Mar 30, 2008
EDUCATION:
Ridgefield homeschoolers tell of trials
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With harrowing tales, a group of parents are trying to get the state to change its law concerning the withdrawal of students from public school for the purposes of homeschooling.
Among them is a family from Ridgefield who seems to feel completely alienated from the public schools and school employees they’d once hoped would be their most powerful allies in the challenging task of raising children with special needs.
The school system, they say, responded to their withdrawal of their children by reporting them as neglectful parents to the state Department of Children and Families (DCF).
“Instead of getting lawyers and doctors to play the education school district’s game, my wife and I decided to quietly remove our children from school, and homeschool them,” said Jeff Kain, the Ridgefield father. “After we informed the school principal in writing, we were then reported to the DCF by a phantom school official that has never been disclosed to us...
“The complaint was ‘educational and emotional neglect,’” he said.
The time and effort involved in providing a home school program for children with special needs is the polar opposite of neglect, he said.
The Kains’ children were withdrawn from school effective Dec. 11, 2006, and the complaint was filed with the DCF on Jan. 11, 2007, Mr. Kain said.
In the spring of 2007, he said, the Department of Children and Families found the case unsubstantiated after one unannounced visit to their home and one meeting in their offices. “They informed my wife in that one and only meeting that they were dropping the case immediately,” Mr. Kain said. “There’s a 45 day grace period, where you get it in writing. It took about 45 days that it was found to be ‘unsubstantiated’ — that’s the term they use.”
Still, the family was greatly affected by the experience.
“We felt so coerced and intimidated,” Mr. Kain said. “This is so huge and so demoralizing and devastating to our family that we hid in our home,” he said.
Closed door
The report for alleged neglect was a final straw in the Kains’ history with the school district.
“We felt they were closing the door to us, and then we left and they contacted the Department of Children and Families and we felt like the door was closed forever,” the Ridgefield father said.
The episode instilled a fear that their children might be taken from them.
“I am so afraid to have our children legally kidnapped by a state,” Mr. Kain said.
“...We have two beautiful children we have to be advocates for, and we feel like we’re being pushed out of a community. It’s the most terrible thing I’ve experienced in my 54 years of life. We’re hiding in our home. When we need something, I go to Wilton.”
That was in a long phone conservation.
Last month, about a year after being reported to the state Department of Children and Families for “educational neglect,” the Ridgefield couple provided written testimony to a legislative committee considering a bill designed to clarify what should happen when parents withdraw children — in many cases special needs children — from the public schools in order to homeschool them.
“Parents of families with special needs, comprising medically disadvantaged, emotionally wounded and neurologically impaired children, are strained to educate their children alone in the face of scorn for being forced out of the public schools due to prejudice toward these children,” Mr. Kain wrote to the legislature.
“It is leaving disturbing and interminable scars for our children. We parents must endure devastating and sweeping consequences from such indifference, in spite of our appeals to assist teachers by offering our critical information and our voluntary support.
“After using us as weekly volunteers in the classroom, they discarded us by falsifying trumped up charges to the DCF here in Connecticut.”
A Redding mother wrote to the legislature with a similar tale.
“The sound of my doorbell strikes terror in my heart,” her testimony reads. “I can not answer without shouting, to make sure someone from the Department of Children and Families (DCF) is not on the other side.
“We are a home schooling family in the State of Connecticut ... Our situation evokes tales from ‘far off lands’ where people are, or were, persecuted and monitored by their government...”
Attorney Deborah Stevenson, an education lawyer in Southbury and the executive director of National Home Education Legal Defense, told the legislature that public schools around the state had been reporting families to the Department of Children and Family after the withdrawal of children from the public schools for homeschooling.
“The bill ... is needed because of the improper, coercive, and abusive actions of school officials who falsely reported, or threatened to report, more than 40 families to the Department of Children and Families in this past year alone, simply because they exercised their right to refuse unlawful demands of public school officials, and withdrew their children from the public school system...”
The bill would “compel school districts to unconditionally acknowledge and respect the right of parents when they exercise their right to withdraw their children from a public school,” she wrote.
“Parents should not have to fear the loss of custody of their children simply because they exercise this right.”
State’s concerns
A lawyer with the State Department of Education offered a different perspective on the controversy.
“We’ve got a number of different statutes that relate to home instruction,” said Attorney Laura Anastacio. “But essentially what we have are dual obligations. Parents have certain statutory obligations and school districts have certain statutory obligations.
“Local boards of education are required to make certain that children who reside within their school districts are attending public school, or they have to contact the parent and make sure that the child is receiving equivalent instruction elsewhere.”
School personnel are also “mandatory reporters” under state child protection statues: They are required to report suspected cases of abuse — not just beatings, but all kinds, including the “educational abuse” of not providing a child with adequate schooling.
“They have to report cases of possible educational neglect, if a child isn’t being educated.” Ms. Anastasio said.
The state Department of Education has advised districts on how to proceed.
“We came up with a recommendation that school districts adopt a twofold approach: First, that they require an annual ‘Notice of Intent’ and in that ‘Notice of Intent’ the parent is saying for this school year, I am going to educate my child in the home and I will educate the child in the subjects listed here that are taught in the public schools.
“And then we also recommended, although they don’t have to do this, that at the end of the school year they set up a meeting with the parent — we call it a portfolio review — so the school official can just take a look at what that child has been doing, so they can know he was instructed in math, in science, in social studies, all the subjects that are taught in public school.
“From what I’ve heard, there are some parents who feel that that’s very onerous on them,” Ms. Anastacio said.
“If they’re not able to make a determination whether the child is being educated, then the DCF laws under Title 17-A do require the school districts to report possible cases of educational neglect.”
Superintendent Low
Ridgefield Superintendent Deborah Low began a discussion on the issue by explaining what, by law, she couldn’t talk about.
“I can never comment on any situation involving individual students or their families,” she said.
State laws require that children be educated, she said, but do permit home schooling.
“Families have the right to do that, with the expectation that the education would be comparable — ‘equivalent’ I guess is a better word,” Ms. Low said.
“...There is an expectation by the state that the student be educated,” Ms. Low said. “Again the parents can choose to do it on their own, with the expectation that it’s the equivalent instruction. That’s the only state expectation that there is — it’s a big one...”
As to reports that might have been made to the Department of Children and Families, Ms. Low — who came to Ridgefield in June 2007, months after the Kains were reported — had little to say.
“The reports to DCF are a totally different issue, and there are laws governing when districts are expected and required to report,” she said. “...School people are considered mandatory reporters” if they have concerns about children, she said.
Committee hearings
State Senator Judith Freedman, whose 26th District includes Ridgefield, is a member of the legislature’s Select Committee on Children, which heard the parents’ testimony on the bill to ease the withdrawal of children for homeschooling.
“It was very interesting. There were quite a few of them, and they were all treated differently,” she said. “I think the local school systems go after them on truancy and get DCF involved, and call it neglect, or whatever you want to call it, because the kids aren’t in school.”
The school districts’ and state departments’ perspectives on the issue went unrepresented at the hearing, Senator Freedman said. Attempts to introduce the bill in previous years never got far.
“School people? There wasn’t anybody there, which I thought was very interesting,” she said. “This bill has always gone before the education committee and they’ve never done anything with it, so this time it came before the children’s committee. We’re obviously going to have to send it to the Education Committee.”
While he is interested in the bill before the legislature, Mr. Kain said he did not view it as the most important point.
“To me the real issue is: Why are people home schooling?” he said. “Are they being threatened? Are they not getting the resources the schools have? Are they being bullied?” he said.
“Simply choosing to homeschool does not equal educational abuse!,” Mr. Kain said. “It’s an oxymoron.”
“The fact is, some public schools are not providing a free and appropriate education for special needs children, although they receive federal and state funds to do so.
“We now have to pay the expense of homeschooling while also paying taxes to a public school district that failed to provide our children with a safe and appropriate education based on our children’s special needs.”
© Copyright 2008 by Hersam Acorn Newspapers
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