School District Rejects Homeschool Objectives Senior Counsel Dee Black answers questions and assists members with legal issues in Pennsylvania. He and his wife homeschooled their children. Read more >> Earlier this school year, the Brandywine Heights Area School District notified a homeschooling family that the education objectives attached to the affidavit filed with the superintendent were deficient and needed revision. The school official referred the teaching parent to the Pennsylvania Core Standards (adopted from the Common Core State Standards) as a guide for developing objectives for her son’s home education program. Uncertain as how to proceed, the parent contacted Home School Legal Defense Association for guidance. Superintendents’ rejection of objectives created by parents for their children’s instruction is a fairly common legal problem encountered by HSLDA member families. Fortunately it is a problem that is easily solved, because the homeschool law expressly states that, “The required outline of proposed education objectives shall not be utilized by the superintendent in determining if the home education program is out of compliance with [the law].” But this is also a problem that can be fairly easily avoided so that parents don’t have to deal with it in the first place. It all has to do with the way the objectives are phrased. According to The American Heritage Dictionary, the noun “objective” is defined as “something worked toward or striven for; goal.” In other words, for home educators it’s learning goals for the student that the parent is trying to achieve through instruction in each of the courses. Quite often, however, the objectives submitted to superintendents are simply a description of the material that is going to be taught in each course, not a description of what the instructor hopes to achieve or expects the child to learn. In the matter involving the Brandywine Area School District, we advised our member that the Pennsylvania Core Standards were not applicable to home education programs, so there was no need for her to adapt her curriculum or teaching to these standards. We also recommended that she submit revised objectives that described the learning goals for her child in each of the required courses being taught. After doing so, she heard nothing further from the school district.
Posted on: Wed, 14 Jan 2015 10:01:08 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015