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NEW YORK

Victory in Wappingers

Home School Legal Defense Association recently helped a member family in Wappingers Central School District when the superintendent wrote a letter stating that parents would no longer be able to administer the standardized achievement test to their own children for the annual assessment requirement. While Regulations of the Commissioner of Education § 100.10 gives the superintendent of the local school district authority to consent to the person chosen by the parent to administer a standardized achievement test, there is no prohibition against a parent administering the achievement test to his or her own child.

In this particular situation, there was no reasonable basis for the superintendent to withhold his consent since both parents had at least a bachelor's degree. Local homeschool leaders, longstanding HSLDA members, and HSLDA Attorney Thomas Schmidt worked together to convince the district that these parents were more than qualified to administer the test.

While § 100.10 does not require that parents have any particular qualifications to administer the standardized achievement test to their own children, the law does give the power of consent to the superintendent. Because of this statutory authority, HSLDA generally advises parents to indicate any qualifications they might have when stating the method of annual assessment (usually done in the third-quarter report). This provides the best information to the school district.

The ability of school district superintendents to determine—without objective guidelines—who administers achievement tests is one of the reasons HSLDA supports Assembly Bill 4598 and Senate Bill 2060, currently in the New York legislature. These bills would eliminate approximately 75% of the present restrictions on homeschoolers in New York, including the consent requirement.