CV NEWS FEED // A bill Virginia legislators are considering could threaten parents’ right to homeschool, a homeschooling advocacy group official informed CatholicVote Jan. 27.
Home Educators Association of Virginia (HEAV) Director of Government Affairs Callie Chaplow, told CatholicVote in a phone interview that SB1031 would give the public access to the personal information of homeschooling students and parents, in addition to hampering the freedom of those who choose to homeschool for religious reasons.
According to Chaplow, the public could access the test scores, name, home address, and age of all homeschooling students.
Chaplow said Virginia’s laws on religious exemption are based on a Supreme Court ruling that Wisconsin’s compulsory school attendance law violated the religious freedom of Amish families. That case, which the court decided in 1972, was Wisconsin v. Yoder.
Under current Virginia law, parents must submit a religious exemption to a school board stating that their opposition to public school is based on deeply held religious beliefs and not social, moral, or political. Under the proposed legislation in Virginia, parents would instead submit their religious exemption to the local school district’s superintendent.
“They’re shifting that locus of control from the school board, a publicly elected body, to the superintendent of schools and putting it under home instruction,” Chaplow explained. “The problem with that is, first of all, the superintendents already have a lot of trouble administering the homeschool law. And they usually have a designee in their office that does it. There’s a lot of turnover. There’s not a lot of training. There’s a lot of mistakes.”
She added that religious freedom exemptions involve much higher stakes than the other responsibilities that superintendents already have in homeschooling cases, such as processing and accepting notices of intent to homeschool.
“Once you move religious exemption into that area, we’re going to end up seeing a First Amendment court case on our hands,” Chaplow said, noting mistakes like missing a notice-of-intent letter are easy to correct.
“But you drop the ball suddenly when we’re talking about a First Amendment issue, that’s going to mean expensive litigation for the school district, which translates to you and I, the taxpayers,” she added.
SB1031 was introduced by Virginia Sen. Stella Pekarsky, a Democrat, according to Virginia’s legislative website. The bill was first proposed Jan. 7.
Chaplow will discuss the legislation with Virginia’s Lt. Gov. Winsome Sears in a Facebook livestream at 6:30 p.m. Jan. 27.
