by Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Writer
(March 6, 2008) A Los Angeles Appellate Court judge stunned the nation’s home-schooling community when he ruled that home schooling is not an option in the state of California and parents who home school their children could face criminal sanctions for doing so.
“ . . . Parents do not have a constitutional right to home school their children,” said Justice H. Walter Croskey in the Feb. 28 ruling.
The ruling, which reverses an earlier decision by a Superior Court judge, has caused everything from concern to panic among parents of the state’s 166,000 home-schooled children. Legal experts are calling it “breathtaking.”
“The scope of this decision by the appellate court is breathtaking,” said Brad Dacus, president of the California based Pacific Justice Institute, in a press release.
“It not only attacks traditional home schooling, but also calls into question home schooling through charter schools and teaching children at home via independent study through public and private schools. If not reversed, the parents of the more than 166,000 students currently receiving an education at home will be subject to criminal sanctions.”
The ruling concerns the case of the two youngest children of Phillip and Mary Long, who the couple decided to enroll in the Sunland Christian School, a private home schooling program. The couple objected to the state’s curriculum which included sex education and the promotion of homosexuality as a normal lifestyle.
“We just don’t want them teaching our children,” Philip Long told World Net Daily. “They teach things that are totally contrary to what we believe. They put questions in our children’s minds we don’t feel they’re ready for. When they are much more mature, they can deal with these issues, alternative lifestyles, and such, or whether they came from primordial slop,” Long said. “But at the present time it’s my job to teach them the correct way of thinking.”
The Longs were initially targeted by the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services after one of the children reported “physical and emotional mistreatment by the children’s father,” according to documents submitted to the court. The mistreatment turned out to be spankings and the case was closed out.
However, two attorneys who had been appointed by the state to represent the children initiated the current case, which has been going on for years. In at least two previous decisions, the courts affirmed the Longs’ right to home school.
Justice Croskey disagreed, and described the children’s enrollment in the Sunland Christian School as a “ruse of enrolling [children] in a private school and then letting them stay home and be taught by a non-credentialed parent.”
Terry Neven, president of the Sunland Christian School, said that his organization, which has been in full compliance with the law for more than 20 years, was never given an opportunity to represent their case in court.
“California is now on the path to being the only state to deny the vast majority of home-schooling parents their fundamental right to teach their own children at home,” said Michael Smith, president of the Home School Legal Defense Association, an international home-schooling advocacy association, in a March 3 statement.
“If the opinion is followed, then California will have the most regressive law in the nation and home schooling will be effectively banned, because the only legal way to home school will be for the parent to hold a teaching certificate. Parents should not have to attend a four-year college education program just to teach their own children.”
An appeal to the state Supreme Court is planned.
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