire are considering legislation—House Bill 1321—that would exempt homeschooled children from the bulk of the state’s child labor law. “Homeschooled children, like other children, need time for their studies,” said Rachel Coleman, executive director of the Coalition for Responsible Home Education, a national nonprofit organization that advocates for homeschooled children. “Work experience is not a substitute for K-12 education. Children’s education and opportunities should not be limited by formative years spent working instead of studying.”
HB 1321 exempts “youth receiving home education” pursuant to the state’s homeschool law from sections IV, VI, and VIII of the state’s child labor law. These sections lay out the hours children may work. Children 15 and under are barred from working before 7 a.m. or after 9 p.m. in order to protect their sleep, and may work no more than three hours per school day, 23 hours per week during school weeks, and 48 hours per week during school vacations. Children ages 16 and 17 from may work no more than 30 hours per week during school weeks and 48 hours per week during school vacations (with no limits on when they can work). HB 1321 would exempt homeschooled children from these protections entirely.
“We understand that children who are homeschooled are often able to work different hours from other children,” said Coleman. For homeschooled children ages 16 and 17, she noted, state law already allows for this flexibility. “This bill is not about acknowledging different school hours,” Coleman added. “HB 1321 would allow a child of 14, 15, or 16 to work full time, 40 hours per week or more, for the entire year, allowing little or no time for their education.”
CRHE is aware of multiple cases of child labor violations in homeschool settings, including teens required to work full time year round in farm labor, construction, or house-cleaning businesses. In numerous cases CRHE is familiar with, these children have not had adequate time to complete their studies, resulting in educational neglect that followed them long into adulthood, limiting their career options. Under HB 1321, such situations would not be child labor violations; instead, they would be legal.
HB 1321 would turn homeschooling from a child-centered educational option into a loophole from child labor protections, to the detriment of vulnerable teens. This is especially the case in a state like New Hampshire, where parents are not required to show evidence that they are providing their children an education. “If HB 1321 becomes law, there would be nothing in in the state’s statutes to prevent a parent from homeschooling solely so that they could require a child of fourteen or fifteen to work full time,” warned Coleman.
“Children who are homeschooled may receive their education at home, but they still need time to receive an education,” said Coleman. “We urge the lawmakers of New Hampshire not to exempt homeschooled children wholesale from the state’s child labor protections.”
The Coalition for Responsible Home Education is a national organization founded by homeschool alumni and dedicated to raising awareness of the need for homeschooling reform, providing public policy guidance, and advocating for responsible home education practices.
Last Updated: 9 June, 2023 by Rachel Coleman
Homeschooling and Child Abuse: A Response to Ray and Other Apologists
January 25, 2018
On January 14, 2018, news broke that the thirteen children of David and Louise Turpin, ages 2 to 29, had been imprisoned for years in a California home-turned-prison under the guise of homeschooling. Nine days later, Brian Ray published an article on his website purporting to find that homeschooled children experience abuse at a lower rate than do other students. Ray argues that no laws should be changed to protect homeschooled children like the Turpins’ from the prolonged torture they experienced. However, to reach this conclusion, Ray both misrepresents evidence and leaves out studies that contradict his conclusions.
Before we begin, a word about Ray. Brian Ray is a former homeschool father who runs the National Home Education Research Institute, which effectively acts as a research arm for the Home School Legal Defense Association, an organization that opposes oversight of homeschooling. Ray has been widely criticized by researchers for relying too heavily on his own research and at the same time wildly misrepresenting his own findings.
Ray’s Bias
In this piece, Ray sets out to examine whether child abuse rates among homeschooled students compare to child abuse rates among other students. “A recent thorough search of available literature has resulted in identifying only three published reports relevant to whether the abuse of public school and private school children happens at a lower, similar, or higher rate than for homeschool children,” he writes. What are these three studies?
The first study Ray refers to is one conducted by Rodger Williams that Ray calls “original research.” The second study is Ray’s own survey of homeschool graduates, a study that did not use a random sample (meaning that it cannot be generalized to all homeschoolers) and asked only one question related to abuse. Ray refers to the third study, CRHE’s analysis of cases from our Homeschooling’s Invisible Children (HIC) database, as “a report using publicly available data.” But far from conducting original research, Williams actually relied on the incomplete numbers from CRHE’s analysis. Bafflingly, Ray keeps this information from his readers, presenting the two as entirely independent studies.
Ray writes that Williams “used information from one organization that promotes more government regulation of homeschooling.” After devoting ten paragraphs to discussing Williams’ analysis, Ray spends a single paragraph discussing CRHE’s treatment. He does not identify CRHE as the organization Williams drew his data from. This is important because by leaving out the fact that Williams drew on CRHE’s data, Ray leaves the impression that Williams’ analysis represents a third independent study with its own data source.
Either Ray was careless when putting together his article and did not realize that the two data sources were the same, or he left out the source of Williams’ analysis intentionally to create the impression of multiple independent studies with their own separate data sources.
CRHE’s Data
In 2013, we began collecting cases of severe and fatal child abuse in homeschool settings and posting them in a database, Homeschooling’s Invisible Children. In 2015, we tallied the homeschool fatalities in our database for each year. We then used data from the Child Welfare Information Gateway and the National Center for Education Statistics to determine the rate of child fatalities among children ages 6-17 and create an estimate of how many children were homeschooled each year. We used this data to compare child fatality rates.
We found that there were slightly more fatalities in our database than would be expected given the overall child fatality rate for their age group (84 versus 73). We then ran statistical significance testing to find out whether we could eliminate random variation as a possible cause for the higher number of fatalities we were finding. We found that the difference between the two numbers was not large enough to eliminate the possibility that our higher homeschool fatality number could be the result of random variation. Our 2015 analysis relied on figures from 2000 to 2012; we have added a number of cases since then.
As we outlined in our article, our database is not a complete catalogue of all homeschool child abuse fatalities. This is because there is no official data that provides these numbers. Statistics on the rate of child abuse are typically compiled by a state’s social services division and draw on its case files. To our knowledge, no state currently includes information on a child’s educational status when tabulating child abuse statistics. Instead of relying on a nonexistent official tally, our database is created using internet searches and is entirely dependent on what cases hit the news, and which news articles remain on news websites (many newspapers archive old pages, meaning that news stories disappear from the internet).
Ray does not mention that we found a higher number of child fatalities than would be expected given homeschoolers’ share of the population. Instead, he merely states that we “summarized various disparate sources of information” and “found no statistically significant difference between the general public and homeschool fatality rates.” Ray also does not inform his readers that our database is emphatically not comprehensive, as we stated directly in our study.
Williams’ Study
Rodger Williams is a former homeschool father and a lobbyist for the Oregon Christian Home Education Association Network. He posts his own statistical analysis on a website called “the homeschool effect,” which has no landing page or “about” section. In a posting dated July 28, 2017, Williams used our estimates (he did not try to run his own) and our database (which he did not identify as incomplete) to run his own analysis. Williams’ innovation was to remove cases from our list which he determined should not be considered to involve homeschooled children.
Williams looked at 61 homeschool fatalities from 2003 to 2012 and determined that 21 were legally homeschooled, 19 were truant, and 21 were low regulation cases. He does not state how he determined this. Our HIC team relies on published news sources, legal records, and in some cases correspondence with investigating agencies to determine that a case involved homeschooling. In order to investigate the legal status of each child’s homeschool as Williams claims to have done, he would need to contact the investigating agency (child services, law enforcement, or the courts), possibly using a FOIA request, to gain access to information which is rarely made public in the media. It is unlikely that Williams did this given that he did not report his methodology.
News reports of the horrific child abuse cases we include on HIC often do not state whether state law was followed. No state offers a comprehensive list of homeschooling families, which would allow for easy verification. This is one reason we made the decision, when we created our database, to include all cases where the parents claimed to be homeschooling. We have been transparent about this; you can read our explanation in our FAQs.
Another reason we include all cases where the parents claim to be homeschooling in our database is that we created our database in order to look for themes that can help guide policies to prevent such things from happening in the future. With this in mind, it is important to understand limits in enforcement in states that do require some form of oversight, with an eye toward closing loopholes and fixing enforcement problems.
We are less concerned with determining which fatalities should “count” as homeschooled than we are in investigating the ways in which parents in our database have used homeschooling to cover up their abuse and prolong their maltreatment, and finding ways to stop future parents from doing the same. That makes cases where parents told neighbors they were homeschooling relevant regardless of whether the proper paperwork was completed.
Official Reports
Toward the end of his study, Ray states that the United States Commission to Eliminate Child Abuse and Neglect Fatalities did not mention the type of schooling children received or recommend regulating any type of educational environment. This is disingenuous. If no state currently collects data on a child’s educational status when tabulating child abuse statistics, how could the Commission identify any one educational environment as an area of concern?
In its report, the Commission did identify social isolation as a risk factor for abuse; as we have discussed here, there is no more effective way for an abusive parent to socially isolate a child than to homeschool. (Consider the thirteen Turpin children, raised in near complete isolation.) Furthermore, the Commission did not purport to be the official standard for child abuse prevention. Instead, the Commission called on individual states to conduct their own child fatality reviews.
In some states, child fatality review boards have already raised concerns about abusive parents’ use of homeschooling. In 2011, a review panel in Florida called on the Florida Department of Children and Families to “work with the school system and the Department of Education to devise an efficient alert system, with appropriate follow-up inspections, for at risk children removed from the school system and placed in ‘home schooling.’” Their recommendations followed a case where a child with previous contact with child welfare officials was removed from school to be homeschooled, and then tortured and killed. In 2012, Pennsylvania’s Task Force on Child Protection reported that “[t]he Task Force received testimony from prosecutors and physicians regarding specific instances of child abuse and neglect occurring in homeschool settings where families have had prior involvement in the child welfare system, which suggests that there may be instances where it would be prudent for additional safeguards to be put in place to ensure the health and safety of these children.”
The Missing Study
Ray claimed that a “thorough search of available literature has resulted in identifying only three published reports” relevant to child abuse rates among children in various school settings. The three studies were his own, CRHE’s, and Williams’ (which used our data). Ray completely leaves out Barbara Knox’s 2014 study of child torture. Either he knew about the study and decided not to include it, or his search was not as thorough as he suggests.
In her study, Knox looked at child abuse so severe that it could be termed torture. Knox found that 47% of the school-aged child torture victims in the cases she examined were removed from school to be homeschooled. Knox reported that in these cases homeschooling “appears to have been designed to further isolate the child” and that “their isolation was accompanied by an escalation of physically abusive events.”
It is possible that Ray failed to include Knox’s study because, as a non-random sample of cases, its findings cannot be applied statistically to all homeschooled children. However, this critique applies equally to the three studies Ray cites, including his own. Furthermore, Knox’s study is useful because it illuminates the fact that when abuse does occur in homeschool settings, there are fewer safeguards to catch it or prevent it from escalating.
Conclusion
In his rehashing of our data, Williams wrote that “there is no reason to impose ‘protective’ regulations on families who already are prone to a lower fatality rate than the rest of the nation.” This claim is absurd. Do we let hunger in our communities go unaddressed because the U.S. has a lower rate of food insecurity than the rest of the world? No, we do not.
Ray began his survey of research on homeschooling and child abuse by looking at abuse perpetrated by school personnel. When such abuse occurs in school settings, we as a society take steps to prevent future cases. Some states are considering improved background checks which screen for past allegations of misconduct whether or not there was a criminal prosecution, for example. All we are asking is that abuse in homeschool environments be addressed the same way—with an eye not toward accepting abuse, but preventing it.
For us, the question has never been whether abuse overall is more common among children who are homeschooled or children who attend school, but rather what happens when abuse does occur. CRHE Executive Director Rachel Coleman spoke recently with a crime reporter at a large regional newspaper who said that of all of the cases of abuse and child fatality she had investigated, the homeschool cases were by far the more horrific. This is because, as Knox’s study underlined, homeschooling allows abusive parents to isolate their children and conceal their abuse to a greater extent than they could if their children attended school.
Every child, no matter how they are educated, has the right to be protected against abuse and neglect. This is not about singling anyone out—we already take steps to identify abuse of children who attend public school. It is about ensuring that the same laws that give dedicated homeschooling parents the ability to create positive, innovative learning environments do not also allow parents like the Turpins to create houses of horror.
Last Updated: 30 October, 2023 by CRHE
West Virginia Lawmakers Should Grant Homeschooled Students Sports Access
For Immediate Release: Access to public school athletics programs provides homeschooled students with substantial benefits
Canton, Ma. 01/25/2018—On January 10th, West Virginia lawmakers again introduced legislation designed to grant homeschooled students access to public school athletic programs. Currently, the West Virginia Secondary School Activities Commission requires student athletes to be enrolled in the public school they represent, thereby preventing homeschooled students from participating. Senate Bill 130 and House Bill 4007 would change this. “We urge West Virginia lawmakers to support Senate Bill 130 and House Bill 4007,” said Rachel Coleman, executive director of the Coalition for Responsible Home Education (CRHE), a national nonprofit organization that advocates for homeschooled children. “It is well-documented that access to public school athletics programs benefits homeschooled students without creating problems for either public schools or other students.”
SB 130 and HB 4007 require homeschooled students who participate in public school athletic programs to demonstrate adherence to the same academic standards of public school students and bars. Some critics allege that allowing homeschooled students to participate in public school athletics programs takes opportunities away from other students, but the evidence for this is sparse. “A 2012 survey of state athletic associations that had granted homeschooled students access found that doing so had not caused problems in those states,” said Coleman. “Further, research suggests that homeschooled students tend to gravitate toward activities without a limit on participants, such as cross country running or tennis.”
In 2016, CRHE conducted a survey of 150 homeschool graduates’ athletics experiences and found that participants overwhelmingly believed that athletic participation was beneficial to homeschooled students (87%) and that public school athletics should be made available to homeschooled students (80%). Many participants noted that community athletics programs were often limited: “Once I reached junior high age there were no longer any community sports available,” wrote one participant; another noted that public school athletics programs “are very often the only access for students like myself who grew up in underprivileged areas.”
Currently, 30 states grant homeschooled students access to public school athletics programs, putting West Virginia in the minority. “Granting homeschooled children access to public school athletics improves homeschool outcomes,” said Coleman. “We urge West Virginia lawmakers to support the state’s homeschooled students by supporting SB 130 and HB 4007.”
The Coalition for Responsible Home Education is a national organization founded by homeschool alumni and dedicated to raising awareness of the need for homeschooling reform, providing public policy guidance, and advocating for responsible home education practices.
Last Updated: 23 March, 2021 by Kieryn Darkwater
Listen to Rachel Coleman on Press Play KCRW
Listen to Rachel Coleman on Press Play with Madeleine Brand.
(We’re sorry, we don’t currently have a written transcript of the broadcast. If that’s something you’d like to help with, let us know)
Last Updated: 9 February, 2018 by Kieryn Darkwater
Rachel Coleman’s Interview on KNX1070
Listen to Executive Director, Rachel Coleman’s interview with KNX1070 opposite Mike Smith of HSLDA.
Transcript below:
TRANSCRIPT BEGINS AT 00:16.
CHARLES FELDMAN: Inspections: Would inspections have discovered the home in Perris where thirteen siblings were found in torturous conditions, not enough food, some chained to furniture? The house was a home school, but in California no inspections are required except for the fire department and even that apparently did not happen. So, we will go in depth. Also, it’s not every day that the President of the United States is compared with the former Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, but today is that day. It was an extraordinary speech by a Republican US Senator on the floor of the US Senate.
MIKE SIMPSON: Later on we’ll be talking about two stabbing deaths, a college student over winter break and a transgender woman, and the hate crime investigations that could surround them. And then as the President hands out his fake news awards, many Americans really don’t know the difference between real news and what’s fake.
(01:07)
FELDMAN: We begin with the tragedy in Riverside County. Thirteen brothers and sisters found malnourished in what authorities described as “their filthy family home.” Some of them chained to their beds, their parents under arrest, the big question – how could this happen, and why didn’t anybody outside know?
SIMPSON: So these siblings were homeschooled by their parents. So in hindsight many are asking, why weren’t there inspections – some rules for homeschooling that might have shed light on this situation? We have two guests: Rachel Coleman, executive director of the Coalition for Responsible Home Education, and Mike Smith, attorney for the Home School Legal Defense Association.
FELDMAN: So Rachel, let’s begin with you. As I understand it, you were homeschooled. But, and I know that states differ, should a state such as California have apparently no, or if there are any, very little, regulations that would require some sort of state input, some sort of state inspection into these so-called home schools?
RACHEL COLEMAN: Hi, yes, so we have a set of policy recommendations you make- that we make, but I think to understand our position – we are actually – our board is all homeschool graduates. And we founded our organization in 2013 because we kept seeing cases like this. This is not the first case like this, not the only case like this, and as homeschool graduates we were sort of appalled to see this education method that had served us, in some cases, well – my own experience, I had a great education – to see it used to hide abuse in these ways. And so we do call for accountability. We tend to call for accountability in ways that reflect the sorts of things responsible homeschooling parents already do. We would like to see, for example, mandated annual doctor visits, and annual assessments by a certified teacher. These would be points of contact with a mandatory reporter that could have identified these children’s situation, especially with as malnourished as they were.
SIMPSON: So Mike, Rachel says that her group kept seeing cases like this one. Do you think there needs to be more rules out there to prevent this kind of thing?
MIKE SMITH: Well, I think there, I think there needs to be a better, better way to address child abuse and neglect, but I don’t see that as the same thing as homeschooling. In other words, there – in order to prevent child abuse, you can’t prevent all of it, but to do a better job, basically you have to try to figure out what the risk factors are. And homeschooling has never been declared a risk factor by the Mayo Clinic, which has done research on this. The [muffled], the World Health Organization and the US Congress basically commissioned a study in 2014 to eliminate child abuse and neglect fatalities and they found that the number one risk factor is whether a family has been investigated previously or they have – they’re under suspicion of child abuse and neglect. And homeschooling, in none of these studies, in none of these surveys, has been mentioned as a prime risk factor for abuse and neglect. So that’s where I take issue with what’s being proposed with the kind of regulations – especially the regulations I’ve heard, and I hope Rachel would even agree with me on this – inspections of the home. In other words, we’re talking about basically a Fourth Amendment issue. So I do not believe that all of the fine homeschool families in California, and there are thousands of them, should have to be subjected to this added regulation because of what this family did.
FELDMAN: Well Mike, and let me, and then we’ll get to Rachel’s response, but let me ask you. Whatever studies may or may not have shown, and I’m not going to dispute that from the past, I think you would agree that even one horrific case such as the one that we are talking about here is one too many. So, so long as the regulations are not too onerous, what would be the objection? Everything in life is regulated. You can’t drive a car without regulations, you can’t get married without regulations, you can’t get divorced without regulations. Why not have some regulations that would at least give some sort of protection to students who may be, if not abused by their parents, perhaps just not well educated by their parents?
SMITH: Well, I would say that, I disagree with your statement if you could just eliminate one-
[crosstalk in italics]FELDMAN: (no, no I didn’t say)
SMITH: I would like to eliminate all
FELDMAN: no I didn’t say that
SMITH: I would like to eliminate
FELDMAN: Go ahead
SMITH: -to eliminate all child abuse and neglect, just like everybody here would. This is abhorrent to me, because I’m in homeschooling because I love children. But I also believe that the liberty issue is important for the rest of the families that are not abusing and neglecting their children, especially when you, you’re talking about the need for individualized education and a tutorial method of education. If we’re going to have the state come in, you’re gonna [muffled], you’re going to see that the test scores that are tremendously high right now on standardized achievement tests by homeschooled families could suffer as a result, and so I see no need to, to bring further regulation. Especially, I’m really concerned about this proposal that’s coming forth that, that homes would be inspected. That’s, that’s just not acceptable.
SIMPSON: Alright, Mike, let’s put you on hold for a second again and get Rachel’s response here. Rachel, doctor’s visits or test scores and standardized tests aside, let’s concentrate on the state coming and knocking on the door and doing the inspection for a second, do you think that should be happening?
COLEMAN: We do not support home visits for these cases. We believe that the primary emphasis in a case like this should be ensuring that they have contact with mandatory reporters. And we believe we can do this by having annual assessments by certified teachers and also regular doctor visits. These kids were so malnourished, that would have been picked up. I do want to touch on a few of the things that Mike Smith just said. First of all, risk factors. Every one, every one of these reports he just mentioned list isolation as a risk factor, and there is no better way to isolate a child than to homeschool them. Now I want to be clear – most homeschooling families do not isolate their children. I was not isolated – I was homeschooled. But there was a study in 2014 by Barbara Knox that found that – specifically she was looking at child torture cases, child abuse so severe you could call it torture – and for the school age cases she looked at, 47% of them involved children who were pulled out of school to be homeschooled, followed by an increase in isolation and an escalation of the abuse. So ,you know, clearly the isolation that homeschooling can enable in these abusive cases is a risk factor. I also want to mention the issue of risk factors being previous investigations by, of the family, by social services. That’s absolutely something we’ve found true in the cases in our database. That’s one of the reasons we recommend requiring a background check for homeschooling parents to check: was there a previous case of child abuse that was founded by a judge – or were children removed from the home in the past? And I want to mention that Mike Smith’s organization has opposed these measures. So he’s sitting there saying that he thinks that we should pay attention to risk factors like previous investigations – they oppose background checks to ensure that families previously founded with child abuse, previously convicted with child abuse, they opposed these regulations, or these proposals, to bar these families from homeschooling when there were these risk factors present. So I don’t think there’s complete honesty there. Also his comment about standardized tests wasn’t fully honest. Homeschooled children, there are no standardized test scores that you can look at for all homeschooled children, because they’re not required to be tested. The studies –
SIMPSON: Okay we’re going to have to hold you there because we do have to take a break, and when KNX In Depth continues we will have a lot more on this unique story.
(END SECTION ONE)
SECTION TWO
(00:07)
FELDMAN: You’re listening to KNX In Depth with Mike Simpson, I’m Charles Feldman.
SIMPSON: As we continue our discussion, a reminder: coming up after news and traffic at the bottom of the hour, a look at two crimes. Did arguments lead to the stabbing deaths of a college student home for winter break and a transgender woman or were they hate crimes? And then: President Trump calls it fake news but many Americans, they don’t know the difference between what’s news and what’s news with a spin.
FELDMAN: Okay, so we’re going to go back to our discussion about what happened in Riverside County with those thirteen siblings who were found in, at home in deplorable conditions. They were being homeschooled, and the question on the table is whether inspections, some kind of inspections, might have found this, discovered this, at a much earlier state. We had been talking with Rachel Coleman, who’s Executive Director of the Coalition for Responsible Home Education, and Mike Smith who’s an attorney for the Home School Legal Defense Association. Uh, you know, we can go back and forth – which in fact we’ve been doing – on studies and each of you can probably cite a study that is in opposition to the other person’s study. I don’t want to get involved in that too much at this point, I want to just confine our discussion to this one particular case that happened at this one particular house, where it happened that these particular children and young adults were homeschooled where there was no real inspection, no intervention, from local or state authorities, and what in each of your opinions could have been, should have been done to perhaps prevent that. Mike, why don’t you take a crack at that?
SMITH: Okay, thank you. In, in California, in order to be a legal home school, you have to file a private school affidavit or be involved in some other program, oversight program. But like this family, they filed a private school affidavit, and they have to comply under penalty of perjury that they’re going to comply with what that private school affidavit says. Now, had anyone reported this family, had suspected something because their children – one of the reports I saw was that at 2:00 in the morning one of the children was out doing, I think they were planting sod in the front of the yard there. So let’s say a neighbor would have been concerned, I never see these kids out, I never see them go to school. If they called the public school or the department of social services, they would be obligated to go out and confirm that this family in fact had children, be able to see the children, and determine that they were legally being homeschooled, meaning they had filed a private school affidavit. If that had happened in this case, I’m assuming that there would have been an investigation and that this probably wouldn’t have happened. So that was available and it’s something that didn’t happen, and I think some of the neighbors are obviously wishing they had done what they kind of thought they should have done.
SIMPSON: You don’t always know your neighbors though, and we’ve talked about that on this program. Does the state not have some sort of responsibility for these kids though? They’ve got to make sure they’re getting, number one, a good education. So I mean, how do you make sure that home schooling isn’t being used as a way to shield kids from anyone’s oversight, as Rachel has pointed out?
SMITH: Well, the state is not responsible for these children’s education. Because they’re being privately educated. The state has an interest in seeing that every child either becomes literate or self-sufficient when they graduate. So the responsibility was with the parents, and this is the way homeschooling is done in all the states. In some states it’s more regulated than others and some of the states are less regulated than California. So I dis- I don’t think that this a homeschool case. This is an abuse and neglect situation, and to bring homeschooling in is unfair to all the other families in California that are very responsibly homeschooling their children.
FELDMAN: Well Rachel, do you agree with Mike that it’s unfair to bring in the setting in which all of this occurred, which was a home school setting? Do you think that that is not relevant to the discussion?
COLEMAN: It is completely relevant. If those children had been in school, someone would have noticed that they were constantly hungry, that they were behaving weird socially. A teacher would have said something. Those children ended up in that situation because they were homeschooled. Without homeschooling, their parents could not have done that. And I also disagree with the idea that the state has no interest here. Every child has the right to an education, and the state has a responsibility to protect the rights of its citizens, and that includes children. So the state absolutely has a role here.
SIMPSON: Why is it hard to get more regulations passed? I mean there are some lawmakers that are talking about it now after this case, but is there a, is there a homeschool lobby that fights back?
COLEMAN: Yeah, Mike Smith’s homeschool lobby –
SIMPSON: Mike’s group?
COLEMAN: – the Home School Legal Defense Association. They oppose regulation every step of the way. They are the reason that these bills keep getting shot down.
(crosstalk)
FELDMAN: I’m just curious – yeah, Mike,
SMITH: Can I defend my, can I defend myself there –
FELDMAN: Yeah, Mike, go ahead, sure.
SMITH: Well, I’m not the only one, HSLDA’s not the only one. Every state organization that is involved in homeschooling, that I’m aware of, takes the same position we do. That this is a liberty issue and unless it can be proven that home – that parents are not responsibly teaching their children at home, the state has no interest. They do if that can be proven, but that requires probable cause and reasonable suspicion. So, and the other thing is the, whether we like it or not, in America, there’s no fundamental right for a child to have an education. Do I believe they should be? Absolutely. That’s the reason I’m in homeschooling, because I wanted my children to have a superior education, and they got it because my wife taught them, quite frankly. And that’s the reason most families are involved in homeschooling, they want their children to have an excellent education and they want to be able to guide them and direct them. And if you bring the state in, once they get involved, and this has been our experience in representing families for over 35 years, the state simply wants to take more and more of that liberty. And liberty, without liberty, homeschooling will not exist.
FELDMAN: But Mike, let me ask you something. You’re an attorney, and you know that the state, every state really, has some extraordinary powers when it concerns certain individuals, children in particular for example, states can take children away from parents if it can be proven that the parents are harmful to the health and wellbeing of their children. So if the state is vested with that sort of authority vis-à-vis children, why shouldn’t it have the right to make sure that children who are being homeschooled, are being homeschooled in an environment that is one that is helpful for them both physically and mentally?
SMITH: Well, because that’s what California has right now. The private school exemption. The legislature has determined that this is sufficient to protect the state’s interest. And as I indicated before, California is not an aberration, there are other states that are very much like California, there are some states that have more regulation, and several that have less. There are even states that don’t require notice. So we can’t say that California is out of step. So I’m just saying that this is basically a situation where we’re either going to recognize the liberty of parents to direct the education of their children, or we’re going to let the state come in and eventually they will determine how these children are educated.
DV HOST: Alright, that’s Mike Smith, attorney for the Home School Legal Defense Association. We also heard from Rachel Coleman, executive director of the Coalition for Responsible Home Education.
Last Updated: 30 October, 2023 by Rachel Coleman
New Hampshire House Bill 1650 Would Legalize Educational Neglect
For Immediate Release: Removing failure to educate from the definition of a neglected child would remove only layer of accountability remaining for homeschoolers
Canton, Ma., 01/15/2018—New Hampshire House Bill 1650, which would remove “failure to provide the education required by law” from the state’s definition of a neglected child, would harm homeschooled children, warns the Coalition for Responsible Home Education (CRHE), a national nonprofit group that advocates for homeschooled children. “HB 1650 would remove the only recourse concerned family members have for reporting the educational neglect of a child who is homeschooled,” warned Rachel Coleman, the organization’s executive director. “Lawmakers must consider the implications of this bill for homeschooled children.”
Prior to 2012, New Hampshire’s homeschool law gave school districts the authority to review student assessments and initiate a grievance process if a homeschooled child was not making academic progress. In 2012, the state legislature revised the state’s homeschool law, removing this authority. “In most states, educational neglect in homeschool settings is handled either by the local school district or by the Department of Health and Human Services,” said Coleman. Since 2012, the authority to handle calls about educational neglect in New Hampshire homeschooling families has rested with the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) alone.
“In New Hampshire, school districts cannot investigate educational neglect in homeschool settings,” added Coleman. “If HB 1650 passes, DHHS could not do so either. No one could.”
“While many homeschooling families have their children’s best interests at heart and put in the work necessary to give them a good education, this is not always the case,” said Coleman. CRHE regularly hears from family members or neighbors across the country concerned about homeschooled children who are not being taught. “In some cases parents struggling with drug addiction opt to homeschool to keep their children from saying anything about their drug use,” said Coleman. “The National Center for Education Statistics estimates that 15% of homeschooled children do not have a parent who has completed high school. Not all homeschooled children have access to the resources they need to succeed.”
Berlin School District Superintendent Corinne Cascadden has recently expressed concern about the homeschooled children in her district, warning that as many has half of them may not be being educated. Her concerns have prompted lawmakers to introduce House Bill 1263, which would restore school district’s authority to evaluate homeschooled students. “Recent concern about the education New Hampshire’s homeschooled children are receiving makes this an odd movement to remove the only layer of accountability they have left,” said Coleman. “HB 1650 would make it harder for children who are being homeschooled but not educated to find help, effectively legalizing educational neglect in the state.”
The Coalition for Responsible Home Education is a national organization founded by homeschool alumni and dedicated to raising awareness of the need for homeschooling reform, providing public policy guidance, and advocating for responsible home education practices.
Last Updated: 23 March, 2021 by CRHE
Thirteen Starved, Chained California Children were Homeschooled
For Immediate Release: Lax homeschool laws give parents the ability to isolate their children, hide abuse
Canton, Ma., 01/16/2018—The Coalition for Responsible Home Education (CRHE), a national nonprofit group that advocates for homeschooled children, has learned that the thirteen Turpin children, found emaciated and chained in a home in Perris, California, on Sunday, were homeschooled. “This case fits a pattern we’ve seen of isolation and imprisonment in abusive homeschooling situations,” said Rachel Coleman, a homeschool alumna who helped found CRHE in 2013 and currently serves as the organization’s executive director.
CRHE maintains a database of severe and fatal abuse cases in homeschooling situations and has identified a number of themes that characterize such cases. “Many of the cases in our database involve food deprivation and imprisonment,” said Coleman. “Calista Springer, who died in a house fire in 2009, was chained to her bed like these children.” In other cases, children have been locked in bedrooms or kept in cages. “We know that many homeschooling parents provide their children with a safe and child-centered home environment,” Coleman stated. “Unfortunately, current law provides nothing to stop families like the Turpins from using homeschooling to isolate and imprison their children.”
In California, homeschooling parents are required to register as individual private schools with the state or enroll their children in a private “umbrella” school. David Turpin, the children’s father, registered his homeschool, which he named “Sandcastle Day School,” with the state of California each year after moving there in 2010. For families who register as individual private schools with the state, nothing more is required. Parents do not need to submit assessments of their children’s academic progress or show any evidence of homeschooling, and there is nothing done to ensure that homeschooled children have contact with mandatory reporters.
A neighbor of the Turpins reported that “the kids were invisible.” The children’s grandparents, who lived out of state, told reporters that they stayed in regular contact with the Turpin parents, but not with the children. “When a homeschool abuse case comes to light, it is not uncommon for neighbors or relatives to report having little contact with the children,” said Coleman. In a 2014 study of child torture, University of Wisconsin pediatrician Barbara Knox found that 47% of the school-aged victims she examined were removed from school to be homeschooled; another 29% were never enrolled in school.
CRHE recommends mandating annual academic assessments to consist of either a standardized test administered by a certified teacher or a portfolio review conducted by a similarly licensed professional. The organization, which has a board made up of homeschool alumni, also recommends requiring homeschooled students to have regular doctor visits. “Contact with mandatory reporters is critical,” said Coleman. “While children homeschooled in positive, healthy environments typically have regular contact with mandatory reporters, absent any law to the contrary children like the Turpins may be completely isolated.”
Seven of the thirteen Turpin children rescued on Sunday were adults; the oldest was 29. “In cases where homeschooled children are isolated and not educated, it can be very difficult for them to leave,” Coleman stated. “The older Turpin children may not have had driver’s licenses or any form of identification, and were likely not given high school diplomas or any other educational records by their parents.” CRHE has come across many cases where abusive homeschooling parents have used their complete control over their children’s records to control them well into adulthood. “Concern about younger siblings may also keep older children at home,” Coleman added. CRHE recommends that states maintain annual academic records on file for each homeschooled child and make those records available once they turn 18. “No adult should be in a position where they feel they cannot leave home,” said Coleman.
The Coalition for Responsible Home Education is a national organization founded by homeschool alumni and dedicated to raising awareness of the need for homeschooling reform, providing public policy guidance, and advocating for responsible home education practices.
Last Updated: 30 October, 2023 by Rachel Coleman
Florida Lawmakers Should Support Homeschooled Children, Not Leave Them Adrift
For Immediate Release: Proposed legislation would limit protections for a homeschooled children when they are needed most
Canton, Ma., 01/11/2018—The Coalition for Responsible Home Education (CRHE), a national nonprofit that advocates for homeschooled children, has concerns about House Bill 731 and Senate Bill 732, which would limit school districts’ authority over homeschooling. “The body of 10-year-old Janiya Thomas was found in a freezer in Bradenton in 2015,” said Rachel Coleman, executive director of the organization, which was founded by homeschool alumni. “Janiya died because the Florida’s homeschool law did not do enough to protect her. This is the time for Florida lawmakers to improve the law, not shackle it.”
HB 731 and SB 732 would bar school districts from requesting additional information from homeschooling parents and limit the district’s ability to review homeschooled children’s annual assessments. “This bill appears to be directed at school districts like Miami-Dade, which ask homeschooling parents to provide copies of their children’s birth certificates,” said Coleman, who understands homeschooling parents’ frustration when requirements are unclear. “The current law is too vague, but writing the most loose interpretation into law isn’t the solution.”
Janiya’s mother had a criminal record and had previously had a child removed from her home due to abuse but was still permitted to homeschool. Florida law does not require any form of background checks for parents who withdraw their children from school to homeschool. After the 2011 death of Nubia Barahona, a 10-year-old homeschooled child in West Palm Beach, an independent review panel called on DCF to “work with the school system and the Department of Education to devise an efficient alert system, with appropriate follow-up inspections, for at risk children removed from the school system and placed in ‘home schooling.’” The recommended system, which might have saved Janiya, was never created.
“Rather than limiting school districts’ ability to ask for information, lawmakers should create a uniform background check process for homeschooling parents to prevent tragedies like Janiya’s death and to avoid confusion between homeschooling parents and district officials,” said Coleman. “Lawmakers can clarify the law and protect children at the same time.”
The bill also expands homeschooled students’ access to career and technical courses and allows homeschooled students to participate in athletics at any public school in the state (current law restricts homeschooled students to participating at the public school they would have attended). “We support efforts to give homeschooled students access to programs and services to help them succeed,” said Coleman. “We are concerned, however, that allowing homeschooled students to participate in athletics across district lines would create a loophole legalizing recruitment, serving coaches and sports programs and not children.”
The Coalition for Responsible Home Education is a national organization founded by homeschool alumni and dedicated to raising awareness of the need for homeschooling reform, providing public policy guidance, and advocating for responsible home education practices.
Last Updated: 30 October, 2023 by CRHE
New Hampshire Lawmakers Have the Opportunity to Support Homeschooled Students
For Immediate Release: HB 1263 Would Restore Needed Accountability for New Hampshire’s Homeschoolers
Canton, Ma., 01/10/2018—The Coalition for Responsible Home Education (CRHE), a national nonprofit organization that advocates for homeschooled children, supports New Hampshire House Bill 1263, which would restore accountability to the state’s homeschool law. “The New Hampshire legislature has the opportunity to stand in support of the state’s homeschooled children by passing HB 1263,” said Executive Director Rachel Coleman. CRHE was founded by homeschool alumni in 2013 to advocate for homeschooled children.
Current New Hampshire law requires homeschooling parents to have their children evaluated annually, but does not require parents to submit the results to any educational agency and prohibits school officials from using the results as a reason to terminate a homeschool program. “An assessment does not serve as an accountability measure when no one sees the results,” said Coleman. HB 1263 would require parents to submit the results of their children’s annual assessment to an educational agency and would create a grievance process for children who are not making educational progress commensurate with their ability.
HB 1263’s bipartisan sponsors were motivated by concerns raised by Berlin School District Superintendent Corinne Cascadden, who reported that she believes as many as half of the children homeschooled in her school district are not receiving an education. Coleman is unsurprised. “When a state does not provide accountability, homeschooling can be used by abusive or neglectful parents to conceal problems at home or evade truancy proceedings,” she said. In a 2011 study of child torture, Barbara Knox of the University of Wisconsin found that 47% of school-aged victims had been removed from school to be homeschooled. “In the absence of accountability, there is no way to ensure that homeschooling is being used to educate children and not to isolate or neglect them,” said Coleman.
HB 1263 does not create any measures New Hampshire homeschoolers are not already familiar with. The bill would restore the state’s law to its pre-2012 form; that year, HB 1517 removed the state’s accountability provisions. Some homeschool advocates have objected to the bill nonetheless, claiming that there is no evidence of educational neglect by homeschooling parents. Coleman disagrees: “To say that there is no evidence of educational neglect when the state no longer has a way to obtain any evidence at all about homeschooled students’ performance is the height of nonsense,” she says.
On CRHE’s website, many homeschool graduates describe their positive views of state accountability. Homeschool alumna Caitlin T. saw the importance of accountability first-hand when her family moved from Pennsylvania, which required parents to submit annual assessments, to New Jersey, where parents were not required to provide documentation to the local school district. “In New Jersey, things fell apart,” she explained in her testimonial. “No one was there to check up on us or offer help.”
HB 1263 is currently before New Hampshire’s House Education Committee. “I urge the lawmakers of New Hampshire to pass HB 1263 out of committee and vote it into law,” said Coleman. “It’s time to stand up for the homeschooled children of New Hampshire.”
The Coalition for Responsible Home Education is a national organization founded by homeschool alumni and dedicated to raising awareness of the need for homeschooling reform, providing public policy guidance, and advocating for responsible home education practices.