An attempt by Connecticut state government to stick the nose of a regulatory camel into the state’s home schooling tent has been vigorously resisted for months by hundreds of homeschooling parents in open hearings -- to no avail. The Democrat dominated General Assembly – no doubt with the connivance of politically powerful educational union heads – successfully fashioned a bill, PA 26-37, that allows the regulation of homeschooling in Connecticut.
Livy Stanford of the Hartford Courant reported on July
23, “The nation's largest homeschool advocacy organization is calling on the
U.S. Department of Education to investigate a new state law that provides oversight
of homeschooling families, alleging that it violates the federal Family
Educational Rights and Privacy Act, protecting the privacy of student education
records ... Will Estrada, senior counsel at the Home School Legal Defense
Association, told the Courant … ‘There's not a single state in the nation that
says before a child can leave the public school, we're going to send all the
personal, identifiable information from the child and the family over and run a
background check.’"
Estrada added, “the law also raises concerns about whether a
‘public school is going to hold off letting parents exercise their
constitutional and fundamental rights to choose where a child is educated.’ He
said the state risks losing millions in federal funding for education if it is
found to violate FERPA. "If Connecticut persists in this, they are putting
at risk public school students … ‘It's why I hope that Connecticut will do the
right thing and repeal the provisions of this law.’"
Gov. Ned Lamont, who has rarely met a petition from union
heads that was not satisfied by Democrats in the state legislature reliant upon
SEBAC for campaign funds and union soldiers to get out the vote, signed the new
law. It will take force in 2027 and require all families withdrawing their children
from public school for the purpose of schooling them at home to submit, The
Courant tells us, “to a cross-check through the state Department of Children
and Families to determine whether the family had an active DCF investigation
within the past 33 business days.
DCF, we know, is itself a prisoner of regulations some of
which, its critics insist, are unusually burdensome and have the unintended
consequence of hampering efficiency within the oversight agency. Some pending
court actions eagerly supported by Connecticut Attorney General William Tong
grossly interfere with what Alexander Hamilton use to call “energy in the
executive office.”
Before Connecticut’s chief executive Ned Lamont signed the
bill regulating home schooling, he might have asked himself, “Will the
real-world consequences of the bill serve to improve either homeschooling
and/or public schooling in Connecticut? Or will it simply strengthen the
already intimate political and mutually beneficial connection between a) the
governor’s office and the Democrat controlled legislative apparatus on the one
hand, and b) public employee union officials on the other hand?
"The state” – that would be Tong – “’intends to defend
PA 26-37, which addresses the state's duty to try to prevent abuse of the
system in ways that endanger kids while still respecting parents' ability to
make educational decisions for their families,’ Cathryn Vaulman, director of
communications for Lamont, said in an email. ’Prior to the passage of this
bill, Connecticut was one of very few states in the country with virtually no
laws regarding the protection of children who are outside the public school
system.’"
The communication suggests – does it not? – that no
unregulated activity in Connecticut should be permitted to proceed on its merry
way without state intervention. That may help keep the 200+ lawyers in the
Attorney General’s office busy prosecuting miscreants, but there are downsides
to such interventions, the most important of which is that the ever-present
totalitarian itch in all socialist states to control every human activity
contravenes the constitutional principle of a limited government. Embracing the
contrary principle seems an odd way to celebrate the 250th
celebration of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. Warmly embracing
unlimited government is an erosion of the doctrine of limited government, is it
not?
Not for nothing did James Madison, considered “the Father of
the U.S. Constitution and a pivotal drafter of the Bill of Rights,” sternly
warn his fellow countrymen, “There are more instances of the abridgement of the
freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachment of those in power than
by violent and sudden usurpations.”
Not only are there three separate but equal branches of
governance in the federal system – executive, legislative and judicial – but
there is an equal and separate distribution of political power among federal,
state and municipal governments, each of which serves to prevent “the
abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachment of
those in power…”
And it is, Madison would agree, this indispensable separation
of power that is endangered by the accretion of power by national or state
socialism.
There is nothing – repeat NOTHING – “democratic” in the Democratic
Socialist of America’s utopian vision of a centralized distribution of power. A
power over education seized by the state from Municipal government is a
continuing abridgment of the freedom of the people by the gradual and silent
encroachment of those socialists in state government who favor the
centralization of political power in their own hands.
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