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Old March 11th, 2008 #80
Alex Linder
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Join Date: Nov 2003
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[Not one iota of evidence that HS has anything to do with the ordinary nigger behavior outlined below. The HS connection is wholly due to the jewess' bias.]


Lack of Supervision Noted in Deaths of Home-Schooled

By JANE GROSS
January 12, 2008

Ten states and the District of Columbia, where Banita M. Jacks was charged on Thursday with four counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of her four daughters, have no regulations regarding home schooling, not even the requirement that families notify the authorities that they are educating their children at home.

The lack of supervision of the home-schooling process, some experts say, may have made it easier last year for Ms. Jacks to withdraw her children from school and the prying eyes of teachers, social workers and other professionals who otherwise might have detected signs of abuse and neglect of the girls.

Instead, the children, ages 5 to 17, slipped through the cracks in multiple systems, including social services, education and law enforcement. Their decomposed bodies were discovered earlier this week by United States marshals serving eviction papers on the troubled family.

The absence of any home-schooling regulations in Washington is largely the result of advocacy and litigation by the Home School Legal Defense Association, which since its founding in 1983 has transformed the landscape for families home schooling their children. Once against the law in all but five states, home schooling is now legal throughout the country and highly regulated in just six states, New York among them. About 1.1 million of the 50 million school age children were home schooled in 2003, the National Center for Education Statistics says.

For sure, the fact that Ms. Jacks’s children last attended school in March in no way accounts for their deaths, which the medical examiner said occurred more than two weeks ago. There was evidence that the eldest girl had been stabbed and that the others had signs of strangulation and other trauma. Ms. Jacks denies responsibility, saying the children died in their sleep and were possessed by demons.

Officials at the Home School Legal Defense Association, in Purcellville, Va., acknowledge that children schooled at home, as Ms. Jacks said hers were, are in rare instances the victims of abuse. But such cases generally occur in families already known to law enforcement or social service agencies who may have “missed the signs and signals,” said Ian M. Slatter, a spokesman for the association, and “being in school wouldn’t all of a sudden make those children safe.”

That view is disputed by other experts.

Clive R. Belfield, a professor of economics at Queens College and formerly a researcher at the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education at Columbia Teachers College, said that “limited compliance and follow-up” gave abusive families “an excuse to get out of being observed.”

Mitchell L. Stevens, an associate professor of education and sociology at New York University, said school officials, who are required by law to report suspicion of child abuse, were society’s best watchdogs of how parents treat children.

“Home schooling removes children from a lot of that surveillance,” Mr. Stevens said, adding that the vast majority of home schooling families are “overwhelmingly trustworthy people who place a very high value on parental autonomy.” And thanks to the advocacy of the legal defense fund, he continued, “they have been largely successful since the late 1980s in getting the law to favor parental rights.”

One example of that, in 1991, disrupted an effort by the District of Columbia to regulate home schooling, with rules that included unannounced home visits and required teachers certification for parents doing the instruction. Christopher Klicka, senior counsel for the Home School Legal Defense Association, met with District officials, told them they were on shaky ground because of the 1st, 4th and 14th amendments, and the rules were rescinded.

Mr. Klicka said he had also intervened to overturn requirements for home visits in a number of other states, including South Dakota, Rhode Island, Illinois and Massachusetts. At one time, he said, 20 states had such a requirement; now none do. Mr. Klicka added that the only regulation he found “reasonable” was that families notify authorities of their plans to home school. Other requirements, including record-keeping on childrens’ progress and either standardized testing or year-end portfolios to demonstrate competence, all required in New York State, were currently being challenged in eight active court cases nationally.

Washington still has no formal regulations, according to spokesmen for both the mayor and the public school system, although parents are supposed to file an “intent to withdraw from school” form with the district, something that did not happen in the Jacks case, although school social workers made several attempts to visit the family and reported the childrens’ absence from school to authorities.

Among his plans, Mayor Adrian M. Fenty of Washington promised “to establish better tracking and monitoring of home school families.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/12/us...in&oref=slogin