Tragic abuse shouldn’t make home schooling a target
Hard cases make bad law. This is a hard case, but it need not create hardship for law-abiding Colorado families. Last month, the body of 7-yearold Caden McWilliams was found encased in concrete in a Denver storage unit. Police believe he died in late May. His mother withdrew him from Denver Public Schools before the fall semester under the pretext of home schooling. She has been charged with child abuse resulting in death.
Over the past few years there have been a handful of appalling cases in Colorado where abusive parents have claimed to homeschool their children in order to hide savage abuse and neglect. In 2017, a disabled Longmont youth ended up in a hospital after parents nearly starved him to death. In 2011, an Erie teen managed to escape his room where he was imprisoned by his mom with little food and no bathroom. In each case, the parents had removed students from public schools stating they wanted to educate them at home. They didn’t actually home-school the boys; rather, they used the law to hide their children and their cruelty from the public.
Because of cases like these, some child welfare advocates are pushing for greater regulation of home schooling. That would be a mistake. Home schooling is already well regulated. Additional regulations like health and safety checks for home-schooled students would infringe on the privacy of law abiding parents, burden government agencies and do little to help catch a minority of abusive parents.
Approximately 30,000 Colorado children are home-schooled. The cottage industry is regulated by state law. Parents must provide a school district the name, age and address of their student 14 days before beginning a homeschool program. Home-schooled students must receive 172 days of instruction in reading, writing and speaking, mathematics, history, civics, literature and science. Student academic progress must be evaluated in grades 3, 5, 7, 9, and 11. Parents must maintain records of attendance data, test and evaluation results, and immunization records.
On average, home-schooled students score better than publicschool students on standardized tests including college entrance exams. One study by Brian D. Ray, Ph.D., found that “legally homeschooled students are 40 percent less likely to die by child abuse or neglect than the average student nationally.” This makes sense. Home schooling takes commitment. You have to relearn algebra to teach it. That’s the opposite of neglect.
Checking on thousands of families who have never had contact with child welfare agencies would be needlessly intrusive and would take time away from checking on families whose children have been identified as at risk of abuse or neglect. Caden’s family had already had contact with the child welfare system. It’s likely he went missing while he was still enrolled in public school.
Moreover, home-school regulations would not have stopped the most infamous child abuse incident this decade.
A couple of years ago, Wayne Sperling and Lorinda Bailey’s four children were found living in filth, not potty trained and unable to speak. Years earlier, three children had been removed permanently from the home because of abuse. The couple went on to have four more kids. At one point, two of those children were removed temporarily only to be returned to the house of horrors. By the time the government intervened again, four boys had lived their first few years in unimaginable suffering.
Rather than consider how to more thoroughly regulate lawabiding home-schoolers, would it not be better to more thoroughly monitor children already identified as at risk and intervene on their behalf ?