Virginia
Virginia Contacts Continue
Virginia has excellent laws for home schooling, yet dozens of families face serious contact with government officials all the same. Many of these contacts involve religious exemption claims, and Home School Legal Defense Association routinely assists families to assert their free exercise right to keep their children out of public schools without significant difficulty. A number of districts have tried to add unnecessary conditions to the home school statute, and HSLDA works hard to make school districts stick to the letter of the law. But the most serious continuing contacts involve Child Protective Service visits to the home.
One Virginia family was “hot lined” because of their nine-month-old child’s genetic disability. Another mother was handcuffed and charged with three felonies for leaving her children in a car in a parking lot for a few minutes. One family had volunteered to participate in an “adolescent health study” at the National Institutes of Health, and after three days of questioning, they were turned in for child abuse because of an answer to one of literally hundreds of questions. In each case, HSLDA was able to provide competent, professional advice for protecting the family from unnecessary governmental intervention.
Despite these problems, home schoolers are actually less likely to be hot lined than the average family, not more likely. Non-home schooling parents often don’t find out that they are the subject of a child abuse investigation until their child comes home from school and tells about his conversation with a social worker. Home schoolers, on the other hand, have the ability to stop the social worker at the door and make sure that there is really probable cause before the investigation proceeds. Because of this, home schoolers are the only organized group of families in America who are successfully regaining the privacy of their homes. Please pray for the families who are subject to these investigations, and for the attorneys at HSLDA seeking to protect them.
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Virginia
The annual jousting tournament near Staunton is said to be the nation’s oldest continuously operating sporting event.
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