Connecticut’s lack of homeschooling regulations has sparked concerns about abuse and neglect—but some parents say state oversight would violate their freedom to educate their children.
I.
One spring afternoon, Amber Leblanc’s fifth-grade daughter, Bella, came home in tears.
Bella, who has dyslexia, had just met with her first special-ed teacher at her Chesire public elementary school. The teacher told her that whenever she sees her older sister Elisabeth, an avid bookworm, reading, she should be reading, too. “To give that task to Bella is so overwhelming and so inconsiderate,” LeBlanc remarked.
It took three years of arguing with administrators for LeBlanc to get a formal ADHD and dyslexia diagnosis for Bella. When LeBlanc brought up the problem to Bella’s teacher, she remembers the teacher saying that Bella simply needed to “try harder.”
After LeBlanc resorted to hiring an external tutor, the school claimed credit for Bella’s progress. It wasn’t until LeBlanc discontinued the tutoring service that the administration finally recognized Bella’s decline and need for individualized support. But by then, it was too late.
Bella’s struggles in school began to disrupt her social life and self-esteem. The tears eventually devolved into tantrums. “She would come home and have insane anger outbursts,” said LeBlanc. “This was happening several times a week.”
The second LeBlanc pulled Bella out of school and started homeschooling, the outbursts went away.
LeBlanc is not alone in her choice to homeschool. According to a 2023 Washington Post analysis, homeschooling has become America’s fastest-increasing form of education. Connecticut’s neighboring state, New York, saw a 103 percent increase in homeschooling in 2023 since the 2017-18 school year. Though the Connecticut government does not keep official records, The Education Association of Christian Homeschoolers estimated that the state’s homeschooling numbers doubled from twenty-two thousand in 2019 to between forty and forty-five thousand by 2021.
“The steady increase in homeschoolers has been happening for a very long time, with a clear surge around early COVID,” said Diane Connors, founder and president of the Connecticut Homeschool Network (CHN).
This surge in homeschooling in the state comes at a time of declining public school enrollment. The New Haven school district has seen a 12.65 percent decrease in enrollment in the last decade and projects an additional 1,740 student decrease over the next one (out of the current 18,877).
Yet Connecticut’s unusual homeschooling policy makes it impossible to measure exactly how many parents have turned to homeschooling for their children. Connecticut is a “no regulation” state, offering zero requirements or oversight on its homeschooling families. Families are not required to notify the school district or state government when they pull their children from school.
Connecticut General Statute §10-184 requires all parents in the state to “instruct [their children] or cause them to be instructed” in a list of subjects, including basic literacy, geography, arithmetic, and United States history and citizenship. “But how, when, where, and with what materials is strictly left up to the parents,” says Attorney Deborah Stevenson, founder of the National Home Education Legal Defense (NHELD).
Certain school districts in many of Connecticut’s neighboring states, such as Rhode Island and Massachusetts, ask for curriculum plan portfolios to demonstrate homeschoolers’ academic progress. Many also require time-to-time in-person evaluations, standardized testing scores, and proof of qualification from parents. But Connecticut does not require any such proof of instruction, let alone proficiency.
This lack of oversight has concerned lawmakers and child advocates, who argue that it allows cases of abuse or neglect to slip through the cracks under the guise of homeschooling. Yet parents like LeBlanc believe homeschooling properly educates children whose learning style marginalizes them in public school systems. As the debate continues, Connecticut’s lack of records and regulations means information on families’ actual homeschooling practices remains murky.
II.
To many homeschooling parents, quality educational experiences go beyond academics. “I’m sure my daughter could learn to read and write, totally fine,” New Haven homeschooling parent Julia Werth says. On a typical day, Werth spends at most thirty to forty minutes of structured learning time with her pre-Kindergarten daughter. I asked if she chose homeschooling because she was concerned about the New Haven Public Schools’ recent funding deficit. She shakes her head.
“I would be fine sending her to Nathan Hale [School],” she responds, referencing the nearest NHPS elementary institution. But the reason Werth keeps her daughter at home isn’t centered on dissatisfaction with public schools. She likes that homeschooling allows her individualization, more family time, more sleep, more play, less stress regarding testing—the list goes on.
For Katie Self, who homeschools her second grader and pre-kindergartener, family is a priority. “I want to raise my children and be an active part of their lives,” she says. Homeschooling allows Self to cultivate Christian religious and moral values, uninterrupted by routine external schooling. “We love God, so that is consistent throughout our whole life. We love learning, so that is consistent through everything we do.”
LeBlanc’s older daughter, 12-year-old Elisabeth, left traditional schooling in seventh grade. She was previously homeschooled from kindergarten to first grade. Elisabeth is looking to study neuroscience at Yale to better understand her grandmothers’ Alzheimer’s diagnoses.
Elisabeth participated in AGP—Academically Gifted Program—throughout elementary school. In her experience, however, AGP mostly involved sitting in the back of the classroom on a computer, learning material she couldn’t share with her classmates. “I think that it then taught her really to zone out. She dissociates a lot,” said LeBlanc. Her school denied LeBlanc’s proposal to let her skip a grade.
Elisabeth is enthusiastic about her transition back to homeschooling. “It’s the feeling that you have this tiny bunk bed you share with someone: that’s how school feels like. And then homeschool is this giant queen bed,” said Elisabeth, widening her arms to gesture at the immense freedom.
Today, LeBlanc feels very strongly about schooling: “The public school system only works for a very small percentage of children.” Whether in special-ed or gifted programs, schools leave behind the kids stuck on the periphery of their arbitrary “normal.”
Jenn Massameno of Wallingford, who homeschools her two teenage sons, Sam and Max, credits this failure partially to the Common Core State Standards Initiative, which began in 2010 to increase consistency in K-12 ELA and math education throughout the United States. The initiative began with a simple idea: to create one set of academic expectations for all students, ensuring identical and consistent levels of achievement for all. Common Core provides outlines and descriptions of skills students should have at each grade level. Its top-down, standardized approach, however, limits a teacher’s ability to adapt to student needs and leaves many at a loss.
“[Common Core] was saying that we’re just going to teach in the middle. The kids who are lower? They’re going to get the extra help. The kids that are higher? Too bad for them,” explained Massameno.
Massameno, a former public school special-ed teacher, suspected from a young age that Sam had dyslexia and her younger son, Max, had ADHD. Public schools offer free support for such special needs. Yet, after observing the under-resourced and overstrained special-ed services in Wallingford Public Schools, Massameno opted for homeschooling. “There was no way that I would ever send my kid to that school.”
According to a 2023 U.S. State Department of Education report, Connecticut sends 6.3 percent of its students out of district schools into specialized programs for children with disabilities, the most of any state. While specialized schools certainly can help students with accommodations succeed, the high outplacement rate may also demonstrate school districts’ inability to adequately support special-ed students in integrated school settings.
“It was just really disheartening,” said Massameno.
III.
For many families, homeschooling goes beyond its lexicon—“home” and “school.” From building original curriculums to seeking outside activities, parents often find themselves doing far more than moving a public school structure into a private household.
Massameno explains that one of the most challenging aspects of homeschooling is finances. “There’s no way that we would be able to do this if we could not live on the one income that my husband makes,” Massameno explains.
When Massameno and her husband were married, Massameno chose to stay home with the kids, resulting in a series of financial decisions that enabled her family to homeschool: they purchased a smaller house, which they could afford on one salary; they drove used cars until the cars died.
Chione Giacomarro, who homeschools her two children, Kamy and Caden, recognizes the inherent privilege of being able to homeschool. Most families can only choose it, she says, “because they have the resources to be able to accommodate that.”
Homeschooling gets expensive. Many aspects of the vibrant practice—extracurricular sports, art activities, frequent museum trips—come with a price. Membership for homeschooling co-op groups, where families come together once or twice weekly to offer enrichment activities and community, can also be costly. Durbin’s friend who homeschools in Oklahoma receives a state tax write-off for homeschooling her kids. Connecticut, however, does not and cannot provide this benefit, as it does not keep track of its homeschoolers.
In many homeschooling families, at least one parent will have to fully take on the role of a teacher, dropping a full income, or, in Werth’s case, working part-time outside of regular homeschool schedules. More often than not, the majority of homeschooling work falls to mothers, who make up 82 percent of stay-at-home parents in the U.S.
IV.
Connecticut attempted to pass a bill increasing homeschooling oversight in 2019. It failed after eliciting protests from homeschooling advocates like Connors and Stevenson. The proposed legislature first arose after Matthew Tirado, a non-verbal autistic teen, died in early 2017 after suffering abuse and neglect at the hands of his mother. Tirado and his sister had been out of school for months before his death. Hartford Public Schools, Tirado’s district, had filed reports to the Department of Children and Families alleging potential abuse in the household, but no response took hold. Ostensibly, Tirado was just homeschooled, and lawfully so.
Later that year, Connecticut Acting Child Advocate, Sarah Eagan, argued for improved protection for Connecticut’s homeschooled children in a report. “There must be a safety net to protect children who are victims of abuse and neglect from being withdrawn from the safe harbor and visibility of school and removed to a less or even potentially non-visible environment,” Eagan wrote. She proposed that parents “apply” to homeschool their children, reviewing a student’s truancy and absence records and reporting any concerns of abuse or neglect to the DCF ahead of time.
“In a public school, if children are absent, they will send truancy officers to the home, and there is a point where they will get the Department of Children and Families involved if a child is truant,” said Mary Gunsalus, Lecturer at the Yale Child Study Center and head of Child Study Center School. “But how is that regulated in a homeschooling environment?” she asks.
It isn’t. Connecticut General Statute §10-184 explicitly requires children under the age of eighteen to regularly attend a public school, unless “the person having control of such child is able to show that the child is elsewhere receiving equivalent instruction in the studies taught in the public schools.” Without governmental supervision, however, no one can be one hundred percent certain of the “equivalency” of instruction in a home.
NHPS explicitly states that the district does not provide “any support in educating the child” once they give up their seat in school. This means no access to free coursework, technology, special-ed programs, nor mental health and counseling services that all public schools mandate. For low-income families, it also means losing access to subsidized meals and after-school care.
But for many homeschooling families, the purpose of homeschooling is to provide an educational experience not equivalent to that of public schools.
Many homeschooling parents make the case that truants are not homeschooled, as they are not being educated. They argue that abuse and neglect, too, are problems separate from at-home education that need to be addressed without infringing upon the constitutional rights of homeschooling parents. According to Connors, many homeschoolers left traditional schools to escape purported bullying, physical abuse, and threats of violence against students. In her daughter Sophia Connors’ opposition to Connecticut’s 2019 bill, she asked lawmakers to “leave homeschoolers alone and to take care of the real problems that they have yet to fix.”
For Attorney Stevenson, who founded NHELD, the battle against increased homeschooling oversight hinges on preserving parental rights to direct their child’s education from state interference. “Did we, the people … grant to the government the right or the power to grant or take away our inalienable rights in the manner they propose to do so? Then the conversation, as a matter of law, must end there,” said Stevenson.
Some homeschooling families in Connecticut say they find the state’s lack of oversight crucial to their practice. LeBlanc finds the minimal requirements to be “nice,” as it enables her full freedom in her children’s education. Werth and her husband chose homeschooling partly because they wanted to detach learning from the rigid standardization of testing.
Homeschooling is not an “anti-public school” agenda, said Connors. “It is the idea of facing the truth of where the public schools are at, and not being willing to give the schools the time to fix their issues. Your child gets one childhood and it isn’t to be used as [the school’s] experiment, because it’s clearly failing.”
V.
Amelia Dilworth ’23 was homeschooled from preschool through ninth grade. Dilworth grew up in a homeschooling group, where parents brought their kids of similar age together twice a week, taking turns teaching different subjects. Through it, Dilworth experienced not only what it feels like to belong in a community, but also how to construct one from the ground up. “You’re in an environment everyone kind of comes together to build, right? So, it’s much more than just going to that empty shell of a school building, and saying bye at the end of the day.”
Dilworth reflected that as a young child, watching her homeschooling community grow also meant witnessing a group of women—her and her fellow homeschoolers’ moms—take agency and create a community filled with learning and flourishing. “I think that was really good and healthy for my idea of what women can do,” she explained. “Together, we decide what we’re doing, not some unknown group telling us what we’re doing. We, as a collective, make choices.”
But the freedom that homeschooled families receive also presents its uncertainties.
When asked about what she envisions for Sam and Max’s futures, Massameno smiled and responded: “You’ve hit my weak spot.” She knows, however, that her number one priority is for her sons to be happy. “That is the goal. How they get there? I just—I want to help them get there, and I don’t know the best way,” she explained, adding, “and I’m not good with uncertainty.”
LeBlanc hopes to seek out new STEM resources for Elisabeth. After her previous homeschooling group disintegrated, she wants to find a new group for Elisabeth. She may even consider founding one herself.
— Kelly Kong is first-year in Morse College.