SOUTH DAKOTA
Two Major Victories!
For years, South Dakota families and local school districts have battled over the requirement that home schooled children be tested with the same standardized tests used in the public schools. Many families object to this, wanting their children to be evaluated by means that measure what their children have learned, not what the public school children have learned. These conflicts came to a head two years ago, when home schoolers discovered that the most common school district test, the MAT-7, had a number of questions that were really shocking to Christian families.
A number of Home School Legal Defense Association members refused to test their children with the MAT-7 tests. In response, many of the school districts threaten the parents with court action.
With the consent of the test publisher, HSLDA carefully scrutinized the MAT-7 test questions and found some of them to be heavily weighted against traditional moral values and in favor of politically correct attitudes. HSLDA attorney Christopher Klicka was able to convince the superintendents to hold off prosecution for that year, but the root problem-the wording of the law-remained.
HSLDA drafted language to change the law as it pertained to the testing requirements and forwarded it to the South Dakota home school leaders. Aspects of the language were finally incorporated into H.R. 1286 which improved South Dakota's testing requirements for home school children in two significant ways. First, children may now be tested with any national achievement test. And second, the legislation also ended the requirement that families have children tested annually. Now, children are only required to be tested in the same grades that public school children must be tested.
By God's grace, Governor William J. Janklow signed House Bill 1286 into law on March 4, 1996. Families with significant objections to the MAT-7 should call HSLDA about testing this spring. All families will be able to select any nationally standardized achievement tests starting in the 1996-1997 school year.
The other bill signed into law on March 4 was House Bill 1279, an act to provide additional safeguards against false and malicious reports of abuse and neglect. This was an unusually well-written and much-needed amendment to the law, which prohibited the Department of Social Services from removing any portion of their records that would tend to prove, affirm, corroborate, or support the innocence of the subject of a child abuse report without express written authority of the subject of the child abuse report. In an entirely new section of the Code, any subject of an unfounded report of child abuse or neglect who believes that the report was made in bad faith or malicious intent may petition the court for the release of the records of the investigation. This finally makes it possible for families who are maliciously hot-lined to defend themselves.
