I wondered if idiocy of this sort was coming (and sort of foreshadowed it in my post above):
Well...this attack on homeschooling is absolute BShttps://tomknighton.substack.com/p/wellthis-attack-on-homeschoolingIn a free nation, you get to decide things for yourself. While I’m a school choice advocate and think we should be able to use our tax dollars for education in the manner of our choosing, I find my being able to make the choice of where my kids are educated the most important thing.
...
But some people really don’t want me to have that choice. They want to dictate what I can and can’t do with regard to homeschooling my kids, all in an effort to make it so onerous that I’ll say, “Screw it!” and send my kid to public school.
And the really disgusting people will manipulate any event they can to try and justify their animosity, such as this horrific incident.
After a Connecticut woman was accused of holding her stepson captive for two decades, education advocates said the state’s largely unregulated homeschooling system could allow abusive parents to keep their children from public view with no protective oversight.
The stepson, now 32, told police that he was removed from public school in the fourth grade and that he was homeschooled.
Some background info before returning to my point ... my wife and I homeschooled our munchkins "K-12". We started and for 4 years co-led a homeschoolers' support group that in that time grew to more than 100 families (it's still around, some 30 years later). We networked with other homeschooling families and support groups in our area and volunteered at the regional and state-wide homeschooling conventions. The point of this litany (that thousands of past homeschoolers could equal or exceed) is that we were acquainted with 1000-1500 homeschooling families and saw thousands more.
In our years of homeschooling, we knew of one abusive family (they were into the
Your Children: Fun or Frenzy parenting thingy and some alternate medicine thingy).
Just. One. (Too many, obviously, but inconsistent with the educrats' stereotype) We started hearing this educrats' abuse claim in Clinton's first term, so it's been circulating for decades, decades that have proven it's a fauxny bogeyman. The way those abusers got caught illustrates the hole in educrats'
(that's who created and parrot it) homeschooling conceals abusers narrative. Their child's doctor reported them.
In real life, there are mandatory reporters
(e.g. school employees, healthcare workers), concerned friends and acquaintances
e.g. pastors or Sunday School teachers or Scout Masters, the latter often taught how to recognize potential abuse), and neighbors
(who might realize, "Gee, I haven't seen little Johnny or Janey in 10 or 15 or 20 years) who could start the investigative ball rolling. In this case the failure had multiple layers:
Waterbury Police Chief Fernando Spagnolo said the family first landed on investigators’ radar in 2005 when the victim’s school reported concerns to the Department of Children and Families (DCF), which twice visited the home.
“Everyone really was concerned with this child since he was 5 years old. You knew something was wrong. It was grossly wrong,” Pannone said.
“We knew it. We reported it. Not a damn thing was done. That’s the tragedy of the whole thing.”
The DCF, per CN law, routinely destroys records of "unsubstantiated abuse and neglect reports", so how many times friends, neighbors, and school employees reported this abuser and their reports were dismissed or ignored is not known, but
homeschooling did not shield her abuse from visibility. The failure was DCF's.
