The following letter was submitted by the Home School Legal Defense Association to the DC State Board of Education and the State Superintendent of Education on behalf of the signators. The original letter had specific recommendations for changes to the language of the proposed regulation. A scanned copy of the original letter can be found here. If you live in the District and agree with this letter, please click here and join us in defending the rights of home schoolers in the District.
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June 10, 2008
Ms. Deborah Gist
State Superintendent of Education
441 4th Street, NW, Suite 350 North
Washington, DC 20001
Mr. Robert Bobb, President
District of Columbia State Board of Education
441 4th Street, NW, Suite 723 North
Washington, DC 20001
Dear Ms. Gist and Mr. Bobb:
We appreciate the effort that OSSE and the State Board have invested in attempting to craft homeschool regulations that meet the needs of all stakeholders in the District. As you make revisions to the May 2 proposed regulations, we want to emphasize to you the changes we believe are needed to make the regulations acceptable to home schooling families in the District. We are confident that the modifications described below will significantly improve the proposed DCMR 5200, making them equitable and more administrable while appropriately recognizing the interests of parents, their children and the District Government.
We consider these changes essential to creating a workable and constructive environment for homeschoolers in the District of Columbia. While there are many other changes we would like to see made to the proposed regulations, we understand that you have many other issues to address and cannot spend an unlimited amount of time on the homeschool regulations. We hope that you and your colleagues will agree to these few but critical modifications. The changes are:
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Insert a statement recognizing parental interests.
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Allow parents to use a letter or form of their choosing to notify the District of their intent to homeschool.
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Allow the District to review a portfolio only when it has a reason to believe the parent is not in compliance with the regulation.
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Remove the high school diploma teacher qualification.
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Explicitly provide for the right of judicial review upon a determination of non-compliance.
We, the undersigned, believe that together, we speak on behalf of most if not all of the District’s homeschooling families regarding the changes to the home school regulations described above. If you have questions, please do not hesitate to contact any one of us. Also, a member of one of our associations will soon contact you and some other SBOE members to personally discuss these changes and to answer any questions that you may have.
Respectfully submitted,
/s/
Michael P. Donnelly, Esq.
HSLDA Attorney for Member Affairs
in, inter alia, the District of Columbia
Ethan Reedy, DCHEA President
Cyndi Henderson, BAHE President
Jonathan Zischkau, Esq.
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