I picked this up on a Google Alert and I am not familiar with this source, but I thought I would relay the article anyway.
According to the article, a judge in New Jersey, upset that NJ does not require enough supervision of homeschooling, decided to follow his own law and ordered a homeschooling mother to submit her children to standardized testing, and further, ordered the school district to file suit against the mother (which is the only way to get an investigation of the homestudy program).
The judge criticized the NJ law and lamented the fact that it upholds the rights of parents to home-school their children without interference from the government. Implying that children being educated by their parents are unsupervised, the judge stated, “This is shocking to the court. In this day and age where we seek to protect children from harm and sexual predators, so many children are left unsupervised.”
The judge continued, “In today’s threatening world, where we seek to protect children from abuse, not just physical, but also educational abuse, how can we not monitor the educational welfare of all our children?” He then gave the case of a recently found starving child locked “in a putrid bedroom” as an example of what happens when home-schooled children are not “registered and supervised.”
If this story is true, this should alarm all homeschooling families and remind us that our fight is not completely won yet.
I think it is easy to get complacent, in this time where homeschooling is already legal in all 50 states, but there are still anti-homeschooling forces in the government that would love to change that.
5:57 am on March 8th, 2007
Here is the original link to the document being discussed. I’m not quite sure where they are getting to where the judge ordered anything in particular. Mostly, he just spouts off his personal opinion which clearly is not based in the law he is being asked to judge. But in the end, he only instructs the father how to proceed and says the court will stay out of it and hopes the parents and school district will come to a reasonable conclusion.
10:12 pm on March 8th, 2007
That was very interesting - both links. so much of what that judge said bothered me on so many levels, I can’t even begin. The part that bothered me the most was this “This is shocking to the court. In this day and age where we seek to protect children from harm and sexual predators, so many children are left unsupervised.” Implying that a parent is an unfit supervisor! And that somehow, children are more safe from sexual predators etc by being in state sponsored institutions.
In our great “Live free or die” state, more and more personal freedoms are being taken away - I worry about homeschooling as my own children creep toward mandatory schooling age.