Calling a Truce: Interacting with Your Local School
Most of the homeschool hassles occur at the local school level. Someone sends out a letter from the superintendent’s office requesting all kinds of information that homeschoolers legally have no obligation to provide, and people get all stirred up. One person calls the state board of education, another calls the legislature, and a third calls a journalist. Before you know it, the school system has a huge mess on its hands, all because somebody got a little nosy.
Situations like this happen every single year in school systems around the country. The same school system usually doesn’t do it more than once or twice (bad press is not good when you rely on the public for funds and you’re seen as oppressing the poor homeschoolers), but it does occur. And it may happen in your community.
Or you may receive a phone call from your local school system demanding information or an interview. Usually the education folks leave the homeschoolers alone because they have plenty to do searching out the true truants. Once in a while, though, you may meet someone on a power trip, or an official who truly doesn’t know what’s going on, and that’s where the misunderstandings begin. If this happens at your house, your best safeguards are well-informed and courteous answers.
First: Know your law
If you know what you’re supposed to do and what you aren’t, you’re already a long way toward resolving any potential conflict. Many times school officials demand to see curriculum, attendance, report cards, testing results — that they may or may not be entitled to by law. In my state, for instance, no one can ask me to show the curriculum I use with my children. (I’m not sure why they’d care anyway, but that’s beside the point.) If someone in an official capacity did ask, and I didn’t know that person well enough to know why they were asking, I would simply parrot my state regulations: “My state law requires this, and this, and this.”
Do I have any personal reasons for not wanting to show my Greek curriculum? Not really, except that nobody outside other homeschoolers or genuinely interested persons needs to paw through my books. It’s not necessary, and it tends to leave fingerprints.
If you’re like most homeschoolers around the country, you know your law a heap better than your local education officials do. Some of them simply assume that because they want to see this or that, you’ll willingly hand it over — they think you don’t know any better. Or they don’t know enough not to ask.
Many areas have so many homeschoolers, and they’ve worked with the homeschoolers for so many years, that the local officials already know the ropes. They’re so used to seeing portfolios and paperwork year after year that they glance through it looking for obvious errors, check it off, and move on to the next one. As homeschooling continues to grow, this will hopefully become the case almost everywhere.
Second: Make sure your ducks are in a row
Make sure that anything the state requires is current. If your state requires an intent-to-homeschool letter or form, then you need to file it by the deadline. That way, if anybody asks, it’s in. (And keep a photocopy for your own records so you know what’s on it and the date that you filed it.)
