Homeschooling Regulations
By Sun Kyu Bae |
Published April 14, 2009 |
Articles |
printer friendly version
Home schooling regulations MUST be followed and vary depending on your State. Find out why all changes across the nation are important to you REGARDLESS of where you live!
Long Answer
Although homeschooling is legal in the U.S. as stated by the HSDLA, homeschooling regulations vary across states. But the most important thing to know is that you MUST follow the rules for your state. The consequences of not following the rules are just not worth it (see above for possible consequences).
Homeschool advocacy groups have worked hard and done an excellent job in fighting for the rights of homeschoolers. But it wasn’t very long ago that the “early modern” homeschoolers (circa 1970-1980) had to look behind their shoulders to make sure child custody services or public school officials weren’t harassing them by threatening truancy and child abuse.
However, although homeschooling is now more accepted than at any time since the 70’s, there is still room for misinterpretation by both state and local school agencies which can result in grave consequences for homeschool families. For example, as recently as February 2008, the 2nd Appellate Court in Los Angeles delivered a sudden and stunning blow on behalf of California, effectively banning homeschooling. The Court interpreted the current laws to say that the teachers of home schooled children had to be credentialed in order to teach, implying that the current rule to file an affidavit with the state registering the homeschool as a private school was insufficient in the eyes of the state. Instantly, 166,000 families were at risk of being criminally prosecuted for truancy.
Incidentally, this case had nothing to do at all with homeschooling, but rather started out as a physical child abuse case in which the court-appointed lawyers representing the children asked the court to have the children attend school outside the home (the children were currently being taught by the mother). When the request was denied by the lower court (the court stood on the right of the family to homeschool their children), the lawyers appealed and the appellate court not only reversed the decision, but placed homeschooling at risk for all homeschoolers in California.
Long story short, everyone in the state government (including the “the Governator” himself), even the State Superintendent of Public Schools, derided the ruling. Eventually, the appellate court reversed the decision in August 2008 and so homeschooling survives under current California rules today. Still, California parents were in a homeschooling grey zone for at least 5 months (we know since we were one of them), promoting this issue to the top of the “Top Things Keeping Us Awake” list.
This case illustrates our point that although homeschooling is on a significant uptrend with all its support from the U.S. Constitution, there are entities out there that inadvertently can have serious detrimental consequences to the homeschool institution by misinterpreting the rules, regardless of how well-intentioned they are – sort of like a baby wielding a gun. And that is exactly why organizations such as HSLDA exists, to uphold and clarify homeschooling laws (HSLDA was the organization that advocated in the court to reverse the California homeschooling ruling above).
“That doesn’t affect me since I don’t live in California”, you say? Think again.
Any ruling against homeschooling in the 50 states will ripple across eventually to impact your state, inevitably requiring it to address the ruling in the face of your own state laws. Therefore, we strongly recommend that you keep abreast of all homeschool rulings in the country. You can get homeschool ruling updates from HSDLA at www.hsdla.org.
As an afterthought, can you guess the only organization that favored requiring teaching credentials in the homeschool ruling? Yup, the California Teachers Union, which is consistent with their interests since each head, er, child, represents additional money for the school districts, which creates more chances to raise teacher salaries. Anyway, enough said about that – I can write a great zinger or two about school district/teacher interests all day long, but I digress.
So, how can you find information about your state regulations on homeschooling? Again, check out www.hslda.org – this site has a summary of the regulations for each state.
view as single page
Not What You're Looking For?
Use our Search Engine!
For best results, enter a 3-4 word search term. Then, if you get too many results, try adding another word to narrow down your results. If you get too few results, try removing a word from your search term to increase your search results.
Try it now!