The number of juveniles in the nation’s criminal justice system has been in decline for years. California and New York have closed some of their largest and most troubled juvenile detention facilities. Missouri has recently been credited with doing a better job of caring for its most troubled children, further limiting the state’s population of teens in punitive settings.
But a recent report by researchers has highlighted what they call a disturbing trend: the prominence and plight of girls in the juvenile justice system.
In 1992, according to the report, Gender Injustice, girls made up 20 percent of the children arrested in the U.S. In 2012, girls accounted for 29 percent of children arrested, a near 50 percent increase. The percentage of girls in the population of children sent to formal detention facilities grew similarly over those years.
The authors of the report, Francine Sherman, a professor at Boston College Law School, and Annie Balck, a lawyer formerly with the Children’s Law Center in Washington, D.C., explain the trend by citing the unintended consequences of a crackdown on domestic violence as well as the failures of reform efforts to address the specific needs of girls.
Girls in the juvenile justice system, they argue, are far more likely to have suffered a range of trauma at home before they wind up arrested. Indeed, girls are 4.4 times more likely than boys to have been sexually abused prior to their brushes with the law.
“In every category, girls in the juvenile justice system find themselves there having experienced more adversity than boys,” said Sherman, whose report was done in partnership with The National Crittenton Foundation. The foundation says that it is dedicated to the health and security of girls and young women across the country.
The authors found that girls are over-represented in certain categories of arrests — crimes they said could often be handled without the need for placement in detention. For instance, girls accounted for 76 percent of arrests for prostitution and 40 percent of arrests for liquor law violations.
ProPublica this year has reported on the history and variety of troubles in California’s group homes for troubled children. Many of the children who wind up in the homes arrive via the state’s juvenile justice system. The homes are typically not secure detention facilities, but have been beset by problems that long plagued the state’s locked facilities: physical and sexual abuse, mixed populations of children that make supervision more difficult, and inadequate or inconsistent medical care.
In New York City, ProPublica found that the latest wave of group homes created to better care for children convicted of minor crimes had also been hit by surges in the disappearances or re-arrests of children in their care.
The problems in California’s homes have been compounded by the shortage of facilities exclusively for girls. As a result, there have been instances where girls have been introduced to homes that had formerly housed only boys. At one of the state’s largest homes, in Davis, the introduction of girls overwhelmed inexperienced staff members and accelerated the eventual collapse and closing of the residence in 2013.
The Gender Injustice report issued last week sought to call attention to what it presented as something of a counter-intuitive finding: Efforts by local police departments to act aggressively and make arrests while responding to reported cases of domestic violence had led to a striking number of girls being sent to detention facilities.
Sherman said officers often believed “someone had to be arrested” in such cases, and that girls who might have been violent in defending themselves against assault had been swept up as a consequence. In 2013, girls accounted for 38 percent of the children arrested for “domestic battery.”
The authors offer an array of proposed reforms to better address girls in detention. They suggest ending the detention of girls for violations that pose no meaningful public threat and more effectively providing services to traumatized girls before they themselves wind up in the justice system.
ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for their newsletter.
Gadsden Ragional Medical Center in Gadsden, Ala. (Rob Culpepper/ProPublica)
In Alabama, a positive drug test can have dire repercussions for pregnant women and new mothers. Their newborns can be taken from them. They can lose custody of their other children. They can face lengthy sentences in the most notorious women’s prison in the United States and thousands of dollars in fees and fines.
Yet the hospitals that administer those drug tests — and turn the results over to authorities — are exceedingly reluctant to disclose their policies to the public. In many cases, they test mothers and babies without explicit consent and without warning about the potential consequences, ProPublica and AL.com have found.
According to a review of hundreds of court records, drug testing is ubiquitous in some Alabama counties — sometimes of mothers, sometimes of infants, sometimes both. In some parts of the state, hospitals test on a case-by-case basis, employing criteria that virtually ensure greater scrutiny for poor women.
ProPublica and AL.com began examining hospital drug-testing policies as part of an investigation into Alabama’s chemical endangerment law, the country’s toughest law targeting drug use in pregnancy. Since 2006, the law has been used to charge nearly 500 women with endangering their unborn children. In many cases, law enforcement officials cited hospital-administered drug tests as probable cause for arrest.
Forty-two of the 49 hospitals that deliver babies in Alabama declined to answer an AL.com/ProPublica questionnaire about testing policies, despite repeated requests over several months. Of the seven that did respond, three provided only partial information. Officials at several hospitals declined interview requests to explain why they didn’t want to answer the questionnaires.
In six consent forms obtained from patients and a handful of hospitals — paperwork that patients sign when they check in to deliver their babies — drug testing is specifically mentioned in only two. None indicate that positive results can trigger arrest and prosecution under the Alabama chemical endangerment statute.
“If hospitals are not informing their patients about what their drug-testing policies are, particularly when those results are used to involve law enforcement in their patients’ lives, that is an unconstitutional act,” said Sara Ainsworth, director of legal advocacy for the New York–based National Advocates for Pregnant Women.
Under Alabama law, drug abuse in pregnancy is considered a form of child abuse, and medical providers are “mandatory reporters,” meaning they are required to report positive test results to child welfare authorities, who then must report them to law enforcement. At least 15 other states also treat prenatal drug use as child abuse, but only three — Alabama, South Carolina, and Tennessee — explicitly allow mothers to be criminally prosecuted.
The potential penalties under Alabama law are especially stiff: one to 10 years in prison if a baby is exposed but suffers no ill effects; 10 to 20 years if a baby shows signs of exposure or harm; and 10 to 99 years if a baby dies.
Rosemary Blackmon, executive vice president of the Alabama Hospital Association, spoke on behalf of three hospitals that declined to answer the AL.com/ProPublica questionnaire. She said hospitals fear that discussing their drug testing policies could keep pregnant women from seeking medical care.
“I think there’s just sort of a general hesitancy that the more they talk about the drug screening and reporting, the greater the likelihood the mother will avoid delivering at a hospital,” Blackmon said.
But drug policy experts, medical groups, and civil libertarians say it’s the threat of losing their children and ending up behind bars that creates an atmosphere of fear.
“Criminal laws tend to make women less forthcoming,” said Dr. Stephen Patrick, professor of pediatrics and health policy at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. “It doesn’t set up a place where people have the opportunity to engage with their providers honestly.”
The severe consequences for women and families make it even more important that doctors and hospitals are transparent in their testing policies, experts say.
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists guidance states that drug testing “should be performed only with the patient’s consent … Pregnant women must be informed of the potential ramifications of a positive test result, including any mandatory reporting requirements.”
In 2001, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a program in South Carolina that involuntarily tested pregnant drug users solely for law enforcement purposes. It’s unclear how often hospitals in Alabama report positive drug tests directly to law enforcement, but a bill proposed earlier this year by the sheriff of Etowah County, northeast of Birmingham, would have required reporting within two hours whenever a pregnant woman or newborn tested positive.
Hospital testing policies are so opaque that even state health officials say they are in the dark about specifics. “Some hospitals, any pregnant woman that comes in, they’ll test for drugs,” said Janice M. Smiley, director of the Perinatal Health Division at the Alabama Department of Public Health. “Some will test all their newborns. It’s not one thing where everybody does the same. There’s no consistency there.”
Does she know which hospitals take which approach? “We don’t,” Smiley said.
Drug testing is an issue that U.S. medical providers are increasingly likely to confront. The incidence of babies born dependent on drugs, especially opioid painkillers and heroin, nearly doubled from 2009 to 2012, according to research by Patrick. Hospitals charged $1.5 billion to treat babies in withdrawal in 2012, according to the same study.
There are many medical reasons to screen pregnant women and new mothers for drug use, experts say: to provide proper prenatal care, to prevent pregnancy complications and to anticipate problems that may arise at birth. Many medical organizations, including the American Medical Association, support universal screening: asking women about their use of drugs as well as legal substances, such as alcohol and tobacco, that can affect prenatal health as much, if not more, than illicit ones.
But studies have found that many women lie about substance use during pregnancy, so some hospitals and communities have turned to testing — sometimes urine, sometimes blood, sometimes the baby’s first bowel movement, or meconium.
Several hospitals in Cincinnati announced universal drug testing for pregnant women earlier this year, and hospitals in New York City and Maryland have regularly tested new moms and pregnant women, according to research. Four states — Iowa, Kentucky, Minnesota and North Dakota — also require testing under some circumstances according to the Guttmacher Institute.
Hospital officials in those states have said they are responding to an increase in opioid use leading to drug-dependent babies. But none of those states has a law allowing women to be prosecuted for drug use in pregnancy.
In 2003, the federal government began requiring states to create strategies for dealing with drug-dependent babies. But the law left open the question of which babies and mothers should be tested, allowing hospitals to set their own parameters.
In Alabama hospitals, every facility from Thomas Hospital, in the prosperous bayside community of Fairhope, to the sprawling, urban campus of UAB Hospital in Birmingham, sets its own criteria.
Of the hospitals that answered the AL.com/ProPublica questionnaire, UAB Hospital appears to hew most closely to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists guidelines. Doctors there use a separate form to seek consent for drug testing; women can opt out simply by not signing.
According to court records and interviews with prosecutors, some hospitals have a policy of testing all newborns, in part because federal laws protecting patient privacy don’t apply in cases of child abuse. If an infant tests positive, mothers are then tested and reported to authorities.
Hospitals that take this approach appear to include Decatur Morgan in Morgan County, which has the largest number of chemical endangerment arrests in the state — including a high percentage of first-time offenders who test positive for marijuana only. Decatur Morgan officials declined numerous requests for comment.
Other hospitals single out patients with certain symptoms and those who received little to no prenatal care, the hospital questionnaires indicate. “A lack of prenatal care is a red flag,” the hospital association’s Blackmon said.
Women who use drugs are more likely to go without prenatal care, according to a 2004 study in the Journal of Maternal-Fetal and Neonatal Medicine. But so are women with less education and no health insurance.
Legal experts worry that singling out women who haven’t received prenatal care could unfairly target poor women and those who live far from medical facilities.
More than half of the births in the state are paid for by Medicaid, which is only available to women who earn less than $1,433 a month ($17,196 per year). What’s more, the number of rural hospitals in the state offering obstetrical care has dropped by about 60 percent since 1980, according to the Alabama Rural Health Association, which makes it more difficult for rural women to obtain prenatal care
“You don’t have to be on drugs not to receive prenatal care,” said Linda Fentiman, a professor at Pace University School of Law, who has studied fetal protection laws. “It could just be that you can’t afford it.”
The U.S. Supreme Court has addressed the issue of drug testing maternity patients only once, in Ferguson v. Charleston in 2001. The justices found that a policy at a South Carolina public hospital to involuntary test women (in this case, almost exclusively black) and turn positive results over to law enforcement solely for prosecution purposes violated Fourth Amendment protections against search and seizure.
“The reasonable expectation of privacy enjoyed by the typical patient undergoing diagnostic tests in a hospital is that the results … will not be shared with nonmedical personnel without her consent,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in his majority opinion.
But that decision focused on publicly funded hospitals. “Legally, this is a very ripe area for attack,” said Daniel Abrahamson, director of legal affairs at the Drug Policy Alliance, which helped organize amicus briefs against the hospital’s policy in the Ferguson case.
In admissions forms obtained by ProPublica and AL.com, references to drug testing were almost always obscured in vague boilerplate language giving consent to things like “diagnostic procedures,” “usual and customary medical/emergency treatment,” and “other… care considered advisable or necessary by the physician.”
The consent forms are “really unclear,” said R. Alta Charo, a medical ethicist, former senior adviser to the Food and Drug Administration and University of Wisconsin law professor who reviewed them for ProPublica and AL.com. “This is a global consent to anything in medicine that they want to do. That is not at all a standard for consent. … It does not count in my mind as informed consent for drug screening.”
The absence of clarity is even more striking when compared with other detailed and explicit consent forms maternity patients can be required to sign.
When Casey Shehi checked into Gadsden Regional Medical Center in Etowah County to deliver her son in August 2014, her admissions paperwork totaled 17 pages. The consent forms covered everything from potential medical complications to the photographing of Shehi’s newborn and hospital visitation rules.
The only reference to possible drug testing was a blanket statement: “I consent to examinations, blood tests … laboratory and imaging procedures, medications, infusions, nursing care, and other services or treatments …” No one at Gadsden Regional orally informed her that she would be drug tested, Shehi said.
When traces of benzodiazepine were found in Shehi’s urine — from a Valium she had taken to help her sleep — she was turned over to child welfare and law enforcement authorities, then charged with chemical endangerment. Etowah has arrested more pregnant women and new mothers for chemical endangerment than any other Alabama county in the last two years.
Shehi’s case was recently dismissed, but her experience with drug testing has been mirrored by women across the state, according to a recent AL.com reader survey.
A mother who gave birth at Huntsville Hospital this summer reported that she was “appalled” when she found out she had been drug tested. Two women who gave birth at other Alabama hospitals — Marshall Medical Center South and Brookwood in Birmingham — only found out they were drug tested after false positives, they said in the survey.
“[B]ecause [testing] is now considered the standard of care, patients are not given an option to refuse it,” said a doctor who anonymously provided a Huntsville Hospital consent form. “[N]or are they told that this is included in their consent before signing … I’ve been told by moms that they just get handed the urine cup and told to void.”
Fifty-six of the 110 women who responded to the reader survey said they had no idea whether they’d been drug tested. Officials at Brookwood Medical Center, Huntsville Hospital and Marshall Medical Center South all declined to comment and did not return questionnaires.
In a few counties, notably Madison, where Huntsville is located, defense lawyers recently have been more aggressive in challenging the legality of drug tests and law enforcement investigations based on them, according to court records. A number of those cases have been dismissed.
General medical consents are not the same as consent to a police search, said Lynn Paltrow, executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women and a lead attorney in the Ferguson case. “Unless … there [is] a search warrant or the woman [gives] a specific consent to being searched for criminal justice purposes,” she said, “the collection and transmission of the test results constitute an illegal search and seizure in violation of the Fourth Amendment.”
State Rep. Patricia Todd, a Birmingham Democrat with a background in public health, said there was little political appetite to change the way Alabama addresses drug use during pregnancy. “It’s easy to throw someone in jail for something they do,” Todd said. “You don’t have to deal with the real issue.”
That may leave the matter in the hands of lawyers. Hospitals and medical providers that test women without notice or consent and turn over positive results to authorities are leaving themselves open to legal challenge, said Randall Marshall, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Alabama.
The closer hospitals and law enforcement officials are working, the more likely they are to run afoul of the Ferguson ruling, he said. “This is an issue that we are very interested in.”
Drug Tested When Giving Birth? Tell Us Your Story.
In many parts of the country, the war on drugs has a new front: the maternity ward. But policies meant to protect babies can have unintended, and sometimes dire, consequences for women’s constitutional and reproductive rights. Have you or someone you know been drug tested during pregnancy or childbirth? Did you give your consent? ProPublica would like to hear from you. If you’re uncertain about whether you or your child were tested, you can request your admission and medical records from the hospital or ask your doctors. Get all paperwork for you and your child, including consent forms and hospital testing policies. Be aware: You have a legal right to your medical information. You can help our reporting on the issue by taking this short survey:
Thanks for submitting our form!
ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for their newsletter.
Read Original Article – Published Sep. 30, 2015, 11 a.m.
How Some Alabama Hospitals Quietly Drug Test New Mothers — Without Their Consent This story was co-published with AL.com.
A new report released Thursday provides a detailed look at the graduation rates of low-income college students. At many colleges, low-income students graduate at much lower rates than their high-income peers.
At the University of Missouri-Kansas City, only 35 percent of Pell Grant recipients graduate college, a rate that is more than 20 percentage points lower than that of their wealthier peers. And at St. Andrews, a liberal arts college in Laurinburg, North Carolina, only 13 percent of Pell Grant recipients graduate, more than 50 percentage points less than students who don’t receive the grants.
The study found 51 percent of Pell students graduate nationwide, compared to 65 percent of non-Pell students. The average gap between wealthy and poor students at the same schools is much smaller: an average of 5.7 percentage points. That’s because many Pell students attend schools with low graduation rates. (You can now look up whether poor students are graduating at the same rate as their classmates in our newly updated interactive database, Debt by Degrees.)
Ben Miller, the senior director for postsecondary education at the Center for American Progress, said that schools with large graduation gaps deserve greater scrutiny.
“Colleges have responsibility to ensure that the students they enroll are well served,” said Miller. “If you’re going to enroll someone, you should do the absolute best you can to graduate them, or else don’t take their money.”
The new report comes on the heels of recently released federal education data that has brought new focus on how low-income students fare at college, including how much federal debt they take on and how much they earn after graduation. The graduation rates of low-income students were not included in that data.
The group behind the new report, the Education Trust, collected the graduation rates of Pell Grant recipients — typically students whose families make less than $30,000 a year — for a selection of more than 1,000 colleges across the country.
A spokesman for University of Missouri-Kansas City said many of their students are low-income and that the school is working to do better. “We are not satisfied with that gap,” said John Martellaro. “We are investing more resources in our student success programs in an effort to narrow that gap.” (Read their full statement.)
St. Andrews did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
At more than a third of the colleges studied, schools were able to serve their Pell students almost as well as non-Pell students, with a gap of less than 3 percentage points.
Other schools have managed to graduate Pell students at an even higher rate than their non-Pell peers. According to the new data, nearly 90 percent of Pell recipients are able to graduate Smith College, compared with an 85 percent graduation rate of non-Pell students. And at Western Oregon University, Pell recipients have a graduation rate of 50 percent — nearly 10 percentage points better than their peers.
Both schools worked hard to ensure high graduation rates, including improving admissions policies and bolstering financial aid, as well as increasing advising and support services for students at school, says the new report.
The Pell Grant program is the nation’s largest need-based student grant program, giving out billions of dollars annually. Yet for years, the data on Pell recipient graduation rates was mostly hidden from the public eye.
Although colleges are required to give the government graduation-rate data that’s broken down by gender and race, the data is not required to be reported by income or Pell Grant status. Since 2008, schools are required to disclose Pell graduation rate data if it’s requested by prospective students.
“It’s kind of astounding when you think about how much money is spent on the Pell Grant program,” said Andrew Kelly, the director of the Center on Higher Education Reform at the American Enterprise Institute. “We don’t have any idea about how much of that money goes to producing degrees. We don’t know what happens to Pell recipients after they enroll.”
In order to collect Pell graduation rates, the Education Trust filed requests for data through state higher education systems as well as with the schools themselves. Some of the data was purchased from U.S. News and World Report. However, only around 1,150 schools were included in the report, out of the more than 7,000 institutions in the country. The survey also did not include data from for-profit colleges, where many Pell-recipients attend school.
Sisi Wei contributed to this report.
ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for their newsletter.
Kilton Public Library’s area. (Library Freedom Project)
Since Edward Snowden exposed the extent of online surveillance by the U.S. government, there has been a surge of initiatives to protect users’ privacy.
But it hasn’t taken long for one of these efforts — a project to equip local libraries with technology supporting anonymous Internet surfing — to run up against opposition from law enforcement.
In July, the Kilton Public Library in Lebanon, New Hampshire, was the first library in the country to become part of the anonymous Web surfing service Tor. The library allowed Tor users around the world to bounce their Internet traffic through the library, thus masking users’ locations.
Soon after state authorities received an email about it from an agent at the Department of Homeland Security.
“The Department of Homeland Security got in touch with our Police Department,” said Sean Fleming, the library director of the Lebanon Public Libraries.
After a meeting at which local police and city officials discussed how Tor could be exploited by criminals, the library pulled the plug on the project.
“Right now we’re on pause,” said Fleming. “We really weren’t anticipating that there would be any controversy at all.”
He said that the library board of trustees will vote on whether to turn the service back on at its meeting on Sept. 15.
Used in repressive regimes by dissidents and journalists, Tor is considered a crucial tool for freedom of expression and counts the State Department among its top donors. But Tor has been a thorn in the side of law enforcement; National Security Agency documents made public by Snowden have revealed the agency’s frustration that it could only identify a “very small fraction” of Tor users.
The idea to install Tor services in libraries emerged from Boston librarian Alison Macrina’s Library Freedom Project, which aims to teach libraries how to “protect patrons’ rights to explore new ideas, no matter how controversial or subversive, unfettered by the pernicious effects of online surveillance.” (The Library Freedom Project is funded by Knight Foundation, which also provides funding to ProPublica.)
After Macrina conducted a privacy training session at the Kilton library in May, she talked to the librarian about also setting up a Tor relay, the mechanism by which users across the Internet can hide their identity.
The library board of trustees unanimously approved the plan at its meeting in June, and the relay was set up in July. But after ArsTechnica wrote about the pilot project and Macrina’s plan to install Tor relays in libraries across the nation, law enforcement got involved.
A special agent in a Boston DHS office forwarded the article to the New Hampshire police, who forwarded it to a sergeant at the Lebanon Police Department.
DHS spokesman Shawn Neudauer said the agent was simply providing “visibility/situational awareness,” and did not have any direct contact with the Lebanon police or library. “The use of a Tor browser is not, in [or] of itself, illegal and there are legitimate purposes for its use,” Neudauer said, “However, the protections that Tor offers can be attractive to criminal enterprises or actors and HSI [Homeland Security Investigations] will continue to pursue those individuals who seek to use the anonymizing technology to further their illicit activity.”
When the DHS inquiry was brought to his attention, Lt. Matthew Isham of the Lebanon Police Department was concerned. “For all the good that a Tor may allow as far as speech, there is also the criminal side that would take advantage of that as well,” Isham said. “We felt we needed to make the city aware of it.”
Deputy City Manager Paula Maville said that when she learned about Tor at the meeting with the police and the librarians, she was concerned about the service’s association with criminal activities such as pornography and drug trafficking. “That is a concern from a public relations perspective and we wanted to get those concerns on the table,” she said.
Faced with police and city concerns, library director Fleming agreed to turn off the Tor relay temporarily until the board could reconsider. “We need to find out what the community thinks,” he said. “The only groups that have been represented so far are the Police Department and City Hall.”
Fleming said that he is now realizing the downside of being the first test site for the Tor initiative.
“There are other libraries that I’ve heard that are interested in participating but nobody else wanted to be first,” he said. “We’re lonesome right now.”
ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for their newsletter.
Strong Beginnings Pre-K Graduation, June 11, 2010 in Vicenza, Italy. (Creative Commons photo by Edward N. Johnson/U.S. Army)
As 65,000 4-year-olds start free, full-time pre-kindergarten today as part of New York City’s ambitious universal pre-K program, questions persist about whether the program is spending public funds wisely. Education advocates and officials from Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration say the $300 million a year program is a success because the city was able to offer a place to every family who asked for one and is building broad public support that will protect the program long-term.
Some experts, however, argue that de Blasio’s approach is wasteful because it includes the children of wealthier families who may reap minimal incremental benefits from government sponsored early education.
Studieshave shown that while low-income children benefit exponentially with pre-school, children raised in high-income families do well regardless because they are naturally exposed to richer educational experiences. “We just don’t have the evidence to back why we would heavily finance pre-K in middle class and upper class communities,” said Bruce Fuller, a professor at UC Berkeley who is a critic of universal pre-K and who has written extensively about the New York City case. “I think the mayor has virtuous intentions, but I think once he made this ambitious campaign promise, he sort of charged ahead with blinders on.”
City officials insist that in its first year, two-thirds of the slots created went to neighborhoods where the median income falls below the median for the city as a whole. “We will begin, even as soon as this month, to start talking to families that are eligible for next year’s pre-K program,” said Josh Wallack, deputy chancellor at the city’s Department of Education, who oversees the universal pre-K program. De Blasio’s administration originally planned to enroll more than 73,000 children by this academic year, the same number as children enrolled in public kindergarten. “We would love to see [the number] go up from 65,000,” Wallack said “We may get there. We are going to try really hard.”
But Fuller argues that a significant number of children enrolled in universal pre-K would otherwise have paid tuition for private programs. He surveyed 15 percent of preschool directors in New York City to gauge the number of children who had moved from private pre-K to public last year. Based on the responses he got, he estimates that 40 percent to 58 percent of the new slots created in the first year of universal pre-K were occupied by children who would have otherwise enrolled in private programs.
The city disputes Fuller’s findings and argues that its goal of providing free pre-K to every child is the correct one. “Even assume that what [Fuller] is saying is correct, and I’m not saying it is,” Deputy Chancellor Wallack said, “I think the fact remains we were able to create a system where every family has access, even families that may have made it a priority and paid for prekindergarten before.”
Halley Potter, a fellow at the Century Foundation, said the program’s universality is essential to ensuring its survival, especially given the program’s lack of permanent funding – New York State pledged to finance it only through 2019. “The fact that this has been rolled out so quickly has been able to really motivate parents and families in the city to be advocates for universal pre-K,” Potter said. “I think that’s really valuable.”
Most importantly, she argues, is the underlying goal of fostering diversity. “One of the best things that we can do for [disadvantaged] children is to give them pre-school classes that have an economic mix of kids,” she said. “That is something that we know in K–12 education as well, that economically mixed schools tend to have much stronger outcomes for students.”
In the fall of 2003, police in New Jersey received a call from a concerned neighbor who’d found a boy rummaging in her garbage, looking for food. He was 19 years old but was 4 feet tall and weighed just 45 pounds. Investigators soon learned that the boy’s three younger brothers were also severely malnourished.
The family was known to social workers, but the children were being homeschooled and thus were cut off from the one place where their condition could have gotten daily scrutiny — a classroom.
After the story of the emaciated boys appeared in national newspapers, New Jersey Senate Majority Leader Loretta Weinberg was moved to introduce new legislation. “My question was, how does someone fall off the face of the earth so that no one knows they exist? I was told it was because he was homeschooled,” she said.
Her bill, introduced in 2004, would’ve required parents, for the first time, to notify the state that their children were being homeschooled, have them complete the same annual tests as public school students, and submit proof of annual medical tests.
Soon afterward, a small group of homeschooling parents began following Weinberg around the capitol. The barrage of phone calls from homeschooling advocates so jammed her office phone lines that staffers had to use their private cellphones to conduct business. “You would have thought I’d recommended the end of the world as we know it,” said Weinberg. “Our office was besieged.”
Many of the “hundreds and hundreds” of calls she said her office received came in response to an email alert from the Home School Legal Defense Association, a small but fierce advocacy group based in Purcellville, Virginia. The email, sent May 3, 2004, urged members to immediately place calls opposing a bill that would “devastate homeschooling in New Jersey” by giving the state Board of Education “virtually unlimited power to impose additional restrictions” — a claim Weinberg said was untrue. Additional alerts with similar language were sent out on May 13, 14, 18, 21, 26 and 28.
“There are very few fights I have given up in the more than 20-some-odd years I have been involved in the state Legislature, but this was one of them,” Weinberg said. While Weinberg dropped the bill that year, she has picked it up several times since — as recently as 2014 — even removing the testing requirement in favor of reviews of student work in an attempt to compromise with the HSLDA. Each attempt has failed.
To lawmakers who have made similar efforts across the country, this comes as no surprise. Since homeschooling first became legal about 25 years ago, HSLDA’s lobbying efforts have doomed proposed regulations and rolled back existing laws in state after state. The group was founded in 1983 by lawyer and ordained Baptist minister Michael Farris, who also founded Patrick Henry College. Although its members represent only about 15 percent of the nation’s estimated 1.5 million homeschooled children — up from 850,000 in 1999 — its tactics have made it highly influential.
“To my knowledge, I can’t think of an occasion where we went backwards [in our goal],” said Farris, who said the HSLDA has been involved in “virtually all” legislative efforts involving homeschooling in the past two decades.
“Somebody who wants to file a bill, they should expect to hear from every homeschooler in their state. We will do everything we can do to make sure every homeschooler knows what is going on,” said Farris.
Judy Day, a former Democratic assemblywoman in New Hampshire, experienced this firsthand when she attempted to pass a bill that would have required annual tests and evaluations of student work, called portfolio reviews, in 2009. In November 2008, before the text of the bill was even released, the HSLDA sent an email alert to its members, listing Day’s phone number and personal email address. A subsequent alert sent in January 2009 called the bill the “most serious legislative threat ever faced by New Hampshire homeschoolers.”
Day said she often talked with homeschooling parents for upward of an hour, explaining that the only intent of the bill was to catch the children who were receiving a poor education. “The general response was that they weren’t that interested in the other kids — they were interested in their own children and that’s where it stopped,” she said. These discussions, she said, further convinced her that regulation was necessary. The bill went to a vote but overwhelmingly failed. Day believes other legislators didn’t want to deal with the blowback she’d received.
That same year, David Cook, a former representative from Arkansas, attempted to pass a bill that would have required homeschooling parents to seek approval from the local district to homeschool. “I was a superintendent for 18 years, and in that time I saw a lot of folks that said they were homeschooling and they really weren’t,” he said. But all of Cook’s cosponsors removed their names from the bill after HSLDA-prompted calls flooded in. “They thought it was good legislation until the heat got to them,” he said, noting that a similar bill he’d written in 2005 had died in committee. After meeting with several homeschooling groups to attempt to compromise on the 2009 bill, Cook came up empty. “They told me the only legislation they wanted was what Alaska had, which was nothing,” he said.
In an alert sent shortly afterwards, the HSLDA thanked its members. “There is no question that your outcry against this terrible bill is what made the difference,” the email read. “I have no doubt that had you not contacted these legislators, this bill would have become unstoppable.”
The HSLDA’s campaigns have continued over the past few years. At the end of 2013, Ohio Sen. Capri Cafaro proposed a bill that would have required social services to interview parents who wished to homeschool. Her office was flooded with angry phone calls from all over the country. She wasn’t surprised when the particularly threatening email arrived. According to a copy provided by the senator’s office, it said she had made a “fatal” mistake and that she “wouldn’t see her next birthday,” By that time, she’d received thousands of emails, more responses than she’d gotten for any other piece of legislation during her more than seven years in office. She withdrew the bill two weeks after introducing it. Last year, Pennsylvania — among the few states that broadly regulates homeschooling — rolled back some of its laws under pressure from the HSLDA. And this year, West Virginia’s state Legislature passed bills that would have drastically reduced homeschooling requirements in the state, but the governor vetoed the measures.
“I’ve never seen a lobby more powerful and scary,” said Ellen Heinitz, the legislative director for Michigan Rep. Stephanie Chang, who ran up against HSLDA backlash when she tried to pass homeschooling regulations a few months ago. “They make the anti-vaxxers seem rational.”
The HSLDA has even fought and won battles over a broad swath of issues that seem only tangentially related to homeschooling. Farris said the group has three “bedrock” concerns — not only homeschooling, but also parental rights and religious freedom. In Washington, the group’s efforts blocked laws that would have allowed grandparents to petition for visitation rights, claiming that such policies made it possible for disapproving grandparents to stop children from being homeschooled. In Montana, the group thwarted proposals that would have made high-school attendance mandatory beyond age 16. Initiatives ranging from prekindergarten programs at public schools to the legalization of gay marriage have pushed the HSLDA to action.
Farris said the HSLDA “always encourages people be polite” and often provides a script to help guide conversations. Threats are not sanctioned by the organization, he said. “I get death threats. I would never want anyone else to receive a death threat,” he told me. Still, he recognizes that the calls and visits can get out of hand. He said it comes with the territory. “Look, politics is a rough-and-tumble business at times,” he said. “If somebody can’t take some criticism, then they shouldn’t be in politics.”
When Farris established the HSLDA in the mid20131980s, homeschooling was illegal across the country. Today, it’s legal in all 50 states, but regulations vary dramatically. Some of the discrepancies (many of which were highlighted in a new report from the Education Commission of the States) include:
Forty-eight states have no background-check process for parents who choose to homeschool. Two have some restrictions. Arkansas prevents homeschooling when a registered sex offender lives in the home, while Pennsylvania bans parents previously convicted of a wide array of crimes from homeschooling.
Fewer than half of states require any kind of evaluation. In some of these, including Washington, New Hampshire and Georgia, homeschooled students are tested, but these tests are not submitted to the school district and there are no ramifications for failure. Others, like Oregon, require parents to submit the test scores only if the local districts request them. A third category of states, including Maine, requires that test scores be submitted but set no minimum score.
Seventeen states have no required subjects for homeschooled students. Of the 33 states that do, 22 have no means of checking whether a parent is actually teaching those subjects.
In 40 states, homeschooling parents are not required to have a high-school diploma, even if they intend to homeschool through 12th grade.
Twenty-five states do not require homeschoolers to be vaccinated. Another 12 mandate vaccinations but do not require records. Only five states require homeschoolers to submit proof of vaccinations at any time.
In states with more vigorous homeschool regulation, officials have a good idea of how each child is performing. In New York, for instance, parents who wish to homeschool must notify the state and submit an education plan. Each year, they must provide the results of one of several approved standardized assessments — including the Iowa Test of Basic Skills and the Stanford Achievement Test — or, if parents prefer not to test their children, an agreed-upon portfolio review. If their children aren’t making adequate progress, parents can be put on probation and eventually forced to enroll their children in school.
But if parents don’t like this degree of oversight, they can move across the Hudson to New Jersey. The word “homeschooling” is not mentioned once in the education regulations of New Jersey; it’s covered under a broadly worded provision that allows children to receive “equivalent instruction elsewhere than at school.” The state is so uninvolved in homeschooling that it took me two weeks and over a dozen phone calls to the New Jersey Department of Education to locate someone who could answer any questions about it. The person who eventually fielded my call said he’d never been asked about homeschooling before and called our conversation “a learning experience.”
Christopher Lubienski, an education professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who studies homeschooling, notes that public-school students are flagged if they are chronically truant, while homeschooled children might be illiterate, suffering from acute medical conditions or enduring abuse and no one would notice. “We put basic requirements and limitations for who can teach our children in schools,” he said. “But when you introduce homeschooling outside the ability for the community to see what happens in the home, that becomes even more of a problem.” Parents who have committed violent crimes against children, he said, can legally homeschool, and there’s often “nothing the state can do.”
Similar criticisms have been levied against private schools, which frequently do not require children to pass state-mandated assessments or follow the same background check processes as public schools. In some states, accreditation is optional, giving private schools greater freedom to deviate from public-school requirements. But even these schools are expected to meet minimum requirements and conduct screenings that may expose abuse or neglect. In Texas, where homeschooling is not regulated in any capacity, private schools are at least required to offer vision and hearing screenings, as well as screenings for scoliosis. New Jersey, where homeschooling is also totally unregulated, prevents private schools from using corporal punishment.
Milton Gaither, a professor of education at Messiah College in Pennsylvania and the author of “Homeschool: An American History,” pointed out that private schools, by their nature, also fulfill a need homeschooling does not: to have eyes other than the parents’ observing the child.
There’s one way the government can check in on homeschooled families: by sending social workers. These visits typically happen only when officials get a tip from a concerned neighbor or have other reasons to suspect neglect or abuse.
Farris believes such visits present a dire threat to homeschooling families, encroaching on personal freedom and family life. Social workers, he said, fundamentally misunderstand homeschooling and too often target families that are in no way abusing their children. “These are armed officers invading people’s houses, in many instances without a warrant,” Farris said. “The reality is that we want to stand together as a movement. If they touch one of us we are going to go to their defense, and we have the ability to go to their defense with rigor and expertise.”
Farris said his group gets 300 calls a year from dues-paying members worrying about “social workers at the door.” This number, however, represents just 0.35 percent of the HSLDA’s membership, assuming each call came from a different family.
But Gaither said Farris’ view is outdated. When homeschooling was first legalized, social workers often misunderstood the intent of parents who chose to keep their children home, he said, and visited homes unnecessarily. He said similar behavior today is rare because of how mainstream homeschooling has become.
If social workers are particularly interested in homeschooling families, it’s not because they assume those parents are predisposed to be abusive, said Barbara Knox, a University of Wisconsin pediatrician who specializes in child abuse. It’s because parents who do have a pattern of abuse often pull their children from school under the guise of homeschooling in order to avoid scrutiny. A 2014 study conducted by Knox and five colleagues looked at 38 cases of severe child abuse and found that nearly 50 percent of parents had either removed their children from public school or never enrolled them, telling their respective states they were homeschooling.
“This is a pattern all of us see over and over and over again,” Knox said. “Certainly there are wonderful homeschooling families. But the lack of regulation for this population makes it easier to disenroll children from public school to further isolate them and escalate abuse to the point of reaching torture.”
Farris acknowledged that such cases exist, but believes more often social workers are simply harassing parents who choose to educate their children outside the mainstream.
In 1995, when the organization was first growing into a national power, the HSLDA put out a role-playing guide called “How To Handle Visits From Social Service Agents,” written by former HSLDA attorney Chris Klicka. The social worker in the scene is named Orwell, and he forces his way into the home without a warrant and attempts to strip search the children.
Every family who pays the HSLDA’s annual $120 membership fee is entitled to legal aid from the group whenever social workers come calling. Farris said families would otherwise find it “almost impossible” to track down a lawyer who understood the applicable laws and had the resources to act quickly.
Farris is frequently paid to give talks to conventions and homeschooling organizations on the risks of allowing children to talk to social workers. He published the book “Anonymous Tip” in 1996 — a 470-page fictional account of an overzealous and abusive social worker who fakes bruises in order to take a mother’s children away. A fictional lawyer (and fictional graduate of Farris’ real-life law school) comes to the mother’s rescue.
Julie Ann Smith, who homeschooled her seven children in Oregon until last year, joined the HSLDA after she heard one of the group’s attorneys speaking at a conference, telling parents about “difficult cases” in which children were taken from homeschooling parents. She began receiving the group’s monthly magazine and clipping out instructions on handling social workers, taping them to the inside of her cupboard for easy access. She even followed HSLDA’s advice not to tell any of her neighbors or family members she was homeschooling for fear one of them would call social services. Her children weren’t allowed to play outside or answer the door during school hours because she thought someone would report her for truancy. “It robbed my kids of opportunities to be outside, and honestly, it robbed my sanity not to send them outside for a break,” said Smith, who now sends her children to a local school.
LaDonna Sasscer had a similar experience when she was homeschooling her two children in Florida. She was so worried about social workers that she became the legislative liaison for her local homeschooling group, and she was the HSLDA’s main point of contact for lobbying efforts. She said she encouraged people to join the HSLDA by telling them “scary stories that social workers were going to come and take your children.”
“I used to read [the monthly report] cover to cover and flip to my state right away and say 2018Oh my gosh! Look what’s happening in Florida!'” said Sasscer, who has since left the HSLDA and no longer homeschools. “They had us all paranoid.”
Farris rejected the idea that the HSLDA is scaring people into buying memberships. “I think it would be strange that anyone would think I would do anything differently than teach people their constitutional rights,” he said. “I don’t know how it’s scary to tell the stories of my experiences.” He adds that Smith and Sasscer represent only a “small percent of people,” and that those who are unhappy are free to leave the HSLDA at any time and receive a full refund.
Although the HSLDA is the nation’s leading homeschooling advocacy group, its 85,000 memberships — which Farris said encompass more than 250,000 children, an average of three per member — represent only a small portion of the homeschooling population. Some of these families, and almost certainly a majority of HSLDA members, have religious motivations for choosing to homeschool; many use alternative textbooks that teach creationism instead of evolution and offer a Christianity-centered view of American history.
Non-HSLDA members, who constitute about 85 percent of the nation’s homeschoolers, choose to homeschool for a variety of reasons, said Gaither, the Messiah College professor and homeschooling expert. Some hope to protect their children from what they see as the systematic racism of public schools, while others want to give a child with special learning needs more individual attention. Some families homeschool because a parent’s job requires constant moving, and still others do it simply to become closer to their children.
Karen Myers Bergey homeschools her two daughters, ages 10 and 13, in Pennsylvania, the most heavily regulated state for homeschooling in the country. She said she began homeschooling because she thought she could give her daughters a better, more self-driven education than her local school district could.
“I wanted to be able to live as creative of a life as possible,” she said. “If we want to go take in a show in the city, I can have them get their schoolwork done to allow time for that. We can also take a week off to do an educational trip or even a fun trip somewhere without someone questioning that.”
While she says her family is faithfully Christian, she doesn’t homeschool because of that. She teaches evolution and Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States,” which she says her evangelical friends frown upon. While she’s confident homeschoolers like her make up much of the population, she said she’s frustrated she doesn’t see this represented.
“We aren’t for or against anything in society at large — we are just experiencing life together with our children. That voice isn’t heard,” she said. “What you hear on TV and the radio is the HSLDA saying to leave us alone.” Bergey said she’s never felt like she was “jumping through hoops” to meet Pennsylvania’s standards, and says she’s willing to deal with the regulation if it means keeping kids safe.
“I’m confident that I’m doing a good job for [my children] but I’m willing to give up some of my freedom to make sure that every child is being educated in a healthy and beneficial way,” she said.
Gaither said many parents like Bergey never join homeschooling organizations because their reasons feel so unique to their own families. Secular homeschooling groups exist in every state, but their primary role is to offer support and resources, not to lobby politicians. Even if these groups were to feel strongly about a potential new law, their lack of organizational prowess and funding would make it impossible for them to mount campaigns on the scale of the HSLDA’s.
Some of these smaller groups complain that the HSLDA is perpetuating a stereotype. “Because of the HSLDA, people think we are all far-right, extremely religious, maybe even fanatics,” said Shay Seaborne, a long-time homeschooling activist and former board member of The Organization of Virginia Homeschoolers.
The HSLDA argues that it is advancing the goals of all homeschooling parents, not only through its lobbying but by funding most of the published research on homeschooled children. There are few independent studies measuring how much these kids are learning, Gaither said, since it is difficult to get a random sample of students because notification laws vary so drastically by state. When homeschoolers take the ACT and SAT, they tend to perform fairly well. But those who choose to take these tests are likely already on the higher-achieving end of the group; as a whole, studies have shown homeschoolers take college entrance exams at a lower rate than their public or private-schooled peers.
The HSLDA has funded dozens of studies on homeschoolers’ academic performance, most of them conducted by Brian Ray at the National Home Education Research Institute. Every study Ray has published on homeschoolers indicates they are performing at or above the level of similarly situated public school students. Studies not funded by the HSLDA do not tend to be as positive or have such definitive findings, though most find that the small sample of homeschooled students studied are not performing demonstrably worse than their peers.
Gaither said Ray’s studies are generally as sound as surveys, but they don’t necessarily indicate how homeschooling impacts the average student, since they rely on voluntary surveys given to members of HSLDA and similar organizations. Parents whose children do poorly, he said, are unlikely to volunteer to submit their results.
The HSLDA tends to draw conclusions from Ray’s studies far beyond even Ray himself. While Ray typically includes disclaimers that the studies should not be used to draw broad conclusions, one HSLDA pamphlet touting his research leaves this out, claiming, “Homeschoolers are still achieving well beyond their public school counterparts — no matter what their family background, socioeconomic level, or style of homeschooling.”
Ray acknowledges the way in which his work is used by the HSLDA. “I wouldn’t say it’s fine, but it’s what they do,” he said. “I try to be responsible for what I write, but I’m not their policeman.”
Over the past few years, some members of the first homeschooled generation have begun advocating for stronger regulations. Ryan Stollar is the co-founder of Homeschool Alumni Reaching Out, with a mission of improving homeschooling for future generations. “When homeschooling is done responsibly, it can be amazing,” the group says on its website. “What we oppose is irresponsible homeschooling, where the educational method is used to create or hide abuse, isolation, and neglect.”
Stollar said the homeschool alumni he has spoken with “never felt like they had a right” to speak out because they were always expected to be “perfect examples and show homeschooling can work.” Now, he said, that’s changing. “These last three years have been the first time people have felt like it’s okay to say, 2018Hey, everything wasn’t perfect.'” On the HARO website, alumni are encouraged to share their experiences of abuse and neglect and provide critical analysis of the curricula, principles and leaders who dominated the field when they were growing up.
Rachel Coleman, a co-founder of the Coalition for Responsible Home Education, said she felt for years that if she criticized homeschooling she would be labeled “a traitor.” Her group advocates for homeschool reform and aims to make homeschooling “a child-centered option, used only to lovingly prepare young people for an open future.”
When asked about the groups, Jim Mason, an attorney with the HSLDA, told me that, while he takes issue with what he called their “tone,” he thinks “some of their criticisms [are] very well taken or valid.” The HSLDA is “certainly open to considering constructive criticism” he said. But when I spoke to Farris, he dismissed both organizations outright, calling them “a group of bitter young people” who are “fighting against homeschooling 2026 to work out their own issues with their parents.”
Farris has rebuttals to each of the five practices recommended by CRHE, Coleman’s group. At the moment, no state follows all five recommendations, and only a small percentage of states follow any of them.
First, CRHE said all states should require homeschooling parents to annually notify the state of their intent to homeschool. “Do we ask parents to annually notify the state that they are feeding their kids?” Farris responded. “No. But that’s necessary for well-being, too. We trust parents to feed their kids, and we have an elaborate infrastructure called society that interfaces with people and checks up on them. Does it work every time? No. Do people fall through the cracks? Yes. Nonetheless as a free country we have decided that we do not want the country invading every home.”
The HSLDA also takes issue with CHRE’s second suggestion: that all parents who choose to homeschool are subjected to a background check. The HSLDA contends such a policy would be redundant, as parents convicted of abuse are already subject to additional oversight. But Coleman said this isn’t always the case, as social workers tend not to remove children from the home unless extreme circumstances are present. Also, she said, parents convicted of crimes such as drug abuse or assault against someone other than their child may still have custody.
The CHRE’s third recommendation is that homeschooled students complete annual standardized tests or a portfolio review, to be assessed by a non-relative. The HSLDA strongly opposes all types of standardized testing, which Farris said forces a curriculum onto parents by default. The group recently succeeded in lobbying the state of Arkansas to repeal its testing provision, which an HSLDA news alert said had “no stated purpose.” (This was true — the test had no minimum score and was not submitted to the state, which meant it could not be used to intervene in a child’s education.)
Fourth, the CRHE advocates for a system that would flag homeschooling families with a troubling history of social services involvement, subjecting them to additional oversight such as random visits or additional testing. Mason, the HSLDA lawyer, said this ran counter to American principles by punishing families for unproven wrongdoing. “We live in a country of presumed innocence,” he said. “Suspicion of wrongdoing shouldn’t limit the actions of anyone.”
Knox, the abuse expert, disagrees. She supports increased communication between family services agencies and school systems, so that when a child with a history of family services involvement is removed from public school for homeschooling they can be flagged and monitored.
Finally, CRHE said homeschooled students should be subject to the same medical requirements as public-school students. At the moment, almost every state requires public school students to submit medical forms filled out by a doctor. The HSLDA is neutral on whether parents should vaccinate their children, but it opposes “any attempt to weaken exemption provisions currently in state law” and sends out emergency alerts when states propose removing exemptions. This year alone, alerts have been sent out warning parents of bills concerning vaccination requirements in Maine, California, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Oregon, Maryland, and Mississippi.
Rob Reich, a professor of political science at Stanford who has written extensively about homeschooling regulation, said it’s “hard to oppose” laws that would limit abusive parents from homeschooling. But, he said, legislators should first pass laws that gather data on homeschooling.
“The HSLDA points out their success stories, and the skeptics point out the abuse,” he said, but neither side has real numbers to back up its claims.
Luis Huerta, an associate professor of education and public policy at Teachers College-Columbia University, is also in favor of CRHE’s data collection proposals and says he’s fascinated by the group’s emergence.
“Never have we had this strong of a group who are advocates [of homeschooling] and who are also demanding that we have information from which to be able to draw empirical conclusions that influence policy decisions,” he said. “This can potentially change the landscape.”
Farris is frustrated by the criticism from groups like CRHE and HARO, insisting that many of these groups will “say the opposite, no matter what we say.” When I told him that I’d spoken to homeschoolers who told me HSLDA doesn’t represent their views, he responded, “We don’t ever say that we do. But 15 percent, I will say, is bigger than anything they can organize.”
Stollar, the co-founder of HARO, said his group is constantly struggling to let legislators know there are other perspectives out there. Last year, he and several other former homeschoolers showed up at the Virginia statehouse to lobby in favor of a resolution proposed by Tom Rust, a Republican assemblyman. Rust had proposed a study of the state’s religious exemption law: In Virginia, homeschoolers are officially required to register and document their children’s progress. But parents who file a religious exemption are allowed to forego school without any requirements at all. About 7,000 Virginia children are currently homeschooling under this provision. Rust said he wrote the bill after receiving phone calls from constituents who felt members of their extended family were receiving a poor education under the exemption.
HSLDA quickly sent a notification out to its member families, urging them to “accept the possibility that Rust’s call for a study is a mere pretext, and that his true intention is to try to take away some of your freedom once the study gives him some 2018cover.'” Carol Sinclair, Rust’s legislative assistant, answered most of the group’s phone calls, which came from all over the country. She said most of the callers were “downright difficult” and refused to acknowledge that some homeschooled children were being poorly educated. “If you care enough about homeschooling, I would think you would want to make sure children didn’t slip through the cracks of the system,” she said.
Until I spoke to Rust, he had assumed, as many legislators do, that the HSLDA represents the majority of homeschooling families. “They clearly came across as speaking for all homeschoolers — that’s certainly the impression they gave — and to be honest with you, I thought that’s what they were doing,” he said.
It may take some time to change that impression, said Stollar. When he and his fellow homeschooling alumni showed up at the statehouse to voice their support for Rust, many of the legislators assumed they were part of the HSLDA and dismissed them immediately.
“One legislator in particular put her hand up and said 2018I’m not even going to talk to you guys,'” he recalled. “We explained our position several times, and she just didn’t get it. Finally, it dawned on her that we were in favor of the bill. She was astonished by that.”
Jessica Huseman recently graduated from the Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism at Columbia University, which provided support for this project.
ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for their newsletter. This story was co-published with Slate.
