Home Schooling Needs Balance

By Retta Dunlap
Hidden amongst the leaves of Vermont’s Green Mountains are families who have chosen to educate their children at home. For a long time, they have wanted and, as of this past June, now have a brand-new homeschooling law that replaced the old, tired 36-year-old law.

The concepts in this new law, titled “home study,” are not really new. I have been talking about them for decades with any and all listeners at the Vermont Agency of Education (AOE), the legislature and with homeschoolers. But not until COVID did the AOE staff see that the paperwork burden, under the old law, was just too much, even for them. During COVID, the home study enrollment numbers more than doubled to 5,500. The numbers have come down since COVID but are still well above those of the pre-COVID years.

As with anything involving human rights, there is a balance that needs to be achieved between the state’s interest and, in this instance, the rights of parents to homeschool their children. Over the decades, the question that I kept asking of the powers that be is, “what exactly do you need to know to satisfy the state’s interest in the education of these children?”

This answer always boils down to the state needs to know who these children are, where they are, who is responsible for the education and that they be enrolled in an educational setting of some kind. To advocate for change, you have to identify the goal posts on either side of the issue and this is where it landed.

Vermont’s new law requires parents to fill out a form with the name, age, birthdate, address of the student and the signatures of the parents who have the legal authority to make this choice; followed by the attestations of the parents that they will 1) provide 175 days of instruction in the minimum course of study found in the law, 2) annually assess the child at the end of each school year and maintain this record of progress at home and 3) provide adaptations to the student, if there is a disability.

This minimal information is to be submitted to the state when starting a home study program and the AOE is to acknowledge this submission, within 10 business days. This greatly condenses the timeframe for enrollment. Now, an enrollment submission that used to take days for families to pull together will now take less than 5 minutes. It can even be done via an online form.

One thing this law did not do is make homeschooling easier to do. The time it takes to plan, educate and get an assessment done has not changed. The difference is that parents no longer have to submit these for state review. The AOE could give no assurances about the education in the first place. So, while this may seem like a small change, the value is that the state is no longer nit picking what little information was provided.

I like to explain it this way. Since the light from a microscope can affect how living cells behave when trying to view them, the state’s review power over the course of study can alter, ever so slightly, how one homeschools their children.

It is a fresh new place that VT homeschoolers find themselves in. The fact that they do not have the state looking over their shoulder puts them squarely in charge of how to deliver learning experiences to their children. It will be refreshing to say “what a cool idea,” instead of “how do I document this to the state?” As it should be, homeschooling is a natural parental process and, with a little bit of forethought, it will happen when it happens.

— Retta Dunlap is a retired homeschooling mom who is president of Vermont Home Education Network. She lives in Woodbury, Vt.