City Tells Volunteer Fireman He's Unqualified Because of His Homeschool Diplomahttps://pjmedia.com/catherinesalgado/2026/09/21/city-tells-volunteer-fireman-hes-unqualified-because-of-homeschool-diploma-n4957476Andrew Coates has a state EMT license in Nebraska and is a volunteer firefighter who wanted to turn that volunteer work into a profession. But while the state of Nebraska simply says firemen have to be high school graduates, the city is claiming that it will only accept diplomas from accredited high schools, excluding homeschoolers like him.
My mother homeschooled me from kindergarten through 12th grade, and we used a program that does have official accreditation. But most homeschoolers use a much more individualized and unofficial curriculum, and since public officials usually despise parents as educational authorities, many of them refuse to recognize the validity of homeschool education, even though homeschoolers overall consistently score higher on standardized tests.
This rejection of Coates has nothing to do with competency, given the disastrous scores and increasing incompetence of many public school students, and Coates’ own state EMT license. It has everything to do with the city of Fremont wanting to force people to go through educational channels which politicians can control.
If you watch the video below, you will notice that the written requirements for the position did not match what the city’s Karen of an HR director, Jennifer McDuffee, told Coates. To complete the ridiculous persecution, the city then added the word “accredited” to its job description specifically to exclude Coates.
Discriminating against homeschool graduates is so 1980s-1990s. Hopefully, Coates contacts Home School Legal Defense Association about this silliness.
When our munchkins approached graduation age, we did a couple of things that would bypass an issue like this. First, all three took advantage of our local JC's concurrent enrollment program, Thus, they were college students before graduating. Second, around the same time we graduated them, we had our munchkins take and pass the California High School Proficiency Exam. In California, by law, a CHSPE certificate is the legal equivalent of a high school diploma. Their high school diplomas were never challenged, but they were prepared had that happened.
That was the late 1990s and early 2000s, and things have improved for homeschool grads since then. This case is pretty much an outlier.
