OUTRAGE: Successful NH Home-Schooled Girl Ordered to Attend Public Schools

Think those bad old days are long past when states ordered kids to attend public schools?

Think again.

A 10 year old New Hampshire girl has been ordered to attend public schools even though by any reasonable measure her home school education is going well. The reason? She and her education is too Christian.

In the process of renegotiating the terms of a parenting plan for the girl, the guardian ad litem involved in the case concluded, according to the court order, that the girl “appeared to reflect her mother’s rigidity on questions of faith” and that the girl’s interests “would be best served by exposure to a public school setting” and “different points of view at a time when she must begin to critically evaluate multiple systems of belief...in order to select, as a young adult, which of those systems will best suit her own needs.”

Marital Master Michael Garner reasoned that the girl’s “vigorous defense of her religious beliefs to [her] counselor suggests strongly that she has not had the opportunity to seriously consider any other point of view” and then recommended that the girl be ordered to enroll in a government school instead of being home-schooled. Judge Lucinda V. Sadler approved the recommendation and issued the order on July 14.

I am so outraged by this, it is a struggle to respond in coherent language. I will say that if this isn’t a blatant, arrogant violation of parental rights and of the First Amendment, then I don’t know what is.

I may say more when (if?) I calm down.