The treatment of homeschooling families in New York City has become so deplorable that legal action has now been taken against the city for “systematic mistreatment of homeschool families.”According to the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), a lawsuit was filed in December to defend homeschooling families such as that of Tanya Acevedo of New York City who followed all the rules for notifying the school district within 14 days of withdrawing a child from school and filing all of the necessary paperwork.
And yet in spite of this, a representative from Child Protective Services (CPS) still showed up at her door to announce that she was being investigated for “educational neglect.” They proceeded to enter her home, interview her child in private, even look in her refrigerator before leaving her with the stern message that she needed to show up at the CPS office the following day with her child and her paperwork.
Instead, she called the lawyers at the HSLDA who saw this case as the “last straw” in a string of similar complaints from homeschool families in New York City.
“What happened to Tanya was the last straw,” said Jim Mason, HSLDA vice president of litigation. “Before this, there had been a string of what seemed to be bureaucratic oversights: people would fail to receive responses to their requests or letters, or else they wouldn’t receive their metro benefits. But this invasion of Tanya’s privacy was beyond the pale.”
His investigation found that it was common for the district to not file families’ homeschool notices, then report them to CPS.
HSLDA contact attorney in the city, T. J. Schmidt, said it was common for the district to not file families' notices, then report them to CPS. In addition, the state’s homeschooling regulations are so antiquated that he spends most of his time sorting out paperwork issues between homeschooling families and school districts.
He cited a myriad of problems such as how the city consolidated all of the administrative functions relating to homeschooling for all the school districts in all five NYC boroughs into one central office in Manhattan. Because it underfunds and undermans this office, delays and lost paperwork are routine. Worse, the central homeschool office controls the attendance database for all schools in the city inasmuch as the data relates to homeschooling.
As a result, this dysfunctional arrangement is causing homeschool families like Tanya's to suffer unnecessary abuse.
“Tanya both withdrew her child and gave the district notice on the same day. Everyone was on the same page,” Mason told the Federalist. “You don’t have to wait or give the district permission. They have no cause to investigate you or even mark your child absent.”
He added: “New York Public Schools believe that you need to have their permission to withdraw your student from their system and begin home-schooling. That’s entirely contrary to the law.”
As a result, the HSLDA filed a civil rights lawsuit against New York City public schools over their systematic mistreatment of homeschooling families.
“We are asking for money damages and for a court to order the New York City bureaucracy to simply follow New York’s homeschooling regulation,” Mason said.
Thus far, no ruling has been made in the case.
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