Under a new law proposed this week by Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy’s Sandy Hook Advisory Commission, every homeschooling parent with a child who has been labeled with a behavioral or emotional problem would be forced to submit to a host of strict, burdensome regulations.
The scheme put forth in the commission’s draft recommendations on mental health would require homeschooling parents to submit individual education plans regularly to a local education bureaucrat.
School officials could then decree whether parents may continue to educate their own children, reports the Connecticut Post. Administrators could pull the plug on any parents’ homeschooling by declaring that the child failed to make “adequate progress.”
The onerous new rules for homeschooling families somehow make sense in the minds of commission members because Adam Lanza massacred 20 young children and six teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. in December 2012 — when he was 20 years old.
Lanza attended public schools (and a Catholic school) for virtually all of his education. His mother, whom Lanza later murdered, pulled him out of Newtown High School when he was 16 and briefly homeschooled him. While he was still 16, Lanza earned his GED and enrolled at Western Connecticut State University, another public school.
Members of the Democratic Governor’s Sandy Hook commission have conceded that the additional burdens they have recommended for homeschooling families may be controversial.
“It may be hard to implement because parents may want to get their back up and say ‘You can’t make me do that if I’m homeschooling,'” state board of education member Patricia Keavney-Maruca, a supporter of the recommendations, admitted.
However, the 16 commission members — experts in education, mental health, police work and so on — have insisted that homeschooling must now be tightly regulated in light of the Sandy Hook tragedy. (RELATED: Lefty Journalist Blames ADAM LANZA For Obama’s Second-Term Implosion)
“Given the individuals involved in the tragedy that formed the basis of this commission, I think we have thought this issue out at some length and we believe it is very germane and that the actual facts leading up to this incident support the notion of the risk in not addressing social and emotional learning needs of children who may have significant needs in that area who are homeschooled,” proclaimed commission member Harold I. Schwartz, a psychiatrist at Hartford Hospital, according to the Post.
“Continuation of homeschooling should be contingent upon approval of” the state-approved education plans “and adequate progress as documented,” agreed University of Connecticut mental health law professor Susan Schmeiser, according to CTNewsJunkie.
Across Connecticut, some 5,000 children receive homeschooling education. Under current state law, homeschooling parents are under no obligation to participate in or use the services offered by public school systems.
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