It turns out that there is one last chance to stop the repeal of Iowa’s reporting and assessment requirement. While the house and senate have passed it, the governor hasn’t signed it yet—though he is expected to. Iowa allows a line item veto. That means the governor could veto a specific portion of the bill and sign the rest into law. I hope you will all consider joining me in calling Governor Branstad on this issue!
Yesterday, the Iowa legislature betrayed its obligation to protect the well-being of that state’s homeschooled children. In one fell swoop, the legislature removed every safeguard designed to ensure that they were actually receiving an education. It’s gone now, all of it, every little protection, and there is now nothing left to ensure the needs and interests homeschooled children. Nothing. And that is, of course, how homeschooling advocates wanted it.
Time and again, light social conversations are peppered with anecdotes and stories, and for someone like me navigating that can sometimes feel like a minefield. Don’t let on that you have never heard of the pop star they’re discussing, do share a story about playing in cornfields as a barefoot kid—that one’s okay!—and hope you’re invisible when they’re discussing how much they hated high school pep rallies. If I slip up at a party or social event, it can be a problem.
But what I’m really struck by is how bad HSLDA’s legal advice appears to be for the people actually taking it. HSLDA makes its money off of ostensibly protecting homeschoolers’ right to homeschool, but in practice it rather looks like HSLDA cares more about keeping its members frightened enough to keep renewing their membership than it does about actually giving them good advice.
In google searching for something totally unrelated, I came upon a humorous poem about a failed courtship. As someone raised in this mentality, I found it familiar—and quite funny—and thought I’d share. It’s written like a letter from a girl’s prospective suitor to her father, sent after learning (from the father, of course) that the girl had rejected his suit.
This has been a crazy couple of weeks, to be honest. I never expected that HSLDA would respond to my posts or that people would come out of the woodwork angry about the blind eye HSLDA has turned toward the issue of child abuse in homeschooling families. Some people have even rephrased this whole thing as “Libby Anne vs. HSLDA.” So where are we on this topic? Let me offer some links and pull some thoughts together.
“The home-school law is abused up and down, left and right,” Jansma said in an interview last week about truancy issues. “I despise that law, because the families I deal with use as a loophole. Happens all the time. You’ll have a parent who is clearly neglectful and we can’t get resolution, and they’ll say, ‘I’ve decided to home-school my child’ and there’s nothing I can do about it.”
A Guest Post by Kathryn Elizabeth. I really hope that I’m wrong, and that HSLDA just made a mistake in judgment that they’re going to correct. The more I think about it though, the only thing that makes sense to me is that HSLDA is doing what they’re doing with abusers as part of a well thought out legal strategy with the end game being the Supreme Court ruling that homeschooling is a fundamental right that is subject to virtually zero regulations.
My parents were the kind of people that were always learning. My mother was very crafty and was always tackling a new sewing project and my father was always reading and always ready to take the time to teach us children things about nature or science. They modeled this for us and taught us to love learning as well. It was about discovery, and tackling new things, and about always seeing life as an adventure.
Growing up, I heard a lot about the importance of checks and balances in our government. My parents explained that it was the checks and balances our government has that ensures that our country will not become a dictatorship. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, they explained time and again. But it was like all of this was erased from their brains when they started talking about their right to homeschool.
A thread for discussing and debating which homeschool regulations would be appropriate, which would be effective, and which would be too prone to problems.
HSLDA has now offered an official response to my post about their defense of child abusers. Their response actually confirms that I had my details correct in that post, and also cements the concerns and problems I have with them as an organization. In this post I will look at their statement and offer my response. In a nutshell? It’s not enough.
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