Homeschooling Freedom, with Jim Mason

I was encouraged, and I'm sure you were too, to see some of our coalition partners from across the aisle come to the defense of homeschoolers in Connecticut.

I'm thinking especially of Richard Wexler at the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, or NCCPR.

I think I saw a letter from him.

What issues did he raise with Connecticut's new setup?

Well, as you know, he's long viewed with suspicion, the parent surveillance kind of issues.

So I talked to him about, you know, the new bill as it was making its way through committee and into the House and then the Senate.

So he wrote a letter kind of expressing what you just said, that this situation.

misguided effort and that it drags people into a system that is often more harmful to children than helpful and that it's a bipartisan issue that many people from the left-leaning side of the political spectrum are see the same kind of problems that we at HSLDA have seen for years and that you at Parental Rights have worked on kind of from the more center-right perspective.

At HSLDA, we got involved because homeschooling was at one time by itself viewed by many as an issue to be investigated by Child Protective Services.

in some states where it was either really illegal or wrongly thought to be illegal that you know later cases said it wasn't illegal ever just the simple act of homeschooling could get a cps investigator at your front door and so you know we hslda got involved in that a long time ago protecting families in their own homes from unconstitutional searches and seizures based on nothing more than a kind of a whim of a report to be investigated.

And then that gave birth to your organization, Parental Rights, in the early 2000s.

You yourself, I mean, in your role as the head of litigation over there, you've not only been a passionate champion of the Fourth Amendment in child welfare investigations, but a very effective one, shaping the law in New Mexico, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania.

So what are your thoughts on this Connecticut law through the Fourth Amendment lens? Because it's, again, bringing in CPS into homeschool situation.

It may not involve the Fourth Amendment, which protects persons, places and things.

The way the bill operates, I go to my school to withdraw my child.

They say, nope, can't do it until we get clearance from the CPS agency.

They then go to the CPS agency, which does a background check to see if you're on the central register.

or under a current investigation.

And so there's a couple of things that really come to mind.

One of them is we have asked the Federal Department of Education to look into this bill because there's a federal bill regarding student privacy that states are bound to follow if they receive federal money for education.

And so that federal bill says certain student personally identifiable information about a student cannot be released without consent.

And it has some clear guidelines on who can get that information without consent.

So what Connecticut did was said, well, you know, the exceptions are within the education world.

We can talk about personally identifiable information about a student, but the CPS agency isn't an education agency.

So we'll just say in this law from here on out, the CPS agency is also an education agency.