House committee backs bill on home-schoolers

The House Education Committee advanced a measure Tuesday requiring public school districts to admit home-schooled students into individual classes.

House Bill 1419 by Rep. Mark Lowery, R-Maumelle, passed the committee on a split voice vote after questions about how the bill could affect public schools’ performance measures.

It would require public schools to develop policies on how private-school and home-schooled students may apply for enrollment in an “academic course” at traditional public schools and public charter schools. The bill wouldn’t mandate specifics of a school district’s policy other than outlining it must be “consistent” with policies applying to the district’s traditional students.

“Our ability to allow this

option of non-public-school students being able to take academic courses is a win-win,” Lowery said. “We’re able to recognize maybe sometimes that a home-school family is not equipped to teach chemistry or physics or something, trigonometry. They have the option of putting the student in the local public school, and the school district also is a winner on this because receive one-sixth foundation funding for each class that the student takes.”

Under current law, school districts may allow private and home-schooled students to enroll in a class, but they aren’t required to allow those students to attend.

There are about 20,000 home-schooled students in Arkansas, state Education Commissioner Johnny Key said Tuesday, and about 270 of them attend classes at public schools in 72 school districts. There are 238 public school districts in Arkansas.

Key said schools enrolling home-schoolers could be only be impacted on attendance measures, and home-schoolers wouldn’t affect schools’ other performance indicators. Several lawmakers indicated they would propose changes to exempt the home-schooled

students from the attendance measures to minimize the effect on school districts.

The only opponent of the bill who testified Tuesday, Richard Abernathy, executive director of the Arkansas Association of Educational Administrators, said his organization would likely support the bill if districts’ attendance measures wouldn’t be negatively affected by the students attending under Lowery’s proposal.

Under HB1419, school districts could request a waiver from the requirement, and they could limit outside enrollment if it would create a “financial loss.”

Lowery said he hopes the bill, if it passes, will give legislators a better baseline to gauge interaction between private-school and homeschooled students and public school districts.