Connecticut officials just adopted the first major new restriction on homeschooling in America in decades, forcing parents to seek permission from “child welfare” authorities while imposing a slew of new regulations on families who exit government schools. Advocates for home education blasted the move. And they vowed to fight on.
The legislation, known as House Bill 5468 and signed into law as Public Act 26-37 or “An Act Concerning the Provision of Parent-Managed Learning,” treats all homeschool families as guilty until proven innocent, critics said. Before starting to homeschool, parents must report to the government and receive approval from the Department of Children and Families to proceed.
The unprecedented measure also purports to force parents to provide government-approved “education.” Language ordering homeschoolers to have “equivalent instruction” to government’s was removed. But the final bill signed into law by Governor Ned Lamont last week still decrees that parents must follow the studies taught in government schools.
The bill was so controversial that all Republicans and even some Democrats voted against it. But even with no GOP support, the legislation was approved by the House in a 96 to 53 vote and 22 to 14 by the Senate. Thousands of concerned citizens spoke out and testified against the bill, while just a handful expressed support.
“The state has a responsibility to protect children,” argued State Senate Pro Tem Martin Looney, a Democrat, before voting to support the controversial bill. “In other words, it’s not only the parents who have a responsibility for those children.” He did not mention the epidemic of sexual abuse, drugs, crime, illiteracy, and suicide in public education.
But Republicans pointed out that the state’s child-welfare bureaucracy was in shambles. “That agency is a train wreck,” explained Senator Eric Berthel, a Republican from Watertown). “It’s off the rails. It needs to go through substantial reform and be fixed before they should be allowed to interact with another family and another child.”
“The bill subjects every homeschooling family to a background check just to exercise a basic parental right,” fumed Berthel, one of many Republican lawmakers who spoke out against what they described as government overreach and an assault on parental rights. “It creates a system where an allegation can carry the same weight as a conviction.”
“In today’s economy, many families have multiple generations living in the same household,” he continued. “Under this bill, if anyone in that household is on a registry, the request is denied. That’s not targeted policy. That’s a blanket restriction that punishes entire families.”
Critics at the state and national level also slammed the measure. “They are taking something away from the homeschoolers that they have always had in Connecticut,” argued Family Institute of Connecticut Executive Director Peter Wolfgang, a homeschooling father of seven. “We have always had strong freedom to homeschool here.”
He also blasted the state’s effort to scapegoat home-educating families for failures of DCF, noting that the children who died were already known to the agency. “They were DCF’s responsibility, and DCF dropped the ball,” he said. “So what does our state government do? The opposite of what makes sense.”
He also blasted the state’s assumption that children were safer in a government school than with their own families. “What this law says is that the state government believes that children are safer in a public school … than they are with their own family,” he said. “It’s substituting the government for the family, and it’s saying that children belong to the state instead of to their own family.”
Ultimately, politicians “want to put all homeschoolers under the thumb now of DCF, the same group that failed to protect these children that were already their responsibility,” Wolfgang continued. Indeed, he noted that lawmakers and supporters of the bill consistently referred to the children as “’our kids’, as if the kids belong to the state.”
The Home School Legal Defense Association, which rallied families in the state and beyond, vowed to continue the fight against Connecticut’s new restrictions. Attorney Kevin Boden, HSLDA director of legal and legislative advocacy, sent an email to families warning about the significance of the danger—and noting that this assault could spread.
“This profound shift transforms Connecticut from a state where parents had significant freedom to the only state that imposes mandatory background checks on fit parents before they can teach their own children in their own home,” he said. “By requiring every parent to be pre-screened before they can begin homeschooling, it ceases to acknowledge parents as trusted actors and instead casts them as risks to be managed.”
“For homeschooling families, the signing of H.B. 5468 marks the first regression of homeschool freedom in the modern homeschool movement,” continued Boden. “While we are more than disappointed by this legislation, the battle is not over. We have been working hand-in-hand with our allies in Connecticut to oppose this bill since it was introduced and will continue to pursue appropriate legal action now that it has been signed into law.”
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