Opinion on Legislation
HB0467/SB1135

Leave your CRS
and Report to the LEA
by Kay Brooks,
TnHomeEd Owner

In English I believe this legislation says:

Notwithstanding the provisions of the homeschool code which allows registering with a CRS, [never mind what the law said before]

any parent desiring to conduct a homeschool covered by a CRS

must register children who would be in grades 9-12 with the local education agency where the child would be enrolled if he did attend public school and

must notify the local education agency if the child is withdrawn from homeschool under a CRS and

report where the child will be educated next.

It’s my understanding after my meeting with Rep. Maddox that this bill arises out of truancy problems in Weakley County specifically where truants are declaring themselves to be homeschoolers--specifically registered with Gateway Christian Schools. However, Dr. Leo Crofford, director of that school, stated in his letter to Rep. Maddox of 3/23/01

Quote: “No legislation should be based on skewed or false information. We often hear rumors about Gateway home school students running loose. But with all the talk, no attendance officer has ever produced a single name of one who was actually a Gateway student.”

Additionally, Dr. Leo Crofford has told me, and Rep. Maddox confirmed this when I met him again yesterday (4/03/01), that he will drop this legislation if Dr. Crofford can "make peace" with the Attendance Supervisor of Weakley County, one Mr. Marvin Flatt. It's my understanding that this bill was rolled specifically so these two could work things out. It's also my opinion from my conversations with Rep. Maddox and Dr. Crofford that Mr. Flatt is not being fully trained in homeschooling law per TCA 49-6-3050(b)(1) (last sentence).

There are several real concerns abut this bill:

• Requiring homeschool parents to notify the local education agency that they have left a church related school and where the child will next be educated will in no practical way aid in solving the truancy problem in Rep. Maddox’s district. Truants will lie about their status. It's what they do.
• Further, it is ineffective as a means to register homeschoolers. This bill only unnecessarily further burdens already law-abiding parents. If I register with and then never leave my church-related school, this law appears to read that the names of my children will still never be reported to the LEA at all.
• The original Code this bill amends says 9th-12th grade homeschooled students must be reported to the Local Education Agency. However, Kaye Jeter, an attorney with the Department of Education, has already opined that I don’t need to register even my 9th-12th grade students if our Church Related School considers our home a satellite campus of their school. Technically, according to Dr. Jeter, these students are “privately schooled” even though most of us would call them homeschoolers. So again, another large segment of the homeschooling population will still remain unreported to the LEA if the Jeter Memo protection is extended to include the whole paragraph of this code.

So what we have here is publicly or privately schooled truants lying about where they are being educated and sullying the good name of homeschoolers in the process. We have a poorly written bill that would require only students leaving a Church Related School to notify the LEA, except where the Jeter Memo exempts, and a huge portion of the homeschool population, which population is not the problem, still unknown to the LEA attendance officers. But as law-abiding families they don’t need to be known to the LEA. Truancy officers can still contact parents, which someone must do anyway, and determine where the student is actually enrolled.

TCA 49-6-3007(c) , and (e)(1) already require all schools to report their students to the superintendent of the system the school is located within 30 days of the school year and when the child withdraws. This legislation seems unnecessary. Except that CRS are not complying with this law, due to the Jeter Memo, and parents may be easier to intimidate into compliance than CRSs. [9/24/01--during the battle it was Rep. Maddox who said from the house floor that CRS aren't included in this law as they are separate from the specifically named entities that must comply.]

The Jeter memorandum is not mentioned but that memo allows CRS to consider our homes as satellite campuses of the CRS and so we are not required to report our children to the LEA. The word "satellite" doesn't appear in the homeschool code but it is in the summary (which is curious). I quote the legislative summary for HB0467:

Schools, Home - Requires Parents whose children are being educated through satellite church-related home schools to advise local LEA when their children are withdrawn from such program. -Amends TCA Section 49-6-3050