Abusive parents are using homeschooling to avoid detection

On April 25, 2018, Connecticut’s Office of the Child Advocate (OCA) issued a stunning report. Using data from six school districts, OCA found that over a third of children removed from school to be homeschooled lived in families that had been reported at least once for abuse or neglect. This is the first publicly released data to suggest the extent to which homeschooling may serve as a vehicle for abusive parents to isolate their children from scrutiny by other adults.

The Child Advocate’s report was a follow-up to its investigation of the tragic death of Matthew Tirado.  On February 14, 2017 , Matthew died of homicide from prolonged child abuse and neglect by his mother. While Matthew was never formally withdrawn from school (though he had not attended for a year), OCA found that his mother was able to withdraw his sister from school after numerous reports by the school district alleging abuse and neglect in the home.

To determine whether other children from families that were the subject of child abuse allegations were withdrawn from school, OCA collected data from six Connecticut school districts, the Hartford District where the Tirados lived and five other districts selected for their diversity. Their analysis showed that over three school years, 2013-2016, 380 students were withdrawn from the six districts to be homeschooled. Of those students, an astonishing 138 (or 36%)  lived in families that were the subject of at least one prior accepted report of abuse or neglect. Most of these families had multiple prior reports, ranging from two to 30 reports. 11% of the withdrawn children belonged to families with four reports or more.

Executive Director Rachel Coleman of the Coalition for Responsible Home Education (CRHE) is not surprised by this percentage. She cites an unpublished study conducted in another state, which produced similar results. Coleman also cites the groundbreaking study of torture as a form of child abuse by Barbara Knox and colleagues. Of the school-aged victims they studied, 47% had been removed from school under the pretext of “homeschooling,” although no education was taking place in these homes. According to the researchers, this “homeschooling” “appears to have been designed to further isolate the child and typically occurred after closure of a previously opened CPS case.”

Like the parents in Connecticut and those studied by Knox, Jennifer and Sarah Hart removed their six children from school as soon as Minnesota CPS closed their last case in 2011. The school had made six reports concerning food deprivation and physical punishment, two of which resulted in findings of abuse. With their withdrawal from school, the children had lost their best advocates. They continued to endure starvation and cruel discipline until their deaths in 2018.

The OCA report suggests that “homeschooling is used to conceal abuse more frequently than has been commonly thought,” as Rachel Coleman puts it. With 1.7 million children being homeschooled today, it is possible that hundreds of thousands are living in abusive situations.

Abusive parents must not be allowed to withdraw their children from school on the pretext of homeschooling them. Legislators must act to require schools to report all withdrawals for the purpose of homeschooling to Child Protective Services (CPS) to be cross-checked for previous reports. Parents with at least one substantiated abuse or neglect report should not be allowed to homeschool. Parents who have been the subject of an unsubstantiated report could be allowed to homeschool, subject to frequent monitoring by the school district or CPS.

The powerful homeschool lobby will object to any such regulation of homeschooling. In California, a massive outcry from homeschooling parents killed a very modest bill to require annual fire inspections of all home schools, prompted by the Turpin case.  The Home School Legal Defense Association has stated that “abuse is horrible and must never be tolerated. But imposing regulations that treat all home-schooling families like criminals is unjust.” Nobody is suggesting that homeschooling parents be treated as criminals. Rather, they should be treated a little more like schools.