Turpin Case Shows Risks of Not Monitoring Home Schools

It seems that the whole country is talking about the Turpin family. Thirteen children and young adults were found imprisoned and emaciated in their home in Riverside County and California on January 14 after a seventeen-year-old escaped and called the police.

Reporters and politicians soon focused on one salient aspect of this family. The children were being ostensibly homeschooled under a provision of California law that allows parents to designate their homes as a private school by simply filing an affidavit. These “schools” are not monitored or inspected aside from an annual fire inspection.

I have already written about Natalie Finn. starved to death by her adoptive parents Adrian Jones, tortured to death by his mother and stepfather, and a little girl in Kentucky who was rescued at the last minute from a similar fate. All were ostensibly home-schooled, although little schooling was going on in these toxic homes.

Homeschooling is increasing in popularity in the United States. About 3.3 percent of the school-aged population was homeschooled in America in 2016. This is nearly double the percentage tin 1999. Clearly most of their parents are not abusive and want to provide the best education for their children, often at great personal sacrifice.

But available evidence suggests that the most severe cases of abuse and neglect, often fatal, tend to involve homeschooling.  A study by Barbara Knox of the University of Wisconsin found that 47% of a sample of children tortured by their parents had been withdrawn from school and an additional 29% had never been enrolled.

.The Coalition for Responsible Home Education (CRHE) has collected nearly 400 cases of severe or fatal child abuse in homeschool settings that it identified from public records that mentioned home schooling as a factor. Even based on this incomplete database, CRHE estimates that homeschooled children are more likely to die of abuse or neglect than children of the same age overall.

Many of  the severe and fatal homeschooling abuse cases that CRHE has collected share ugly details with the Turpin case. More than 40% of these cases involved some form of imprisonment. These children were chained to their beds, kept in cages, or locked in rooms for years. More than 45% of these cases involve food deprivation.

The linkage between home schooling and severe child abuse is not totally surprising. As Rachel Coleman and Kathryn Brightbill of CRHE point out in an op-ed piece for the Los Angeles Times, children who are in school cannot be isolated and locked away. They cannot easily be starved to death as school staff would notice and they would have access to food. And they are required to have an annual physical exam.

Of course children who attend school are abused and neglected too. But attending school exposes them to teachers and other staff. School staff submit more child abuse reports than any other group. Education personnel submitted 18.4% of the child maltreatment reports that received an investigation or alternative response in 2015, the most recent year for which the information is available

In order to prevent more cases like the Turpins, CRHE recommends requiring that homeschooled children receive annual education assessments and physical examinations. This would provide two opportunities for each child to be seen by a mandatory reporter.

State Assemblyman Jose Martinez, who represents the town where the Turpins live, has already expressed his concern about the lack of oversight of private and home schools and his intent to explore introducing legislation to mandate some type of oversight.

But homeschooling advocates are opposed to any regulations on homeschooling. The President of the powerful Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) asked a reporter for Reuters, “Should all the innocent home-school families, who do a great job, … be intruded upon because of this family?” he said. “I think the answer is no.”

HSLDA is one of Washington’s most effective lobbying groups, according to the Washington Post Magazine. State groups have also been able to scuttle attempts to regulate homeschooling in response to child abuse deaths in Florida,  Iowa and Kentucky.

It is hard to understand why responsible homeschooling parents and their advocates would object to such minor requirements as requiring an annual doctor’s visit and educational assessment. State legislators should set aside their fears of backlash from extremist advocates and assume that most voters will support protecting children.