The Homeschooling Handbook_ From Preschool to High School - Mary Griffith [25]
But what if you do need legal help? What if you become one of those increasingly rare cases where your homeschooling becomes a legal problem? Where do you find the assistance you need?
Just as with finding homeschooling legal information in the first place, you should try a variety of approaches. Before you ever get to the point of needing legal help, you can do a few things to prepare for potential problems. First, make sure you are familiar with your state’s law and requirements and that you have some way of keeping up-to-date on any changes. In most cases, this means joining a state homeschooling organization that monitors your state’s legal system and keeps its membership informed of possible changes: legislation, court rulings, education department regulations, and so forth. Be familiar with the types of problems that could arise and consider possible ways of handling them.
Most good state groups will provide this sort of help. They will collect information on “hostile contacts” from school officials and suggest tactics for dealing with them. Such tactics should include general advice, such as staying polite and making sure you keep records of any conversations and correspondence with officials. Other advice should be specific to your local situation and include information on what materials or cooperation officials are legally entitled to from you and what your recourse under the law may be. The aim of a state group in providing such information will be to equip you to handle the situation yourself. In at least 90 percent of the cases in which local officials question a family’s homeschooling, a polite but firm letter or phone call clarifying local homeschooling regulations for those officials is usually enough to clear up the problem. In any case, you can take a few steps that are nearly always effective in dealing with doubtful or hostile officials:
Always get the name and official title of anyone who calls you.
If an official tells you that homeschooling, or some aspect of it, is illegal, ask for the legal citation. If the official cannot give you a specific education code section or regulation to support his actions, ask him to contact you again when he can cite the legal authority for his views.
If an official is adamant in opposing your homeschooling, try going over her head to the school board or other elected officials. Try asking a few questions about how the money used dealing with you could otherwise have been spent on, say, materials for classroom students.
If you get no help from officials at any level, consider generating a little publicity. Reporters usually love “David and Goliath” stories, and a tale of independent homeschoolers, who don’t want government money and just want to be left alone to teach their children, fighting an unsympathetic and unfeeling education bureaucracy, usually fills the bill. If you can focus some attention on the finances here, too, so much the better—everyone loves a good government waste story.
A few situations will require more than just an assertive homeschooling parent, though, and you may find you need professional legal help. Again, a state organization should be able to give you advice. Generally, state groups simply do not have the resources to provide their members with professional legal help, but most groups should be able to recommend lawyers who are informed about homeschooling issues and willing to take on homeschooling clients.
Your family lawyer, if you have one, may also be willing to help you, but may not know much about the applicable laws. Again, the state homeschooling organizations should be able to provide enough information to save your lawyer a lot of time (and you the fees for the legal research time!) learning about the field. Or, you might be able to work out an arrangement to do some of the legal research on your case in exchange for a reduced