Connecticut Legislators Want to Scapegoat Homeschoolers

I t’s a truism that the modern liberal project is the very opposite of live and let live. While the left proclaims autonomy as its highest virtue in all matters sexual, they are the very opposite of libertarian on everything else. That is why blue states tend to have the most restrictive laws in nearly every other sphere of life.

Which is what makes Connecticut such an anomaly when it comes to homeschooling. Connecticut is about as deep-blue as it gets. But our state’s law regarding homeschooling is one of the most permissive in the country. In fact, there are very few laws regulating homeschoolers in Connecticut.

And that is just the way Connecticut’s homeschoolers like it. In a state where schools hide children’s gender-confusion from their parents and the Department of Children and Families (DCF) once had a hotline for gender-confused children to report their “non-affirming” parents to the government, many tens of thousands of socially conservative Connecticut parents choose to homeschool their children rather than expose them to those agendas. That included my wife and me, for nearly 20 years.

But Connecticut’s homeschoolers are not just conservative Christians like us. They include Muslims, Wiccans, atheists, and people from just about every walk of life. The one thing that unites them all is a desire to take advantage of Connecticut’s friendly homeschooling environment to protect their children from an increasingly authoritarian government that seems to think their children belong to the state.

That same government is always on the lookout for an opportunity to tighten the law that allowed so many of Connecticut’s children to escape its clutches. As the old saying goes, never let a good crisis go to waste. Unfortunately for Connecticut’s homeschoolers, our state government has found one.

This past March in Waterbury, a 32-year-old man lit his room on fire to escape the house where his stepmother allegedly held him captive and starved him for decades. “Something out of a horror movie” is how it was described in the New York Post and elsewhere. The case shocked the nation. What happened next shocked Connecticut’s homeschoolers.

Within a day or two of this man’s plight being discovered, the case was being blamed on Connecticut’s “lax” homeschool regulations. By late March, Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont had made homeschooling the focus of the state’s response to the Waterbury House of Horrors story.

There was just one problem: The case had nothing to do with homeschooling, and everything to do with the very state agencies to whom the governor would like to entrust greater oversight of Connecticut’s homeschooled children. According to Hearst Connecticut Media:

As a boy attending Waterbury schools, his starvation was apparent to those around him. He “told police that he was pulled from school in the fourth grade because DCF was called by the school about his behaviors, which included stealing food from others and eating out of the garbage because he was being starved at home,” and school officials were apparently acutely aware of the situation, contacting the state Department of Children and Families (DCF) multiple times. The man recalls DCF officials, who reported to his home twice, being satisfied with the lies he told at the direction of his stepmother.

In a May 9 editorial, the Republican-American — Waterbury’s daily newspaper, which is owned by Hearst but maintains its own editorial page — quoted the report above and added:

It’s important to remember that the man — then about 10 years old — was hidden away only after school officials handed DCF the case on a silver platter. As it has famously done in other cases of prolonged abuse, the agency failed to perform its sole duty to protect children. But, miraculously, DCF’s role has been largely absent from the public debate over how to prevent similar cases. . . . Instead, thousands of Connecticut families with no connection to the Waterbury case suddenly find themselves implicated because lawmakers have decided to apply a narrow focus on what they say is a lack of homeschooling regulations. But this story began in public schools, where the alleged victim was exposed to mandated reporters who did precisely what they were supposed to do — only for DCF to drop the ball.

The editors were not the only ones to notice that homeschoolers were being scapegoated — or that “public schooling’s danger exceeds that of homeschooling’s” as Connecticut writer Chris Powell put it. Powell wrote: “The far bigger problem is that no one in authority checks on the academic progress and safety at home of most children in public school.” Powell mentions the high rates of absenteeism in some Connecticut cities and the high-profile case of the Hartford Public High School student who graduated even though she is illiterate.

While Powell focused on the state’s poor record of educating Connecticut’s children, another writer, local homeschooling mother Erika Ahern, zeroed in on the state’s claim to keep children safe. “Show me the evidence that the state is better than parents at preventing child abuse,” Ahern demanded. “The criminal lack of accountability for Connecticut’s mandated reporters and those vetting the reports would be a better target” than homeschooling, she wrote and provided several examples.

None of which seemed to matter to the state. On May 5 the legislature’s education and children’s committees held a joint hearing on homeschooling. This was an “informational” hearing, not a public hearing, meaning only invited guests could speak. The committees invited a panel of five government and anti-homeschooling activists to speak in favor of regulating Connecticut homeschoolers and allowed only two homeschooling advocates to speak against it. The Republicans were united in opposition to connecting the Waterbury House of Horrors story to homeschooling while the Democrats, for their part, claimed not to be against homeschoolers and even denied at one point that the Waterbury story was the reason for the hearing.

Homeschoolers weren’t buying it. The Education Association of Christian Homeschoolers in Connecticut, the CT Homeschool Network, the Family Institute of Connecticut, and several other organizations sent out alerts. Thousands of families, with children of all ages in tow, showed up at the Legislative Office Building the day of the hearing. They ringed the railings of all four floors overlooking the first floor atrium of the building — and the lobby itself. They sang patriotic songs. They filled overflow rooms. It was the largest group of protesters to appear inside the building since before the pandemic. The Democrats put on a brave face, but Capitol insiders described them as shocked by the backlash.

By May 13, it was over. The homeschoolers had won. There would be no legislation this year to regulate homeschooling in Connecticut.

But after being scapegoated for the Waterbury case, homeschoolers remain rightly suspicious. “You give them an inch, they go a mile. We want to make sure that our right, uninfringed, uninhibited by government regulation, is protected,” one of them told CT Mirror.

To that end, Family Institute of Connecticut and our state’s homeschooling community will hold a press conference and rally at the state capitol in Hartford on June 4, the last day of the legislative session. We want them to know we are watching. And we won’t forget.