The answer seems to be pretty darn easy. After reading the horrible story about the death of Christian Choate, the thirteen year old who was beaten to death by his father and spent most of his time locked in a dog cage, I wondered just how easy it is to home-school a child.
Christian’s stepmother, Kimberly Kubina, took her stepson out of school reporting that he was to be home-schooled, but after what unfolded in the household, it seems quite evident that the real reason behind the move was to cover up ongoing abuse.
Speaking as a former teacher, one of the first bits of instruction you learn is how to identify potential abuse in the homes of your students. You’re told to look for obvious bruises especially around report card and parent teacher conference time. You’re also instructed to look for odd behavior, acting out, withdrawal, and copious sleeping in class amongst myriad other things, and if suspected, to tell your school’s response team immediately. However, this only works if you can witness and interact with students. There is some leeway for students who are enrolled, but suddenly go missing. You can then send a truancy officer to their address to find out what the story is, but when a student is home-schooled there are literally no options.
Since getting certified to teach in New York State is one of the most comprehensive and intensive processes nationwide, I decided to take a look at the New York State Education Department’s guidelines for home instruction — and it would appear that parents have pretty much all the autonomy they could ever want with regard to home-schooling.
Are parents required to register their children in a public school? No. Do they have to meet with school officials? No. Are they required to file a health inspection report? No. Are credentials for parents or tutors seeking home instruction required? No. There is a Home Instruction Worksheet that may be used to track students given by school officials, but is it a requirement that parents fill it out or use it? No.
These are the circumstances in which a home instruction program may be placed on probation.
- If parents submit test scores for an achievement test, the program will be placed on probation only if the composite score of the student is below the thirty-third percentile on national norms or the score fails to reflect one academic year of growth when compared to a prior test. The student’s score on individual test sub scores should not be considered in determining whether the program should be placed on probation.
- If parents submit a written narrative, the program will be placed on probation only if the evaluator certifies that the student has not made adequate academic progress.
This means that in both instances interaction with the school is at the discretion of the parents.
In addition, here are the circumstances in which a school district may require a home visit.
A school district may require home visits, upon three days’ written notice to the parents, only when the home instruction program is on probation. Under any other circumstances, a school official may request a home visit but a parent would not be required to consent to the request.
Still, this would require the parent to open the doors prior to the request for a home visit, and even in doing so, the home visits aren’t spontaneous, and they require the consent of the parent to begin with.
The one area that appears to have some connection with the school system is in requiring an Individualized Home Instruction Plan or (IHIP). The IHIP must include for each of the required courses either a list of syllabi, curriculum materials and textbooks to be used or a plan of instruction to be followed.
It is reasonable for the district to require more than the name, publisher, copyright date and author’s name if the district is not familiar with the textbook’s content. If the district requests additional information beyond the list of textbooks, the parents may, at their option, submit either a written scope and sequence describing the text or a copy of the text for the district’s review (which copy shall be promptly returned to the parents).
But the school will not make a judgment on the substantive nature of the texts, but the IHIP should indicate the total number of hours of instruction per quarter so they may be documented on a quarterly report, which should be furnished by the parent to the school district, which includes the following:
- the number of hours of instruction during said quarter;
- a description of the material covered in each subject listed in the IHIP;
- either a grade for the child in each subject or a written narrative evaluating the child’s progress; and
- a written explanation in the event that less than 80 percent of the amount of the course materials as set forth in the IHIP planned for that quarter has been covered in any subject.
So you can imagine what could occur in homes across the tri-state area. In Christian’s home state of Indiana, not surprisingly the Home-School Laws are not as comprehensive, allowing for even more leeway. Perhaps though, the one constant in all home-schooling laws is the need for some sort of curriculum, and it may have been this singular requirement that spurred Kimberly Kubina, during his captivity, to give Christian paper and tell him to write notes, and even at times give him assignments. However, those assignments appear to have little to do with education instruction. Instead he was asked things like, “Why do you still want to see your mom? Why can’t you let the past go? What does it mean to be part of a family?” according to DCS records.
In answer, Christian “Wrote of why nobody liked him and how he just wanted to be liked by his family.” He even stated that “He wanted to die because nobody liked the way he ‘acted.’ And wondered “when someone, anyone, was going to come check on him and give him food or liquid, often stating that he was hungry or thirsty.”
Stories like this are just gut-wrenching, not just in the abuse, but in the use of home-schooling as a twisted way to proliferate it, to use it as a red herring, to take its tenets and bastardize them in order to fit some insane notion of doing the right thing with regard to his schooling, when it really was just the seventh level of hell for this young boy. He was starved and beaten and eventually died in that dog cage — and when he was found, his father buried him in a shallow grave and poured cement over his body. It would be two years until he was found. What horror. Luckily for humanity, Riley Choate and Kimberly Kubina have been charged with murder, battery, neglect of a dependent, confinement, obstruction of justice, moving a body from a death scene and failure to notify authorities of a dead body.
So among the obvious questions that we always ask the state Departments of Protective Services in these instances, shouldn’t we also ask the question of the education system? Is it okay for kids like Christian to fall through the cracks into a world of pain and horror, because we don’t want to tread on parental rights? I’m not saying that home-schooling should be outlawed, but at the very least someone should be laying their eyes on these kids. If you’re just teaching your kid reading, writing, and arithmetic…where’s the concern if the school wants to check every now and again?
