Shortly after the so called Homeschooling Bill was introduced in Connecticut’s Democrat dominated General Assembly, homeschooling parents arrived in mass at the state Capitol building to testify against it. The parents, accompanied in some instances with their children – all patient and well behaved – protested that the bill was poorly conceived, unnecessary, created rather than solved problems, and short circuited both parental rights and the hitherto uncontested authority of municipalities over school matters.
The proposed bill required, according to a Hartford Courant report, that home
schooling parents previously unmolested by state regulations register with the
state Department of Children and Families (DCF) “to gain clearance to educate
their kids. There were thousands of written testimonies against the bill,
endless phone calls and emails to legislators and the governor, and when the
bill passed two weeks later, there was a lot of bitterness.”
The bitterness remains a painful irritant long after the
bill had been proposed. No clearance by DCF, no home schooling.
Parents argued to no avail that the precipitating cause of
the bill – the mistreatment of children in two cases by parents who had claimed they withdrew
their children from public schools to teach them at home -- had little do with
home schooling as such. It was the responsibility of a deficient DCF to check
on the welfare of the children for reasons other than the caregivers’
homeschooling claims. Yet the legislature was here proposing that DCF, a state
agency pockmarked with inadequacies, should serve as a permitting agency and
gatekeeper controlling the homeschooling of every parent in the state -- an
overreach, the parents correctly thought, that would make homeschooling
considerably less desirable and accessible. And, others thought, that was the
real point of the legislation: An inadequate urban public school system could
not abide competition with a successful home schooling project in which parents
providing for their own children’s education never-the-less continued to pay
taxes to support inadequate urban public schools.
A recently released public letter from Connecticut’s Office
of the Child Advocate (OCA) condemning the quality of casework at DCF supports
the misgivings of homeschooling parents.
CTMirror reported on the OCA
letter: “’OCA has grown increasingly alarmed at the quality of case practice
observed through our reviews of critical incidents and child fatalities, some
of which have garnered significant public attention and some of which have
not.’”
“The [OCA] letter cited a decline in the number of home
visits with children and a decline in how quickly work begins. One rating for
contact with children went from 85% to 58% between the beginning of 2022 and
the beginning of 2025. And some children in DCF care and their caregivers went
without any documented visits with caseworkers in a given month, which the OCA
said was particularly concerning. OCA also described attempts it had made to
work with DCF on improvements — without success. ‘Despite expression of shared
concern by DCF Executive Leadership, OCA finds that DCF has been unable to
demonstrate improvements and the currently identified action steps are not
adequate,’ the letter stated… The letter, which included detailed findings and
research, described the apparent suicide last week of a child who died within
an hour of asking to be moved into foster care. In that case, according to the
letter, “DCF made a decision to leave the child with the parent, indicating
that coming into care was not an option.”
Why are decision makers in Governor Ned Lamont’s
administration and the leading Democrat lights in Connecticut’s General
Assembly failing to connect these dots and conspicuously failing to satisfy the
entreaties of Connecticut’s home schooling parents?
The easy answer to the above question is: Democrats would
much rather savage Trump than discuss their failed progressive non-solutions to
problems legislatively and administratively caused by hegemonic Democrats. As
long as Connecticut Democrats rule the roost, problems that lie at their feet
need not be acknowledged at all. This lofty inattention is what might be called
a king’s prerogative, exercising which cost King Louis XVI of revolutionary
France his head.
The French king lost his head because for overtaxed Parisians
without bread the Palace of Versailles was an unforgivable affront to justice.
No one in Connecticut is in want of bread and, unlike the progressives of the
French Terror, no one is sharpening a guillotine. No one among the American
Democratic Socialists (ADS) has yet prepared a Stalinist gulag to receive
despoiled billionaires and serious students of Friedrich Hayek, the author of The Constitution of Liberty, a pocket
bible for American conservatives, libertarians and some enlightened free market
Democrat liberals.
But homeschoolers in Connecticut certainly feel the tectonic
plates of the American founding shifting under their feet. Can the Democrat dominated legislature
seriously think that autocratic politicians remote from their families are best
able to shape the destinies of their children?
“It’s not just about the homeschooling bill,” Tim Knotts, a
Windsor father of homeschooled children said when the bill was yet under
consideration. It’s about a government and a group of people running the
government who are not listening to the people. My wife and kids were at the
Capitol for about 18 hours of the hearing and my wife testified about 1 in the
morning. There were many hours of testimony, almost entirely against the bill.
The submitted testimony was 98.5% against [the proposed bill]” Knotts said.
Knotts may take some guidance from Lord Acton, quoted by
Hayek in the postscript to his book on liberty: “At all times, sincere friends
of freedom have been rare and its triumphs have been due to minorities that
have prevailed by associating themselves with auxiliaries whose objects often
differed from their own. And this association, which is always dangerous, has
sometimes been disastrous by giving to opponents just grounds of opposition.”
You cannot go far wrong by associating yourself with the
friends of liberty in America, all of whom want a purifying restoration of
ancient freedoms, including the rights of parents to carve out a glowing future
for their children.
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