Backdoor Dealings
A proposed bill that would get DCF off the back of homeschooling parents is
caught in a political war between competing lawmakers
Thursday, April 03, 2008
There's a bait-and-switch scam going on in
the General Assembly where the homeschooling bill 162 is concerned.
Originally proposed by Rep. Arthur O'Neill,
it's supposed to clarify a legal hitch causing problems for
Here's the deal: when parents withdraw their
children from school to teach them at home, the schools have been calling the
Department of Children and Families and reporting the parents for
"educational neglect." We wrote about this last summer: in all cases
the charges against the families were deemed "unsubstantiated," but
defending such charges is stressful and expensive for the families.
The problem is that state law doesn't really
specify what a parent must do to withdraw his children. So O'Neill proposed a
bill which, if ratified, would modify section 10-220 of the state statutes,
which lists "Duties of boards of education." Under O'Neill's bill, if
a parent sends written notice of intent to withdraw his kids, "the local
or regional board of education shall accept such notice and shall deem the
child withdrawn immediately."
This draft went to the Legislative
Commissioner's Office to be written in bill form, and came out entirely
different: the LCO version says nothing about the duties of school boards but
would alter section 10-184 of the statutes, "Duties of parents." And
it says that if a parent "intends to provide the child with equivalent
instruction" at home and sends a letter saying so, the school principal or
superintendent "shall immediately accept such notice as evidence the child
is receiving equivalent instruction."
Deborah Stevenson, an attorney who heads
NHELD (National Home Education Legal Defense), finds this unacceptable.
"It's not enough to accept the letter, you must consider the child
withdrawn," she argues. "Evidence is not proof."
Besides, acceptance of the letters isn't
really the problem: "School districts were accepting them, but not
considering the children withdrawn, then calling DCF and charging them with
educational neglect."
The new language came out just before the
Children's Committee held a public hearing on the bill. "[They] announced
a hearing on the original language, but didn't ... realize the language had
changed before the hearing." So they voted to revert back to O'Neill's
original.
Then the bill went to the Education
Committee, where Sen. Thomas Gaffey and Rep. Andrew
Fleischmann sit. The Education Committee, in turn, rewrote the bill.
"The last day, Gaffey
comes out at committee meetings with another version of this bill with revised
language. Nobody asked him to," Stevenson said. Gaffey's
"evidence" version, according to Stevenson's interpretation, would
not provide parents a way to withdraw their children, but instead give schools
authority to decide whether or not to remove a child from its rolls.
And one more thing, Stevenson said, "Gaffey ... said 'O'Neill is fine with this [new]
language.'"
Rep. O'Neill disagreed. "I never said 'I
support this language' to anybody," he told us.
And what does he think about the changes to
his bill?
"Unfortunately, the Education Committee
leadership feel that given the choice between listening to Deborah Stevenson or
the Department of Education, they'll give the benefit of the doubt to folks
they feel are expert, neutral types."
With due respect, we said, we weren't certain
the Department of Education could be called "neutral" toward a law
which would remove children from their jurisdiction.
"I think the department does have a bit
of a bias," O'Neill said. "They may acknowledge there's a right [to
homeschool], but I think they're deeply skeptical."
Homeschool advocates like Stevenson feel the
Education Committee version of the bill is even worse than the current status
quo, we noted.
"Yeah," O'Neill said. "For the
first time, it would require parents offer formal notice ... in my bill, once
you get that piece of paper, that would be the end of the discussion,"
O'Neill said.
One more thing, we said: reading the new
version of the bill, we couldn't figure out what, exactly, a parent must do for
his kids to be withdrawn from school.
"I think you've got it right. The way
it's written, if a school takes the attitude 'we own the children,' this helps
them. They can go to a judge and say 'may,' not 'must'... it opens the door to
aggressive lawyering."
Sen. Gaffey did not
return our calls but Rep. Fleischmann did, and said the homeschoolers' concerns
about the rewording of the bill were unfounded. "They're mistaken,"
he says of critics of his version of the bill. "Bills can be worded many
ways and accomplish the same ends."
We said that O'Neill himself had concerns
with the revisions to his bill.
"That's interesting," said
Fleischmann, "because he had discussions with ... Senator Gaffey ... [and said] he was comfortable with the language
we were working on.
We indicated O'Neill had told us otherwise.
"I'm really disappointed at the mismatch
between the statements Rep. O'Neill made [in the legislature] and what he's
saying [to us]," Fleischmann said. "Apparently he changed his
mind."
We called O'Neill again to discuss our chat
with Fleischmann.
"I explained to [Fleischmann] I was
doing this on the homeschoolers' behalf, and they were not happy ... that was
the only conversation I had with him," O'Neill said.
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