The Homeschooling Handbook_ From Preschool to High School - Mary Griffith [14]
CHAPTER TWO
Legal Stuff, or Can We Really Do This?
NO SINGLE ASPECT of homeschooling worries new homeschoolers more than its legality. You might be concerned that you won’t be able to handle the burden of responsibility for directing your children’s education. You might question your ability to choose appropriate materials for your kids or wonder whether homeschooling might turn them into eccentrics or oddballs. But nothing else prompts quite the same level of outright fear—that dreadful vision that one day a truant officer or social worker will show up at your door with the news that your homeschooling is against the law and you are in big trouble.
For most of us, homeschooling is such a big step, so foreign to our own educational experience, that even when we have read the applicable laws and understand how they work in our state, we still harbor a nagging, irrational fear that someone will, somehow, for some reason, force us to send our children to school or even remove them from our custody. In almost every case, this fear is unwarranted. Intellectually, new homeschoolers usually understand this. Grasping the concept emotionally is another matter entirely. But as your first year of homeschooling proceeds without those menacing officials appearing at your doorstep, that anxiety will begin to dissipate. When the beginning of the next year rolls around, you probably won’t even remember that undercurrent of dread that used to nag at you.
Is homeschooling a legal educational option? The short answer, of course, is yes. But the complete answer is considerably more complex. Some states are undeniably easier places than others for homeschoolers to comply with the law, and there are sometimes variations in how laws are applied from county to county and district to district. It’s not uncommon to find considerable differences between what the law says and how it is applied and enforced. And legislatures and education departments make changes in the statutes and regulations governing homeschooling often enough to prompt homeschooling organizations and individuals to pay close and regular attention to their state’s legal situation for homeschooling.
In this chapter we’ll take a good look at the rules that govern homeschooling and try to give you enough information to make the legal aspects of homeschooling less daunting. We’ll look at the legal roles of government and of parents in children’s education, and at a few examples of homeschooling laws and how they work. Then we’ll talk about how to learn about the legal situation in your state and what resources are available for the rare cases when legal help becomes necessary. Finally, we’ll take a peek at the sometimes volatile mixture of homeschooling and politics and the possible consequences for homeschooling families.
The State’s Interest in Education
Until the wide success of the common school movement in the latter half of the nineteenth century, education was primarily a matter of parental discretion. Parents decided what their children needed to learn to become competent adults. They decided what to teach at home, whether children should be apprenticed for vocational training, and if and when their children should attend some sort of formal school. With the advent of universal free public education came compulsory attendance statutes and truancy regulations. By the beginning of this century, every northern state had its own compulsory school attendance statute, and the southern states were rapidly following the trend. By the 1920s, the shift