MASSACHUSETTS
The Tide Turns for Home Schoolers
Massachusetts home schoolers this year are reaping the fruit of three years of hard work. School district after school district has modified their home school policy, in every case improving the situations for families educating their children at home.
Massachusetts home schoolers may remember the White family in Bourne, who went head-to-head with their school district in 1993. At an intense, highly charged school committee meeting, Home School Legal Defense Association attorney Scott Somerville gave the school committee a choice. "You can work with [the Whites], or you can fight with me!" The school committee voted to try to work out their differences with the Whites, and a whole new era in Massachusetts home schooling began.
The Bourne school committee formed a working group of home schoolers, school officials, and school committee members to draft a better policy for home schooling. After months of wrangling and compromise, the district finally adopted a policy that was vastly superior to the one that had started the conflict. In fact, it appeared to be the best written home school policy in Massachusetts.
Home schoolers sent copies of the Bourne policy all over the state, and several other districts revised their policies using principles in the Bourne policy. Families in Mansfield and the Whitman-Hanson school districts worked long and hard to change their policies, and were successful.
In 1994, home schoolers in Groton took up the challenge of working with their school district to develop the "best home school policy in the Commonwealth." The Groton-Dunstable Regional School District was blessed with a very open-minded superintendent and a very diligent home schooler, Sandra Lovelace. After months and months of work, meetings, drafts, revisions, and a series of never-ending crises, Groton finally adopted an excellent home school policy. And God is blessing the time and energy invested in this process a hundred-fold. This time, instead of home schoolers passing around the policy, the superintendents are distributing Groton's policy around in their own mailings.
This year we have seen school district after school district adopt the Groton policy, or some variation of it. The successful lawsuit against the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association has given school committees a real incentive to modify their policy in one way or another, and the Groton policy is now the starting point for many districts.
The Groton policy is not perfect, of course. School districts need to add a section explaining that home schoolers can be excused from attendance while their home-education proposal is being reviewed by a school committee. (The Groton policy unrealistically suggests that families must keep their children in bad school environments until the school committee gets around to evaluating their proposals.) The Groton policy could also be improved by adding a section noting that school committees respect the beliefs of those families with conscientious objections to approval, and that such families can be reasonably accommodated.
If your district has not revised its home school policy yet, we encourage you to call your school offices and find out what their policy says. Massachusetts law is changing—one district at a time. We encourage you to help make it happen in Massachusetts!
