The Power of Choice: One Homeschooling Mom's Fight

"It's not a cafeteria; you can't pick and choose,” the superintendent told Woodbridge homeschooling mom Shay Seaborne.

Seaborne has been fighting for the right to choose for several years now.

After a negative experience in a large high school, Seaborne read an article on homeschooling in The Mother Earth News.

“Oh, you can do that? Cool! I’m going to do that!” she recalls thinking. “I wanted to spare my future children from a similar experience.”

But after she had kids, her reasons for homeschooling changed. She wasn’t just running away from public school any more. She just couldn’t bear the thought of sending her two children away, when she loved learning with them.

“I saw that they were learning and thriving in living life in the world, and I felt there was no reason to send them to school,” she said.

After 16 years of homeschooling, Seaborne believes that it is a parent’s right to choose the best education for the academic, emotional, and social health of the child, and that schools should be more cooperative in allowing parents a full range of options.

She first ran into a roadblock with the county school system only a few years after filing her first notice of intent to homeschool.

“The administrative office asked me to provide the tables of contents of books, which is not required by state law,” she said. “I responded with a letter stating that I had read the Home Instruction Statute and did not see where this was required, but if they could provide me with the wording of the law that shows it is required, I would be happy to comply.”

The school division never asked her for that information again, although Seaborne said it made similar requests of other homeschooling parents, many of whom used Seaborne’s response as a template for their own replies.

Next, Seaborne challenged the PWCS policy of refusing to allow non-public school students to be partially enrolled.

“With state law providing .5 ADM for each student taking two classes, and this being on a space-available basis, it made no sense to me to bar these children from class,” Seaborne said.

When Seaborne asked the superintendent at the time to change this policy, he responded, “It’s not a cafeteria; you can’t pick and choose.”

Seaborne then invited school board members and candidates to meet with the FOLC Eclectic Homeschoolers group that she had founded. After a discussion of the partial enrollment issue, the homeschooling group began to draft a new partial enrollment policy.

Seaborne and the rest of the group reminded the school board that homeschooling families could also choose not to respond to the Triennial School Census, which counts all children, including those who are homeschooled, and which affects public school funding.

“If all homeschoolers in PWC, over the three year period covered by the census, it would cost the school division about $2.5 million,” she said. “As we expected, the mention of $2.5 million served as a wake-up.”

The board adopted their draft policy nearly word-for-word in the fall of 2003.

Seaborne, , points to the former “approval before removal” policy as the biggest hurdle that homeschooling parents had to overcome.

In the fall of 2004, “one attendance officer at a Manassas-area high school...took it upon himself to tell parents, who were withdrawing their child from school in order to begin homeschooling, that they could not do this without five days notice,” she said. “The PWCS employee was even making threats to these parents in distress, showing up at their homes and telling them he would see them in court. He was frightening these parents, some of whom were reduced to tears.”

Virginia state law requires no approval before a parent can begin homeschooling.

When Seaborne first heard of these concerns from other homeschooling parents, she tried to reason with PWCS administration.

“I was met with lack of concern,” she said.

Then this policy issue was “codified” by being written into PWCS regulations, she said.

She worked closely with sympathetic Gainsville district school board member Don Richardson. Together they worked out an alternate wording for the new regulation.

“Though the coalition was not wholly satisfied with this wording, we felt that our work-and relationship with the school board was such that we could continue to make improvements over time,” she said. “Our main concern was that the onerous ‘approval before removal’ clause was gone. The rest of the wording had no practical effect on homeschoolers.”

Despite some interference from a national organization that demanded that this newly drafted regulation be removed from the agenda for the next school board meeting, Richardson still ensured that the “approval before removal” regulation was changed.

“The school board meeting played out with Mr. Richardson ingeniously proposing that the division adopt its more prior regulation: the one it had before the ‘approval before removal’ clause was added,” Seaborne said.

The board voted 6-2 to pass Richardson’s proposal in late June of 2005.

“It felt like a huge victory to nearly everyone in the room,” Seaborne said.