Senate Bill 2371: A Bill Amending the Home Education Statute

Author:
Senators Heckaman, Freborg, and Hacker

Summary:
As originally introduced, Senate Bill 2371 would have changed the law to permit grandparents and foster parents to homeschool, to clarify that homeschool students only have to take the basic battery of standardized tests, and to permit parents to choose a test that was not nationally normed. As amended, the bill would not have even permitted grandparents to homeschool and also did the following:

• Required monitoring by a certified teacher to continue beyond two years if the student scored below grade level or below the 50th percentile in any subject;
• Imposed monitoring for one year on any family at the family’s expense if the superintendent of public instruction determined that the family had violated any provision of the homeschool law;
• Required testing in grades 3, 4, 6, 8, and 11 with the state assessment or with a nationally normed standardized achievement test;
• Required the parent choosing a standardized achievement test to pay for the cost of having the test administered in all cases;
• If a remediation plan were implemented because of a low test score, the student would have to have continued to be evaluated for progress by the superintendent until the student scored “above the lowest achievement level on every subject tested on the state assessment, a score at or above the thirtieth percentile on every subject tested on a nationally normed standardized achievement test” or a score demonstrating one year of academic progress.

Status:

1/22/2007		Introduced, first reading, and referred to the Education Committee
2/6/2007		Committee Hearing
2/9/2007		Reported back amended, do pass, amendment
2/12/2007		Amendment adopted, placed on calendar S.J. 419
2/14/2007		Division of bill. Division A passed, Division B lost. Second reading, and passage
2/15/2007		Received from Senate
2/21/2007		Introduced, first reading, referred Education
2/28/2007		Committee Hearing
3/12/2007		Calendared with Committee Recommendation of “Do Not Pass”

HSLDA's Position:
HSLDA strongly opposed this legislation.

Action Requested:
None at this time.

Other Resources

February-5-2007—North Dakota—Calls Needed to Support Homeschool Freedom!

February-13-2007—North Dakota—Homeschool Bill Makes Law Worse

February-16-2007—North Dakota—Update on Homeschool Bill

March-12-2007—North Dakota—Bad Changes to Homeschool Bill

Bill Text   (requires Adobe Acrobat Reader)