How to keep track of the kids that are being homeschooled in Connecticut has been top of mind for advocates and lawmakers this year, following two highly publicized stories about neglect and abuse.
WSHU’s Molly Ingram spoke with CT Mirror’s Emilia Otte to discuss her article, “CT doesn’t regulate homeschooling. Many parents want to keep it that way,” as part of the collaborative podcast Long Story Short. Read Emilia’s story here.
WSHU: Hi, Emilia. Why has homeschooling been such a hot topic in Connecticut this year?
EO: It started out with an incident that became national news around a man in Waterbury who had been held captive essentially for two decades after he was withdrawn from public school. This incident raised a lot of attention, not only in the media, but in the state legislature, and it kicked off a conversation about the regulations, or really lack thereof, in Connecticut, and whether the state should do something to change that.
WSHU: That was one of two stories. There was also another really upsetting story out of New Britain about a little girl. What was the response to those situations from state oversight organizations like the Office of the Child Advocate?
EO: The Office of the Child Advocate really has been pushing for more regulation with regard to homeschooling. And this has not started just with the case in Waterbury. Back in 2017, the Office of the Child Advocate was also pushing for more homeschool regulation after a different case of a young man who was killed. And yeah, the Office of the Child Advocate really has been pushing to get some regulations into place around homeschooling.
WSHU: Can you talk about some of the recommendations that they made?
EO: Yes. So toward the end of the last legislative session in May, after the Waterbury incident had hit all of the national media, the Child Advocate started drawing up some recommendations. Those really included that the state would require homeschool parents to inform their local school districts each year that they're homeschooling and that the children would receive some kind of academic evaluation every year. She also recommended that if a family was seeking to withdraw a child from homeschooling, the local school district should review the records of any family seeking to withdraw to see if there were any past reports of abuse or neglect, and then, if there was sufficient concern, inform DCF.
WSHU: And the response to those recommendations from the families that were homeschooling hasn't been good. What do those look like?
EO: The homeschooling community has largely insisted that these cases, both the case of the Waterbury man and the girl who died, Jacqueline “Mimi” Torres-Garcia, the response has been that the homeschooling community has said that these cases have nothing to do with homeschooling. That they were cases of these young people being withdrawn from public school, that the public schools were well aware of concerns with these families, and that DCF really should have done more. That is their perspective.
WSHU: You mentioned in your story that it's difficult to know how many people in Connecticut are being homeschooled, but that there definitely has been a jump. Can you talk a little bit about the numbers that we do know?
EO: Because Connecticut is one of the states that does not require homeschoolers to inform their local districts that they're homeschooling, we don't have an accurate count. Connecticut is certainly not alone in that. There are, I want to say, 12 states that don't have any requirements for notifications. Most of the data that we do have, I was able to get from the Institute for Educational Policy at Johns Hopkins, and they got it from, I believe, census data. So we do know that there's also state data that says that in 2023-24, just over 1800 children were reported as being homeschooled to SDE, the State Department of Education.
WSHU: So you spoke to some of these families that have come into homeschooling, many of them after the COVID-19 pandemic. Can you talk about some of their stories?
EO: Sure. So I went to a co-op in Stamford that formed after the pandemic had hit, and many of these families had withdrawn their children for a number of reasons; a lot of them, it was just like watching these children struggle with Zoom. And this Co-Op formed in, I want to say, after the 2021-22 school year ended, and basically they get together a couple of days a week, and the kids have these little classes that are taught by the parents based on the parents' interest or the parents' expertise. And it's a really interesting place. I saw children learning carpentry. I saw children doing work with clay. Some kids were like, using tin foil and paper towel rolls and stuff to kind of create a play after reading the book, Bridge to Terabithia. But it was just a really vibrant place, and I think it's a way of homeschooling that a lot of people don't think about. We have these pictures of homeschooling as like sitting at your kitchen table doing math problems with your siblings, and that's not what it always looks like.
It was an interesting experience for me because I didn't know that much about homeschooling in general, but it was fascinating to hear these parents talk about both the struggles they'd had with their own school districts and the frustrations of the pandemic, but just how much they felt like they were part of a community, and they really loved being able to be part of this. So it was a learning experience for me, certainly.
WSHU: And the parents gave you an idea of what the benefits look like from their view. Can you talk a little bit about what they told you there?
EO: Yeah, sure. So for them, flexibility was a big thing, the ability to let their kids learn at their own pace and based on their interest level. I had one parent who said letting her sons learn at a pace where they didn't have to feel like they were being compared to other students. I had several parents who I talked to whose children had some kind of learning disability and really struggled in the public schools, and they talked about just bringing the family closer together, having siblings learn side by side, being able to spend more time with their children, and they said that these were things they really valued.
WSHU: So, where do we stand now with the legislature? Legislation to deal with this didn't pass this session. Do you think it'll be brought back in 2026?
EO: I would anticipate that it would. Lawmakers who I spoke to did not say that there had been discussions going on, but stopped short of telling me whether there was any actual bill language or what specific policies had been discussed at this point.
