One lesson I’ve had to learn again and again in Illinois is logic and accountability are low on many legislators’ list.

That’s why our governors are usually highlighted on comedy shows or from prison and our state is broke and broken.

The companion House Bill 2762 failed to lower compulsory attendance age to 6 years of age and sits unmoving in the Senate.  But last Friday, Lightford presented 2 Senate floor amendments in SB 1307 which changed bill language to compulsory attendance age of 6 years of age instead of 5. The current compulsory attendance age is 7 years of age.   SB 1307 was then passed out of the Senate with a vote of 37-19.

Yesterday SB 1307 walked out of the House Elementary and Secondary Education Committee with a vote of 8-5.  From Senator Lightford’s newsletter:

Dear Friends,
As the 2013 session of the Illinois General Assembly begins to wind to a close, I have some exciting progress to announce. My plan to require all 6-year-olds to attend school has cleared the Illinois Senate and is moving in the House.
I know some of you may be shocked to learn that kids are not required to attend school in Illinois until they turn 7, but that is the law in our state – a law I believe we should change. Seven is too late to start school, and the kids who start school late often end up far behind their classmates. This legislation would also make it easier to address the unacceptable chronic truancy rate among kindergartners and first graders – last year a Chicago Tribune investigation revealed that 18 percent of these young kids are not in school when they should be.

To read more about this legislation, click here.

She also proposes her bill is strongly supported by teachers. Her bill is strongly supported by teachers unions, which doesn’t necessarily mean teacher support.  The bill is now on the House docket for a second reading and the House sponsor, Rep. La Shawn Ford, warned of potential “technical amendments”.  In Illinois, that phrase often means a bill is gutted or controversial bill language could be added.  SB 1307 was passed out of the Senate with two floor amendments added in the third reading.

Contact your Representative and let them know this bill is not necessary.  Kindergartens are already in place in Illinois public schools.  Parents should decide whether their children are ready to be in school, not legislators (or teacher unions).  The IL Association of School Boards opposes this bill because the school districts cannot afford more truancy officers chasing down 6 year old parents for punishment.

Let’s have some common sense in the Illinois Capitol.  It would be refreshing.

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“My son chose home schooling when he was about 3. I didn’t realize that’s what was happening at the time. We tried having him go to preschool, and it was not a good fit for him,” said Wilson, the government affairs director for the Organization of Virginia Homeschoolers.

“Once I started questioning preschool, I suddenly found myself in this land of home-schoolers.”

Across the United States, a growing number of parents like Wilson have chosen home schooling as an alternative to public schools. In Virginia, the number of home-schoolers has increased by more than 50 percent over the past decade, according to the Virginia Department of Education.

There are now more than 32,000 home-schoolers in Virginia. If they were a school district, it would be the ninth-largest in the state – with almost as many students as the Norfolk Public Schools.

Homeschooler after homeschooler offered their experiences, from Ann Zeise to VaHomeschoolers President – Parrish Mort, to two Fairfax County homeschooling moms.  Since Virginia homeschoolers report their homeschooling status, homeschooling numbers were presented for each county.

The school divisions with the most home-schoolers are Fairfax County (2,929), Loudoun County (2,119), Chesterfield County (1,954), Prince William County (1,345) and Virginia Beach (982). That’s not surprising, because those are highly populated areas, and the home-schoolers there represent a tiny fraction of the school-age population.

But in Floyd County, in Southwest Virginia, the 269 home-schoolers represent nearly 12 percent of all school-age children, according to data analysis by Capital News Service. In Surry County, in the Hampton Roads area, home-schoolers represent 11 percent of all school-age children.

There was a former PTA president who shared her opinion of her non-homeschooling experience:

Missy Edwards, the former vice president of the Parent Teacher Association at Lanier Middle School in Fairfax, expressed that concern. She has three children, who have all attended public schools. Edwards said she has been actively involved in her children’s academic paths throughout high school.

Like many public school parents, Edwards believes home schooling cannot provide the type of benefits that public schools do.

“I don’t believe that home-schoolers can benefit from the social and academic capabilities of dealing with real-world issues,” Edwards said. She said public school “has provided my kids with socialization skills that I wouldn’t be able to give them if I had them at home with me every day.”

Real world issues often do not exist in the classroom, except for issues such as school socialization.

The homeschooling crew was gracious.

While Edwards said that she could never be a home-school parent, VaHomeschoolers leaders Amy Wilson of Prince William County and Parrish Mort of Cumberland County said public schools have always been an option for their children.

“If they told me they wanted to go to public school, I would let them give it a try. So far, they both prefer home schooling,” Wilson said.

Mort agreed: “Every year, we’d re-evaluate. It’s one child, one year at a time. If they chose to make a different choice, it was fine.”

Their response was typical of many homeschool parents – one day/year at a time, review and go the best direction for each child.  That is the glory of educational choice, which often keeps families homeschooling year after year.

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This week, the 385th Carnival of Homeschooling is at the Nerd Family Blog.

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The Romeike family counsel made a promise to appeal the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals decision.  Two opinions were presented.  One represented the entire three-judge panel’s opinion, while Judge Rogers offered a separate, concurring opinion.  President Bush nominated two judges – Rogers and Sutton – to the appeals court. President Clinton nominated Judge Gilman in 1997.

 Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals Romeike v. Holder OPINION

SUTTON, Circuit Judge. Uwe and Hannelore Romeike have five children, ages twelve, eleven, nine, seven and two, at least at the time this dispute began. Rather than send their children to the local public schools, they would prefer to teach them at home,largely for religious reasons. The powers that be refused to let them do so and prosecuted them for truancy when they disobeyed orders to return the children to school. Had the Romeikes lived in America at the time, they would have had a lot of legal authority to work with in countering the prosecution. See Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U.S. 205, 213–14 (1972); Pierce v. Soc’y of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510, 534–35 (1925); Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390, 400–01 (1923).

But the Romeikes lived in Germany when this dispute began. When the Romeikes became fed up with Germany’s ban on homeschooling and when their prosecution for failure to follow the law led to increasingly burdensome fines, they came to this country with the hope of obtaining asylum. Congress might have written the immigration laws to grant a safe haven to people living elsewhere in the world who face government strictures that the United States Constitution prohibits. But it did not. The relevant legislation applies only to those who have a “well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.” 8 U.S.C. § 1101(a)(42)(A). There is a difference between the persecution of a discrete group and the prosecution of those who violate a generally applicable law. As the Board of Immigration Appeals permissibly found, the German authorities have not singled out the Romeikes in particular or homeschoolers in general for persecution. As a result, we must deny the Romeikes’ petition for review and, with it, their applications for asylum.

The decision included an extensive court history review, including analysis of the initial decision to allow asylum in the United States:

The Romeikes entered the United States through a visa waiver program. Uwe applied for asylum, and his wife and five children sought relief as derivative applicants. An immigration judge approved the applications after finding that the Romeikes had a well-founded fear of persecution based on their membership in a “particular social group”: homeschoolers. The Board of Immigration Appeals overturned the immigration judge’s decision. It explained that “[t]he record does not show that the compulsory school attendance law is selectively applied to homeschoolers like the applicants.” Id. at 5. It added that homeschoolers were not punished more severely than other parents whose children broke the law. It concluded by reasoning that, even if the German government had singled out people like the Romeikes, “homeschoolers” are not protected by the immigration laws because they “lack the social visibility” and “particularity required to be a cognizable social group.” Id. at 7.

The opinion offered the reasoning behind rejection of homeschoolers as a recognized “particular social group”, the criteria necessary for granting asylum.

Even assuming for the sake of argument that faith-based homeschoolers (or for that matter homeschoolers in general) are a cognizable social group, a matter we need not resolve, “[t]he record does not show that the compulsory school attendance law is selectively applied to homeschoolers like the applicants,” or that “homeschoolers are more severely punished than others whose children do not comply with the compulsory school attendance law.” A.R. 5. The petitioner’s key witness, Michael Donnelly, testified that all parents who do not send their children to school face consequences ranging from fines to jail time to loss of custody. Donnelly identified parents punished for homeschooling their children for religious and secular reasons as well as parents punished for truant children who received no schooling at all.

The parents of Melissa Buzekros, for example, decided that it would be “better for her to learn at home.” Id. at 272. Melissa’s siblings continued to attend public school, but Melissa struggled due to “high noise levels and cancelled classes,” prompting her parents to teach her at home. Id. at 587. In response, the government removed Melissa from her parents’ custody—not to persecute her parents but to enforce the country’s compulsory-attendance law. Other parents, too, have tried to homeschool their children for secular reasons, whether because they were “very unhappy” in public school, highly gifted or low performing, and they also were punished. See id. at 591–92 (affidavits of Tilman and Dagmar Neubronner) (explaining that they faced $9,500 in fines after trying to homeschool their kids who were “very unhappy” in public school); id. at 657–58 (affidavit of Jorg Grosselumern) (explaining that “people who would like to practice homeschooling” because of “educational needs of the child,” such as being highly gifted or low performing, “do not dare to practice homeschooling actively because of the varied sanctions”).No. 12-3641 Romeike v. Holder Page 6

The parents of “school skippers,” truant students who do not show up for school, face civil fines as well. If the parents fail to convince their children to go to school, the government places them in alternative learning programs or special schools for truants. This enforcement of the law has nothing to do with homeschooling, whether for faith- based or secular reasons. For better or worse, Germany punishes any and all parents who fail to comply with the school-attendance law, no matter the reasons they provide.

There has been great concern from many in the United States homeschooling community regarding President Obama’s/Department of Justice homeschool friendliness here, via reflection of this particular asylum case.  There is no doubt many of Obama administrative heads’ previous Illinois history shows homeschool over-compliance demands, particularly during Department of Education Arne Duncan’s former CEO tenure over the Chicago Public Schools. This administration has strong backing from the teacher unions and the unions certainly do not support homeschooling freedoms.

But homeschoolers would be wise to keep a clear and educated eye on the various goings on in the various federal departments, particularly Education, along with a close watch of their state legislative actions.  The attitude might be echoed by the Justice Department’s asylum opposition, but other present and past US administrative actions and policies should bear a more distressing heads up for families and their freedoms.

Below is the final word from the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals regarding the Romeike case:

The question is not whether Germany’s policy violates the American Constitution, whether it violates the parameters of an international treaty or whether Germany’s law is a good idea. It is whether the Romeikes have established the prerequisites of an asylum claim—a well-founded fear of persecution on account of a protected ground. See INS v. Elias-Zacarias, 502 U.S. 478, 483 (1992) (explaining that, even if the petitioner could prove he held a particular political opinion, he must also show that he would be persecuted “because of [his] political opinion” rather than because he defied the guerilla army’s general conscription policy); Chen Zhou Chai v. Carroll, 48 F.3d 1331, 1342 (4th Cir. 1995) (“Even if the applicant can characterize his failure to comply with the population control policy as a political opinion, the applicant must still demonstrate that the government’s actions or threats against the applicant, even to the extent those actions or threats involve forced abortions or sterilizations, were taken for a reason other than to enforce the population control policy.”).

The Romeikes have not met this burden. The German law does not on its face single out any protected group, and the Romeikes have not provided sufficient evidence to show that the law’s application turns on prohibited classifications or animus based on any prohibited ground.

III. For these reasons, we deny the Romeikes’ petition.

Best of wishes to the captivating Romeikes and their search for educational and family freedoms.

Cross-posted at Home Education Magazine News & Commentary

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Make no mistake, homeschooling works, and it works not because of governmental bureaucracy and accreditation standards, but in spite of it. It works because it places responsibility for the education, nurturing and growth of children squarely in the hands of the parents.

When you consider that homeschool parents spend an average of $500 to $600 a year on each student in comparison to $9,000 to $10,000 for each government school student in the United States, the academic results are astounding. Essentially, homeschool parents are paying less to educate their own children than they spend to educate someone else’s children in the government school system.

Whatever thread a homeschooling family makes up in the vibrant, varied tapestry our community enfolds, many agree government oversight is not a help in our home education pursuits.  It appears Mr. Hoffman – former Sioux City Council member, Pentagon 9/11 survivor and widower – is a homeschool dad enjoying the time, for one – “Hugging your kids while you take turns reading a good book.”   From Dave Madsen at NewsNetNebraska:

These days, thanks to his military retirement and a successful real estate business, Hoffman has the financial means to be able to spend time working on a biography about his wife. He calls it a tribute to her, dedicated to his kids. “I’m writing it so one of her friends, or any of the people who knew her might be inspired by reading it,” he says. As he has done for several years, he plans to take his children to California this winter, where he will home school them…another example of his devotion to the kids.

Cross-posted at Home Education Magazine News & Commentary

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