Homeschooling Under Fire

Homeschooling Under Fire  The Iowa Homeschooling Crisis of 1989-90  A history of the plot to depict homeschoolers as truants and child abusers   By Lynn and Sarah Leslie

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Introduction

The
following is based upon a speech delivered June 11, 2004, at the NICHE
Convention homeschool support leaders banquet held in the fellowship
hall at First Federated Church in Des Moines, Iowa. This is a story of
the homeschooling crisis in the state of Iowa during the years 1989-90.
It begins with background information so that the context of the crisis
can be better understood. The remaining story is a firsthand account of
the events that transpired. It is backed up with the author’s own files
and records, including handwritten notes made at the time, in order that
it might be as factual and truthful as possible. Fifteen years later I
still feel a sense of protectiveness towards the families who stood with
us, so I have left out many names. Please don’t misconstrue the omission
of a name to be a personal slight. It is simply an indication of a
reluctance to publicly divulge the family names of those who may still
be vulnerable to State harassment and prosecution. I hope some day
others who lived through these harrowing experiences will write their
stories. On a final note, this is an intensely personal story. It could
not be stripped of the essential element of our Christian faith, which
sustained us so mightily during the time of crisis.

Sarah Leslie

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…for the
people had a mind to work.
(Neh. 4:6b)

 

Faithful under fire

Easton
Baptist Church sits high atop hills of corn overlooking the Four Mile
Creek valley east of Des Moines. On the day of the Iowa home school
parents meeting in June there was a mist rising from the fields in the
cool hours of the early morning. Despite the serenity of this pastoral
setting, there was a faint disquiet in the air as if something
unsettling was going to occur. At various intervals throughout the day,
I felt so uneasy that I peeked out the windows as if I expected to see
tanks, poised with guns, directed towards our small body. But the only
view was rows of corn and a gentle
rain, mixed with occasional sun, which was making rainbows in the
mists. 

 

These
words were penned by me, anonymously due to fear, in a short article
entitled “Faithful Under Fire” published in a small newspaper that was
sent across the state of Iowa in early 1990.

 

This
meeting at Easton Baptist took place in early June 1989. The meeting had
been called by Iowa homeschool leaders in response to two new threats
against the fledgling homeschooling community. The State of Iowa had
just launched a two-barreled assault against home education: 

 

1)     

The
Supreme Court in Iowa had just rendered an opinion that significantly
changed the interpretation of the truancy laws in the case of Barry
Bear, a child from Tama, Iowa. No longer would parents simply be charged
with truancy under the criminal code. From now on they could be charged
as child abusers under the juvenile code.

2)     

And,
perfectly coinciding with the issuance of this landmark ruling, was a
dangerous new bill in the legislature that would codify this change into
law, Senate File 149, which was precariously close to passage.

 

These
two events raised the specter that homeschooled children could be
declared truants, and being thus classified, could be thrust into the
juvenile justice system where they would be treated as juvenile
delinquents, and their parents regarded as child abusers.

 

At the
time of this Easton Baptist gathering, there was a vague inkling that
this imminent danger was not just localized to Iowa homeschoolers. Many
of that day’s speakers presented well-documented information portending
that this was the just the first skirmish in a sweeping plan to
eradicate homeschooling once and for all across the face of America. 

 

Homeschool pioneers in Iowa

The
homeschool pioneers were influenced by John Holt, Raymond Moore, Samuel
Blumenfeld and many others. For varying reasons parents chose to step
out of the mainstream of society. They turned their hearts toward home
with an unusual strength and courage to withstand the tide of modern
cultural pressures. They stood on a foundation of religious and/or
philosophical conviction that was so unwavering that many risked going
to jail rather than submit to putting their children into government
schools.

 

Many
early homeschool families in Iowa—which included the Trucke’s, the
Bluedorns, the Myers, the Cochran’s and others—withstood court battles,
or were compelled to flee the state, in order to avoid the harassment of
prosecution. 

 

Iowa had
a bitter history leading up to 1989. The homeschool community was deeply
divided. The families who were hauled into courts for prosecution on
truancy charges often found themselves isolated and alone, abandoned by
families, churches, and even fellow homeschoolers.  In the mid-1980s
Republican Governor Terry E. Branstad set up a Task Force to grapple
with the novel issues presented by home education, but the equivocating
results of the Task Force only served to intensify the division. The
primary state group at this time was Iowa Home Educators’ Association (IHEA),
a fledgling organization with limited outreach.

 

By 1988,
many new families were entering homeschooling for the first time, and as
a result there were more families being threatened and harassed by state
and local education officials. Things were beginning to get messy
politically.  Iowa law required the use of a certified teacher in
instruction. Several school districts in Iowa piloted programs, called
“dual enrollment,” whereby a child was enrolled in the public school
district, but permitted to be schooled at home by a parent, with the
oversight of a certified teacher hired by the district.

 

By 1989,
Iowa had the dubious distinction of being the worst state in the country
for homeschooling. A one-year moratorium on prosecutions had been called
statewide in 1988. The moratorium was due to expire on July 1, 1989.
Everyone present at the Easton Baptist meeting fully expected
prosecutions to start up again in earnest by mid-September.

 

Invited
to the meeting at Easton Baptist, and all subsequent meetings, were a
few pastors in charge of little church-based schools, who had every
reason to fear that the Barry Bear case could affect them. Private,
unaccredited Christian schools were also being persecuted across America
during the decade of the 1980s. Iowa was no exception.

 

Iowa’s
early history of intolerance

Throughout its history, Iowa has had a dark seam of intolerance of
religious diversity in matters of private education. This is due, in
part, to the particularly pervasive influence of John Dewey’s
educational philosophies during the 1930s and 1940s, especially in the
rural areas of Iowa where he experimented upon a generation of school
children with his new teaching methodologies. Dewey emphasized
socialization with one’s peers as an essential attribute of modern
education in order to create a more socialist society. It was thought
that children would be irreparably harmed without a State education.

 

In the
early 1950s, Iowa began to persecute the Amish, an Anabaptist sect with
a 350-year history of educating their children apart from mainstream
society. This sect had fled the persecution in Europe and came to
America after William Penn, a Quaker, opened up the territory of
Pennsylvania as a haven where Anabaptists could practice their religious
faith in freedom. Some of their descendents settled in rural Iowa
countryside, peacefully practicing their old-fashioned agrarian way of
life. At the height of the Iowa persecutions, a stunning photograph was
published in the Des Moines Register. It showed a big burly
Sheriff’s deputy chasing across a field after a terrified little Amish
boy. The tide of public opinion quickly shifted in sympathy towards the
Amish as a direct result of this award-winning photo.

 

This
attempt to shut down Amish schools didn’t succeed. Nevertheless, State
education officials began imposing severe restrictions upon the freedom
of the Amish to practice their distinctive historical faith in matters
of education of their young.

 

The federal encroachment on the family

There
was a national push to reform child welfare during the decade of the
1980s. At the top of the agenda was more State intervention in the lives
of children and their families. The erosion of the traditional family
structure was given as the reason for deeper intrusion into the lives of
America’s youngest citizens. An army of social workers, psychologists,
social scientists, behaviorists, and political reformers
coalesced—churning out documents, holding press conferences, proposing
legislation, and writing media stories. A crisis in preschool, child
care, health care, and all sorts of family social services was
pronounced.

 

Concurrently, there was a move to reform education by expanding the role
of the government school into family lives, developing uniform curricula
and testing mechanisms, and adopting federal standards for performance.
The school day was tweaked by increasing the number of hours per day,
adding days to the school year, and expanding the ages of compulsory
attendance.

 

Education began to be portrayed as just one facet of a vast array of
family psycho-social services sponsored by the State—services that were
no longer designed simply to protect the neediest children, but also
began to intrude into the lives of mainstream families. Homeschooling,
and private schools which operated outside of this emerging government
“system,” were viewed with animosity and suspicion. Homeschooling was
most often depicted in the media in disparaging terms at this time.
There was an inference that children were being deprived of adequate
peer socialization, isolated, socially inept, and lagging behind their
peers.

 

A
prominent leader in the movement to federalize the reform of public
education was William Bennett, who headed up the U.S. Department of
Education under the Reagan administration during the mid-1980s. Despite
his conservative credentials, Bennett proceeded to lay all of the
bureaucratic groundwork for the education reform movement that
mushroomed across America during the 1990s. Bennett was the first
federal official (that we have on record) to make use of the phrase
“educational abuse” when referring to private and home education.

 

The “closet child abuser” philosophy

In an
interview with Washington Times conservative columnist John
Lofton, conducted on January 2, 1986 (which was later inserted into the
Congressional Record of March 7, 1986), U.S. Secretary of
Education William Bennett laid the groundwork for what we now recognize
as the No Child Left Behind Act: high standards, accountability,
assessments, and rewards and penalties for performance. In this
interview, Bennett called for the State to exert a “minimal interest”
over those children who were in Christian and home schools. He said that
the State should have the right to close down any school that “falls
below the average of the state.” In a lengthy exchange, John Lofton
pressed the point about what this “minimal interest” would entail:

 

Q
[Lofton]: Where does the state acquire this “minimal interest” you
assert? Education is not mentioned in the Constitution?

 

A
[Bennett]: I can’t cite you the cases, but I remember studying it….
Most parents have the interest of their children foremost in mind. Some
parents do not. Some parents abuse their children. The state has a right
to protect those children from those parents….

 

Q
[Lofton]: But why would you defend the right of the state to set testing
standards when one reason a lot of parents want to send their kids to
private schools is because they reject the state’s standards?

 

A
[Bennett]: For the same reason that I send in the cops when I find a kid
has been locked in the closet for three months.

 

Q
[Lofton]: But that’s a criminal act. Why do you liken home schools or
Christian schools that are not state-tested to a criminal act?

 

A
[Bennett]: No, educational abuse of children—if you’re not teaching your
children what they need to know to survive in this world… [ellipsis in
original]

 

This
view, which likens homeschooling to the criminal act of child abuse, was
to become the pillar upon which Iowa’s homeschool crisis was founded. A
corollary view holds that homeschooling parents are potential “closet
child abusers,” and that the State must conduct routine surveillance of
this atypical, “abnormal” family. Many social reformers held the cynical
notion that it was implausible that parents would desire to stay home
and educate children out of genuine affection, devotion, and sincere
conviction. The nasty inference was made that there must be some
sinister ulterior motive for wanting to keep the children at home.

 

The
education reform term “accountability” gained rapid prominence during
William Bennett’s tenure in the Reagan administration as a proposed
mechanism to enforce compliance to the new federal education standards.
Several prominent leaders, from both the political Left and Right,
proposed that the State find ways to hold parents “accountable” (or
“responsible”), and they began to devise intrusive ways to monitor
children in the context of their families.

 

Just to
be sure he understood William Bennett’s position correctly, columnist
John Lofton asked him again a few months later: “Where does the state
get the right to shut down a private Christian school or a home school?
And I got the same fuzzy answer.” (“A threat to private schools?” Washington Times, April 30, 1986).

 

The Iowa connection

Kathy L.
Collins, who was shortly to become the legal counsel for the Iowa
Department of Education, in 1987 wrote an article for Free Inquiry,
a humanist publication (Vol. 7, No. 4, p. 11):

 

Christian parents who want the freedom to indoctrinate their children
with religious education do not understand that the law that prevents
them from legally teaching their kids prevents someone else from abusing
them.

 

This
article, which was abrasively entitled “Children Are Not Chattel,” went
on to describe the rationale for intrusive State regulation:

 

Certified teachers are state-mandated child-abuse reporters. When
children are allowed to be kept at home, there may be no outside
contact, no help for the abused child.

 

This
idea, that homeschoolers were potential “closet child abusers” was to
become the operating principle at the Iowa Department of Education over
the course of the next several years. Kathy Collins would go on to
become the “Great Nemesis” of Iowa homeschoolers. Her name became
synonymous with the harassment, prosecution and persecution of families
in the homeschool community. Anecdotal evidence at the time indicated
that she engaged in a “witch hunt,” tracking down homeschoolers across
Iowa by contacting superintendents, county attorneys, and possibly even
local media outlets, in an attempt to locate families to become guinea
pigs for the next court case.

 

As
tempting as it was to hate this woman, it should be noted that many
homeschoolers devoted themselves to pray for this woman daily.

 

Our personal story

At this
point in the telling of this tale, the story becomes our own. It is not
an easy task to write down the following events, because they are highly
personal and evoke painful memories. Even today my husband, Lynn, and I
tell this story in awe and reverence, in complete recognition that this
is not our own story, but rather a story of God’s miraculous
deliverance.

 

Our
story begins in the early 1980s. Through a series of complex
circumstances, I was catapulted out of anonymity to head the Right to
Life movement in Iowa. After Jimmy Carter’s White House Conference on
the Family in 1980, many evangelical Christians entered politics. They
became involved in issues for the first time—abortion, family matters,
and education were highest on their list. Lynn and I rode the crest of
this wave, educating the Iowa public about the true nature of abortion
before the 1988 presidential caucuses. As a consequence, we had a small
amount of political clout, gaining both friends and enemies in the
process. We also had a reputation as non-compromisers. The first time we
were approached to take “half a loaf” in a political scheme, we
declined, citing King Solomon’s offer to chop the baby in half to give a
portion to each mother.

 

In 1983,
evidently because I was a highly educated evangelical woman with
credentials in education and counseling, Iowa Governor Terry E. Branstad
appointed me to the Juvenile Justice Advisory Committee. He was actively
working to put a diverse group of new people on state boards and
commissions, including many women, minorities and representatives from
various religious groups. This included evangelical Christians. For many
years I fulfilled my duties on the council pertaining to how federal
juvenile justice funds would be appropriated in Iowa. I sometimes
wondered, in a spiritual sense, why I was serving in this capacity. I
was soon to learn precisely why.

 

By late
1988, I had retired from active political life. I was pregnant with my
4th child and was enjoying the quiet life (if one can have “quiet” with
a house full of toddlers). In November of that year, I missed a meeting
of the Juvenile Justice Advisory Council (JJAC) because of family
illness. At this meeting a member of the council, an administrator from
the Sioux City school district named Dr. Warren Montgomery, presented
handouts. He proposed that the JJAC take up truancy as juvenile justice
cause. Up to this point truancy had not been a matter that had garnered
much attention from the JJAC. This is because it was generally perceived
as a school matter, adequately remedied by Chapter 239 of the Iowa Code.

 

In
February 1989, I attended the subsequent JJAC meeting where Dr.
Montgomery was permitted to make a presentation about his handout. He
claimed that Iowa had a truancy “crisis.” Most of his examples, however,
were notably homeschoolers! In fact, Dr. Montgomery asserted that
homeschoolers in his district were “closet child-abusers,” and he
claimed they were keeping their children home to “babysit” and for other
negligible reasons.

 

Most
significantly, Dr. Montgomery reported that there was a bill in the Iowa
legislature that would once and for all “solve” the truancy “crisis.” He
claimed that he had helped to author this bill, and intimated that there
were a number of state and national experts who worked on this bill with
him. At the time I thought he was simply bragging, but later we came to
realize that this was a much larger plan. If homeschooling in Iowa fell,
the rest of the fledgling homeschooling movement in America was supposed
to fall like dominoes—eradicating all private home education once and
for all.

 

The JJAC
was reluctant to get involved in the truancy issue and so they simply
tabled the matter at this meeting. I immediately rushed over to the
legislature after the meeting. Some of my best friends were
homeschoolers and I worried about this proposed bill that Dr. Montgomery
had mentioned. How would this affect them? I wanted to get a copy and
read it for myself. The bill number was Senate File 149.

 

As I
walked up the stairs of the State Capitol and into the Rotunda area, I
peered off to my side, and noticed that the Planned Parenthood lobbyist
was making a panicked phone call to her superiors, obviously thinking
that I was up there because of some Right to Life matter. I was relieved
to see the Iowa Home Educators Association’s (IHEA) homeschool lobbyist
standing right in front of me. I ran up to him and breathlessly cried,
“There’s a bad bill up here, S.F. 149, that is going to wipe out
homeschooling!” He looked around nervously, and then lowered his voice,
“Get away from me! I don’t want to be seen with you. You’re too
controversial!”

 

Stunned
and hurt, I moved away. I then tried to plead with him to listen to me
about the bill, to at least go get a copy to read, but he pointed to a
prominent Des Moines Register political reporter standing off to
the side, and said, “I don’t want David Yepsen seeing me with you. Go
away!”

 

He was
right. I was controversial. I was a well-known face and everyone knew
what I stood for. If he were seen with me, it might evoke memories in
other peoples’ minds of his early beginnings, when he also used to be
controversial. In the mid-1980s this handsome and articulate father had
stood courageously and spoken with great conviction at political
conventions on behalf of family issues. But eventually he compromised
and ended up working for a newly formed Reverend Moon political front
organization, the American Freedom Coalition, which was trying to
organize Iowa’s political and religious Right. My husband had approached
this man with wise counsel to avoid this entanglement. But he rejected
Lynn’s counsel, which perhaps explains some of his animosity towards me
personally that day. IHEA leaders later told us that they had not been
aware that their lobbyist was also working for Rev. Moon’s outfit.

 

Dejected, I picked up a copy of the bill and left. The bill was every
bit as bad as I had imagined. It would have required a homeschool family
to hire a certified teacher to teach their children 180 days in order to
be legal. Other provisions of the bill would bring homeschool families
within the provisions of the “child in need of assistance” (CHINA)
provisions of the Juvenile Court. The proposed law stated that a truant
child “shall” be reported to the county attorney and that the county
attorney “shall investigate” the report and “may file” a petition in
Juvenile Court. Ultimately, this meant that a child could be removed
from his/her parents simply because they teach the child at home.
Characteristic of Dr. Montgomery’s remarks at the JJAC, the bill lumped
hardened, dysfunctional truant families together with solid, stable
homeschool families. If a family, for whatever reason, wasn’t in full
compliance with the law, their children could be deemed “truant.”
“Truant” was loosely defined as any child not attending a public school
or receiving 180 days of instruction elsewhere by a certified teacher—in
other words, the overwhelming majority of homeschoolers!

 

After I
read the bill I rushed home and phoned Johann Hicks, a retired
kindergarten teacher who had great concern about family issues and
privately assisted some homeschool families. She was already aware of
the bill, she informed me, and recognized how serious it was. I told her
about Dr. Montgomery’s remarks and his handouts. Now she had even more
to worry about. But the two of us had no way to stop this bad bill. No
state organization existed that would fight this. Given the lobbyist’s
reaction, IHEA was obviously not intending to fight it. Johann and I
decided that all we could do was get down on our knees and start praying
fervently, which we did over the next 3 months.

 

In
April, I gave birth to our fourth child. Shortly thereafter Lynn and I
began to make plans to move to the eastern side of Des Moines to a
larger house to accommodate our growing family. We were not
homeschoolers at this time. Our oldest son was in a private Christian
school. But I began to worry about how I would manage the long one-half
hour drive back and forth each day, with two toddlers and a newborn, to
get him to school.

 

We
hadn’t considered homeschooling up to this point, but several factors
began to change our minds. First, my mother, a certified elementary
teacher, began to call me with concerns that our oldest son was “gifted”
and needed extraordinary challenges. The Christian school where he
attended was not willing to work with his unique gifts. My mother had
homeschooled me during part of my childhood (due to illness) and it had
been a profitable experience for both of us. I held a bachelor’s degree
in elementary education, but had let my teaching certificate lapse. My
mother encouraged me to think about it, “just for one year.” A second
factor was that one of my best friends, Mary Stuart from Earlham, Iowa,
became convicted in her Christian walk to pull her children out of
public education and begin homeschooling. As she shared her spiritual
journey with me, I could feel the Lord tug at my own heartstrings. Lynn
also came under conviction.

 

The multi-pronged threat

In April
1989, I received a phone call one day from a man named Paul Zylstra. He
introduced himself by saying that he had heard me talk in November 1988
at a meeting sponsored by an organization called Iowans for Moral
Education which was headed by an older woman named Iola Hedinger. He
told me that he had remembered my presentation on the erosion of
parental rights and the national move to reform child welfare laws.

 

Paul
told me that there was a bad bill in the legislature that would further
erode parental rights. Intrigued, I asked him what that might be. I was
shocked when he said S.F. 149. That was the bad homeschool bill!

 

Paul
explained to me that he had been one of the pioneer homeschoolers who
fled Iowa. He ended up in Nebraska where there was another battleground,
this time over private Christian education. Pastor Sileven had been
running an unaccredited church school without using certified teachers,
a crime in Nebraska. One dark night at Pastor Sileven’s church, Paul
Zylstra was with a group of men praying at the altar when the doors
opened and they were handcuffed and hauled out by Sheriff’s deputies.
This strong-armed incident of religious persecution was filmed. It
quickly became a rallying point for American citizens across the country
who supported private education and religious freedom.

 

Against
his own will and better judgment, Paul Zylstra and his family had
recently moved back into Iowa—just in time for the homeschool crisis to
erupt. He was to become the man of the hour.

 

Paul
outlined a strategy whereby he would contact Dutch Reformed legislators
and beg them to stall out the bill in the waning days of the legislative
session. Because he was of Dutch heritage, Paul had contacts within that
conservative and influential ethnic community. Ultimately, it took one
of their own—Des Moines lawyer Craig Shannon—rendering a legal opinion
about the true nature of the bill, before Paul would be able to persuade
Senator William Dieleman from Pella to stop the bill. Legislators had
been told that the bill had nothing to do with homeschoolers. The
official “spin” about the bill was that it would simply solve the
perceived “truancy crisis” in Iowa.

 

Paul’s
strategy worked. The bill stalled out at the end of the 1989 legislative
session. But it was still alive. It had only to go to the floor of the
House in the opening days of the next legislative session, be voted upon
(presumably carrying with ease), and then be passed on to a conference
committee. Once the conference committee met and decided on the bill’s
final language, the revised bill would have to pass both houses. Then it
would end up on the Governor’s desk to await his signature. Of
particular concern to the homeschool community was the fact that all of
this could take place within a matter of minutes.

 

S.F. 149
was stalled, but it wasn’t dead. It hung over our heads for eight long
months until the start of the next legislative session in early 1990.

 

That
bill was bad enough, but there was more trouble lurking. Paul had
noticed a little blurb that had appeared in the January 12, 1989, “State
and Capitol Report” section of the Des Moines Register under the
caption “Statehouse Briefing: In the House”:

 

Iowa
prosecutors are seeking more power to intervene in truancy cases and
have suggested law changes that could give county attorneys more tools
to use against fundamentalist Christians who want to teach their
children at home.

 

Recommendations from the Iowa County Attorney’s Association include a
change in the state’s juvenile code to add truancy to the list of
reasons officials can start proceedings that can lead to removing the
child from the home or to terminating the parents’ rights to their
child.

 

Here
were our worst fears in print. The County Attorney’s Association
(probably working at the instigation of Kathy Collins) was recommending
“removing the child from the home” and “terminating the parents’
rights.”

 

As if
that weren’t bad enough, there was another unsettling bill in the Iowa
legislature at this same time. House File 690 would create a new
category of “mental injury caused by the acts of the child’s parent,
guardian, or custodian.” We quickly realized that “mental injury” could
be easily connected with the idea of homeschooling as “educational
abuse.”

 

A
similar threat loomed in the form of a report which was issued just
prior to the 1989 legislative session by the Kempe National Center at
the University of Colorado. It recommended that Iowa juvenile laws be
revised to make it “easier to remove abused children from their homes
and improve procedures for terminating parental custody.” A concurrent
report was issued by a state committee of the Department of Human
Services. (Des Moines Register articles by William Petroski,
“Deficiencies seen in state abuse laws,” 1-7-89, and “Guidelines given
for examining children for abuse, 1-5-89.)

 

But even
this wasn’t all. There was another threat looming against home education
which originated from a different direction—one which could catch many
homeschoolers unawares.  Johann Hicks, who was following education
reform issues very closely, began to express grave concerns about an
activity planned by Iowa Department of Education Director William Lepley.
He was promoting House File 794, which would create an “autonomous”
Board of Educational Examiners and Professional Practices Commission, a
move which would consolidate power into the hands of an education elite
and pave the way for national teacher certification. Would some
homeschoolers, who thought they were “safe” because they possessed
teaching certificates, find that their credentials would no longer be
renewed? The bill contained ominous provisions that required classroom
experience.

 

The Barry Bear case

The
final, most catastrophic blow came to homeschoolers on May 17, 1989,
when the Iowa Supreme Court issued its landmark decision that Barry Bear
“is a child in need of assistance because of his parents’ failure to
exercise a reasonable degree of care in supervising him.” It was the new
interpretation of truancy that most concerned homeschoolers. This
redefinition essentially placed homeschool families within the realm of
Chapter 232 of the Iowa Code, meaning juvenile court jurisdiction. J.
Michael Smith explained the danger clearly in the Summer 1989 issue of
Home School Court Report:

 

The real
difference between the two methods of pursuing the home schooler is that
in the criminal prosecution against the parents, the maximum penalty
upon conviction is community service. However, in a CHINA proceeding,
the judge can order a child to be removed from the home should the
parents not comply with a court order; i.e. enroll a child in a public
or approved private school.

 

Homeschoolers faced, for the first time, the frightening prospect of not
only criminal prosecution, but also losing their children to the child
welfare system.

 

Barry
Bear was an 11-year-old Native American boy with a minor mental
handicap, who had been raised on the Meskwaki Indian reservation
according to Indian tradition. Serious illnesses, never properly
diagnosed, kept him out of school most of his early life. His mother, a
certified teacher with many years of teaching experience, never claimed
to be homeschooling.  She simply was educating her ill child at home.
Her teaching certificate did not contain a special education
endorsement, and that was the fragile basis upon which the prosecutions
started. Even after Archie and Anna Bear faced prosecution and
conviction numerous times over Barry’s alleged truancy, including other
harassments from the State, they continued to educate Barry at home.
State officials became frustrated that this family was not cooperating,
despite the persecution and prosecution.

 

The
Archie Bear family had a long and bitter history of disputes with the
leadership of the Meskwaki Indian reservation. Therefore, this family
had been isolated not only from mainstream society while the court
proceedings were going on, but also from their own people. No one in the
Iowa homeschool community had known that the Barry Bear case was lurking
within the state’s court system until it exploded onto the public scene
in an Iowa Supreme Court ruling.

 

The
court case precedent had been set. The crisis was just beginning.

 

The grim implications

Paul
Zylstra organized an emergency meeting. He put me in charge of finding a
safe location for the meeting. I contacted a close, long-time friend of
our family, Pastor Craig Nelson, who pastored Easton Baptist Church on
the east side of Des Moines. I knew that his small church, nestled
quietly in the cornfields near a rural suburb, would be perfectly
suitable. By this time, Paul had alerted IHEA board members about the
seriousness of the situation. Because of his prior history as a
homeschool leader in Iowa, they respected him enough to listen to him.
They decided to join the meeting.

 

The
meeting at Easton Baptist was punctuated by four testimonies by parents
who had previously been jailed or harassed by the state of Iowa for
homeschooling. Each family spoke of their family’s extreme vulnerability
to future prosecution because of unique circumstances and/or previous
prosecutions. Some told tearful stories of being abandoned by family,
friends, churches and even fellow homeschoolers when faced with
prosecution. One father, who had withstood prosecution for homeschooling,
said that he deserved to go to jail for the things he had done before he
was a Christian. He courageously stated that he was willing now to go to
jail for doing what was right. His pregnant wife nodded her head,
agreeing with every word he said. Another father explained that he had
been homeschooling his children in violation of state and federal
laws because of their special handicap. Would he lose his precious
children with the looming Iowa crisis? I feared greatly for their
safety. I had overheard HSLDA attorneys, in a private conversation,
indicate that they would not defend this family in court because the
situation simply wasn’t “winnable.”

 

There
were many children in the audience, as is characteristic of most
homeschool gatherings. The older youth were hearing about this for the
first time, and slowly began to comprehend the danger. They began to
realize that they could be forcibly removed from their parents simply
because they were being homeschooled. I watched as fear began to cloud
their faces. Then John Harvey stood up and spoke. He headed the Iowa
chapter of Victims of Child Abuse Laws (VOCAL), an advocacy organization
that assisted families falsely accused of child abuse. He explained the
ramifications of the national child welfare reform agenda, and explained
that there was a plan underway to extradite children in the juvenile
system from one state to another if they fled. In other words, the time
might come when there could be no escape. At this point there was an
audible gasp from the audience. A young teen girl, visibly shaken,
exclaimed, “Where could we flee then? To another country? This is
America!”

 

HSLDA
attorney J. Michael Smith carefully explained that organization’s
position in this newly created legal quagmire. He explained that this
was a terrible new form of persecution against homeschoolers. He and
HSLDA lead attorney Michael Farris would try to find workable solutions,
including a unique strategy to attempt to reverse Iowa’s teacher
certification requirements in the courts over a technicality. [This
strategy was tried, but unsuccessfully, ed.] In the meantime he warned
that HSLDA would be nearly powerless to assist a family if a CHINA
investigation started. Because of the Barry Bear case, a child in the
juvenile system could be appointed his/her own separate lawyer! Worse,
under the juvenile code, parents are essentially considered guilty until
proven innocent. Michael Smith tried to reassure homeschool parents that
it wasn’t likely that the Barry Bear case would be applied to
homeschoolers. He noted some significant flaws in the case that made it
less than suitable as a court case precedent to go after homeschoolers.

 

In
summarizing the meeting at Easton Baptist, I wrote:

 

Despite
of the serious nature of these times, it was remarkable how many new
families attended the meeting because of a strong conviction that they
must begin homeschooling their children, regardless of the consequences.
Some parents wistfully stated that the costs were too great for them to
bear at this time, and they had no choice but to put their children back
in accredited schools. It was estimated that there are hundreds of
Christian families across the state who will be vulnerable to
prosecution this next year, and there are hundreds more who are home
educating and utilizing a State-certified teacher in a limited capacity
to try to avoid prosecution. Many more have already left the state and
are waiting for better times so that they can return to family and
friends. Ironically, these home school families are some of Iowa’s best.
They depict the deep heritage of family-centered values and rugged
independence that so characterized Iowa’s pioneers. This year they will
be fighting on an ideological battleground for survival. If they lose,
we all lose!

 

War starts

Things
were quiet the rest of the summer, but nobody in the homeschooling
community rested easily. On Monday, September 4, 1989, the worst case
scenario happened. A headline in a Des Moines Register story
read, “School opens in showdown over Iowa education laws.” Henry County
Attorney Mike Riepe publicly announced that he would “for the first
time, ask a judge to take children away from parents who refuse to
comply” with Iowa’s education law. He announced that he was going after
Rev. T.N. “Tot” Taylor and his family. Rev. Taylor had run the tiny
unaccredited Bluebird Christian Academy out of his church in Mt.
Pleasant, Iowa. Bluebird Academy did not use State-certified teachers
due to religious convictions. He and his wife had already been
prosecuted two separate times for violating the law. They were not
homeschoolers!

 

I knew
Rev. Taylor. Whenever he would get out of jail, he would go to the State
Capitol Building and stand near the railing in the rotunda with his arms
folded across his expansive chest, cheerfully greeting each elected
official that passed by. He sincerely believed that these elected
officials had it within their power to keep him out of jail, if they
would simply change Iowa’s law pertaining to private education.

 

One day,
in the mid-1980s when I headed Iowa Right to Life Committee, I visited
the legislature to lobby against a particularly bad school-based clinic
bill. As usual, I was very scared. But I spotted Rev. Taylor standing at
his usual spot on the railing of the rotunda and he greeted me. “Stand
here,” he instructed me, seeing how nervous I was to be there. “All you
need to do is STAND,” he said, citing the biblical passage in Galatians,
“and having done all to stand.” He explained that his very presence in
that place caused “conviction.” He was right. I could see the pained
expression on the legislators’ faces as they quickly and nervously
darted by. He told me that once he explained his position to the
legislators, his job was done. The ball was now in their court. He
didn’t need to engage in aggressive lobbying tactics or political
activism.

 

Rev.
“Tot” Taylor’s laid-back style of nonresistance “lobbying” was later to
become the model of “conscience” used by most homeschoolers during the
1990 legislative session.

 

Paul
Zylstra responded to this new crisis by going immediately into action.
He invited a group of homeschool and non-accredited Christian school
leaders to a meeting. The meeting would be in our newly-purchased home,
which we had just moved into a week earlier. There were unpacked boxes
everywhere! This house was rather unique in its design. It had a great
room with skylights which had been reconstructed from the old two-car
attached garage by the previous owner. We learned over the ensuing
months that this large room could pack a good-sized crowd, sometimes as
many as 100 people. We also would learn that this home was uniquely
situated for the battle at hand because of its strategic location—we
were only 15 minutes away from the State Capitol Building.

 

Paul
prefaced this meeting with a dreadful message. “You are free to leave
this meeting right now,” he said. “You need to know that if you stay,
you could be charged with kidnapping.”

 

There
was absolute silence in the room for a few moments. A few faces went
ashen. No one got up to leave. Paul continued, “John Harvey has
explained to me that there is a five-day period between the time when a
CHINA investigation is launched before the parents are required to be
notified. If a CHINA investigation has already been initiated by Henry
County Attorney Mike Riepe, Rev. Taylor’s children are already
technically wards of the State. Your presence here in this meeting,
which is for the purpose of assisting Rev. Taylor and his children in
leaving the state of Iowa immediately, could be construed as cooperating
in kidnapping.”

 

There
was a stunned silence. No one moved.  

 

“We are
here today to set up an underground railway,” Paul continued. I could
feel my heart pounding in my chest. I knew quite a bit about the
original Underground Railway because I had grown up in a house with a
secret room that had been used for this purpose during the Civil War
era. I fought back tears. Had America come to this?

 

That
very day we organized an underground railway for homeschoolers. We were
provided with a secret list of names of families in other states who
would be willing to receive our children, and if necessary, raise them
as their own. Several older gentlemen (among them a close family friend,
David Elrod) stepped forward and offered to risk their own future lives
to transport homeschooled children to the borders of Iowa or beyond.
They said they would be willing to go to jail for the crime of
kidnapping if it came to that. We were also instructed to have our
children memorize key phone numbers. We were told to teach our children
how to secretly evacuate the house and flee to the nearest telephone or
friendly neighbor while the parent detained a social worker or truancy
officer at the door.

 

(How
does one teach their child these things? How does one tell a young child
that someday, perhaps soon, a bad knock will come to the door and they
must flee— they must flee for their life or end up in a stranger’s home,
or a group home, or an institution? How can one take away a child’s
innocence? The security of a family’s loving arms? How can one possibly
describe the horrors of a future life, controlled by the
State, possibly in an institution, away from mom and dad, brothers and sisters, church and friends? How can one explain to
children that it is very important, that this is more than just a game,
to memorize phone numbers, plan an escape route and do practice drills?)

 

That day
an awful realization swept over us. We couldn’t run and hide. Every
fiber of my being wanted to panic and flee and go hide somewhere. Some
of us knew we had no choice but to stand on the front lines as leaders
in this battle—visibly, so that the whole world could see who we were,
where we lived and identify our “truant” school-aged children. This was
the most terrifying step of faith that we could ever imagine having to
take.

 

(May God
bless those who had the courage that day, and throughout the dangerous
days of adversity, to visibly stand and withstand. May the present
generation of homeschooling parents, most of you untested by the fires
of persecution, take note. May you have the courage of conviction to
stand and withstand the persecutions, prosecutions, enticements,
deceptions, seductions  and snares that will inevitably test your
fortitude, faith, and utter dependence upon God in the days to come.)

 

That
day, at the meeting in our home, we all had to face a horrific new
reality for the coming school year— any family non-compliant with the
law for any reason could be deemed truant under the juvenile code. The
moratorium had expired. Few families in Iowa could be compliant with the
existing law.

 

John
Harvey explained the raw reality. He told how parents would be
investigated under Chapter 232 of the juvenile code for “lack of
supervision.” An investigation could be initiated by an anonymous tip, a
complaint from a school official, a tip from a mandatory reporter, or
many others. The investigation stage could be intrusive and exploratory.
Asking about forms of discipline, checking to make sure the house is
safe, inspecting to see if the dishes in the sink are clean, inquiring
with neighbors and friends, and other subjective investigative
procedures could be utilized.

 

At this
point, many families in the room groaned. Homeschooling was still in its
infancy, and many of the parents in the room had faced serious
opposition from family members, close friends, and their churches. What
would happen if these hostile friends and family members were contacted
by a social worker during an investigation? What would these people say
about their homeschooled children? Scriptures warning that even one’s
own family could turn against them came to our minds and were recited.

 

John
Harvey continued. If a social worker, school employee or peace officer
knocked on the door, it meant that a petition had already been filed or
an investigation was in process. Parents would not be given much
information at this point. After the petition was filed the Court would
then determine in an adjudicatory hearing whether the child should come
within the jurisdiction of the Court. At the adjudicatory hearing the
child would be represented by a truant officer, probation officer,
guardian and/or a court-appointed attorney. The parent would have to
obtain their own attorney. If there was a determination that the child
was in “need of assistance,” a dispositional hearing would be held to
determine how the child would be served by the Juvenile Court. A plan
would be drawn up for the family. This could include mandatory
counseling, gag orders, home studies, psychological testing, and a host
of other requirements. It could also include placing the children back
in government schools, or removing them from the family to live in
foster care, group homes or institutions. Ultimately parental rights
could be terminated.

 

John
warned that the State “system” does not tolerate religious diversity. He
noted that homeschool families, who often possess divergent cultural and
religious beliefs and practices, would not easily accommodate to some of
the requirements that could be imposed by the State. Furthermore, he
explained that children removed to a foster home or State institution
could be exposed to activities, practices and philosophies that run
contrary to what they had been taught in their family. Once again, the
room grew silent as parents realized the seriousness of the situation.

 

Paul
Zylstra concluded the meeting with a dark premonition. He reminded us
that the Barry Bear case was “messy” and not the optimum case to set
precedent. He cautioned that in the months to come, the State might
attempt to come up with more test case families to create a better
precedent with which to go after all homeschoolers.

 

Rev. Tot
Taylor’s children successfully fled Iowa that weekend. This occurred
before the Henry County attorney initiated action. Everyone was relieved
and thankful that Mr. Riepe had bragged to the newspapers about what he
was going to do before he actually took the steps to file charges.

 

Foiled attempts

Fall
1989 loomed dark and bleak for Iowa homeschoolers. Some families,
feeling threatened for whatever reasons, simply packed their bags, sold
their houses, quit their jobs and quietly left the state. Iowa lost some
of its best and brightest that fall. No one knows for sure how many
families left.

 

Some
families fled the state after learning that they were being
investigated. This is where the story of modern-day miracles begins.
Each and every time that State officials located a family and began to
target them for creating the next court case, there was a miraculous
forewarning and/or inexplicable protection. The following is an account
of the stories that we knew of firsthand during the fall of 1989 and
throughout 1990.

 

The West
family contacted me shortly after the school year began. To this day I
do not recall precisely how she got my name and phone number. Mrs. West
told me that they had fully complied with their school district for
years and had experienced no previous problems. They were even using a
State-certified teacher. Nevertheless, someone tipped them off that
there was a Juvenile Court officer “looking into” their homeschooling.
She asked me what that meant. I was able to explain the full
ramifications of this situation and warn her of the imminent danger to
her family. The family fled the state immediately.

 

The
Rivera case was the first clear-cut attempt to charge homeschool
families under the CHINA laws. It was well-publicized at the time in
local Iowa newspapers. Aaron and Theresa Rivera had religious objections
to using a State-certified teacher, although they fully complied with
the excessive and burdensome demands of the Cedar Rapids school
district. The Judge refused to consider testimony that their children
were progressing academically, including exemplary standardized test
results. He recommended that the County Attorney investigate this family
under the CHINA laws. The mother and children fled the state.

 

For the
first time in Iowa history, the homeschool community came together in
visible unity and packed the Linn County Court House. At the Rivera
hearing, the truant officer for Linn County testified that she had
hundreds of truants in the system. But she was unable to explain why she
was only targeting this one homeschool family for prosecution. The judge
backed off, the family remained in the state, but the Rivera family was
continually harassed for the next few years.

 

One day
Dr. Montgomery came to a JJAC meeting and I sat at his table for lunch.
He was evidently unaware of my role in the homeschool movement at this
time. He was still pushing the council to discuss his tabled
truancy/child abuse agenda. Over lunch, he began to describe a family in
his school district that he planned to use as a test case for “truancy”
in order to further his agenda in the court system. He didn‘t give the
name at that time, but he claimed the mother was an “illiterate” Greek
immigrant. He said that their son refused to go back to middle school
after reporting that “something happened.” Dr. Montgomery, an
administrator, apparently never bothered to investigate what happened to
this child and why he refused to go back to school. Dr. Montgomery
planned to ask the judge in this case to recommend that the county
attorney investigate this family under the CHINA laws.

 

Dr.
Montgomery, still freely talking with those of us at the lunch table,
then went on to brag that once he had accomplished his objectives with
this particular family, he would then immediately target another family
in his district for prosecution. He gave quite a bit of detailed
information about this family, too. I recognized the family! They had
been homeschoolers for many years. In fact, they had been in our home
several times. I knew that they had experienced previous harassment from
this school district. Dr. Montgomery was unabashedly attempting to use a
truancy situation in his district to create more court case precedent to
form a basis to then go after this homeschool family!

 

After
lunch, I quickly made up an excuse and left the JJAC meeting early. I
flew home to make phone calls. I first contacted the homeschooling
family that Dr. Montgomery had threatened to go after. As a result of
this warning they moved out of Iowa within the week.

 

I then
contacted the Trucke family in northwest Iowa, homeschoolers who had
previously experienced their own court battles earlier in the 1980s.
These courageous people offered to go to the county Court House on the
day that Dr. Montgomery indicated there would be a preliminary hearing
so that we could learn more about the un-named family that was being
targeted. They discovered that the family’s last name was Poulos. That
very evening I phoned Mr. Poulos. I explained to him the dire situation
he was in: that Dr. Montgomery intended to have the courts declare his
son a “child in need of assistance.” I warned Mr. Poulos that this meant
the courts could remove his son from his home. I explained how he was
being “used” by the district administration to set court case precedent
to go after homeschoolers. He responded dejectedly that his family was
very poor and he couldn’t afford a lawyer. He sounded completely
helpless!

 

I knew
of a lawyer in northwest Iowa but I wasn’t sure if he would be willing
to help. He was a Christian believer, but then many lawyers who had
tried to help homeschoolers over the years were also professing
believers. Unfortunately, the homeschool community had become quite
skeptical about lawyers, especially those who said they were Christian.
Often, when they got into court, these lawyers would try to forge
compromises that the families couldn’t agree to. This happened so
frequently that some homeschoolers across the country had gone to court
pro se, taking their chances without any lawyer at all rather
than face a compromise they couldn’t in good conscience live with. I
picked up the phone and contacted this lawyer’s wife, a good friend of
mine, Karen Kurth.

 

Karen
thought Bill might be willing to talk to me about it. The way she
phrased it was that he was at the point in his Christian walk where this
would be a good challenge. I knew that Bill had a reputation for not
compromising. I took a deep breath and prayed it would go well, then
contacted Bill to explain the situation. He replied, “Well, I can’t
contact the family. They would need to contact me.” Relieved greatly, I
called Mr. Poulos back and explained that there was a lawyer willing to
help him pro bono. Mr. Poulos was very grateful. He then
contacted Bill.

 

Iowa
attorney Bill Kurth was able to get the Poulos family off on a
technicality—one which would later cause Kathy Collins at the Department
of Education to express much grief. Bill had uncovered a significant
loophole in the Iowa compulsory attendance law. Mr. Poulos, it seemed,
had duly “enrolled” his son in the school that fall. It turned out that
the Iowa law did not require “attendance—merely “enrollment.”

 

The
final test case was concocted when the “Des Moines Plan” teachers
attempted to set up a phony homeschool family in the fall of 1990. The
Des Moines school district officials selected a Vietnam veteran with
residual problems, whose children apparently weren’t functioning well in
the public school, and persuaded the family to begin homeschooling using
the “Des Moines Plan.” The “Des Moines Plan” was one of the names of a
“dual enrollment” option offered by the Des Moines public school system.
Technically the child was enrolled in the public school system even
though it had the superficial appearance of being “homeschooling.” Most
families in the “Des Moines Plan” felt they were very safe from
prosecution because they were in full compliance with the law—by
publicly enrolling their children and using a State-certified teacher on
the district’s payroll.

 

This
assumption of safety was quite false. I had personal knowledge about the
danger to the “Des Moines Plan” families, but at the time few wanted to
hear this warning. I had been invited to a luncheon with the Des Moines
Plan teachers in Spring 1990. Clarence Townsend, who ran the Grandview
Park Baptist homeschool satellite program, a homeschooling option that
operated out of a private unaccredited Christian school, invited me to
meet with these teachers. He hoped that he and I could be persuasive
with these public teachers about the rights and freedoms of private
homeschooling. He hoped that by now they would have seen the overall
benefits and advantages to a home education and would be easily
persuaded to come around to a position in support of private home
education, i.e. homeschooling.

 

I was
very scared to do this! Lynn and I immediately took precautions to
protect our children in the event that our family was targeted during my
known absence from the home while at this luncheon. These women were
informed in advance that I was a homeschool leader. They knew where we
lived, and they could easily discover that our family was not in
compliance with the law. (To this day, we do not know why they didn’t
come after our family. To God be the glory for His protection!)

 

During
this cordial luncheon, as the four of us discussed the issues
confronting education in the home, both public and private, one of the
teachers began to argue with me. We were discussing the role of the
State in ensuring that children were getting a good education through
testing or teacher certification. She flatly told me that no private
homeschool option was acceptable. When I asked her why, she answered: “I
consider that my PRIMARY job is to be a mandatory child abuse reporter
when I go into these homes.”

 

Knowing
this attitude, I was therefore dismayed, but not surprised, to learn
that the Des Moines district had targeted one of its own families for
prosecution. This Vietnam veteran family came to our attention on the
local ABC-affiliate’s Channel 5 News. Dee Gillman, a homeschool
leader, just happened to be watching the evening news when she heard a
report that the Des Moines school system was about to charge one of its
families with truancy—a family enrolled in the Des Moines Plan! The news
report said that school officials intended to turn the family over to
the juvenile system by requesting that the judge rule that the children
were “in need of assistance.” CHINA! Dee contacted the reporter and
asked for more details on the story. After hearing Dee’s grave concerns,
the reporter provided Dee with a private phone number to contact the
family. The family was scheduled to go to court the next day!

 

Perhaps
it was fortunate that the man was a veteran, because he had seen combat
before. He listened to Dee’s explanation and immediately recognized the
danger to his family. He was going to be set up! He and his family fled
the state in the middle of that very night. The next day Channel 5
News covered the event outside of the Polk County Court House,
showing two Des Moines Plan teachers (the very two that I had lunch
with!) walking dejectedly down the steps. Their “truancy” family hadn’t
shown up to court that day. The State’s plans to create another
precedent-setting case had failed!

 

In the
ensuing years, the State of Iowa was to try many more times to come
after families. But the cases were often messy, frequently got bogged
down, and were not the perfect case that the State wanted to create to
serve as a companion to the Barry Bear decision. In the meantime, the
Bear family had gone through an extensive and complex appeals process,
and some court decisions were rendered which overturned the original
Barry Bear case in significant ways that undermined its basic structure.

 

Racial profiling

It is a
shameful fact now etched in history that high officials within Iowa
government were profiling certain types of families in order to create a
court case. At first we assumed that State officials would come after
the visible leaders. We were sitting ducks, after all.  But gradually a
horrible, unimaginable realization began to dawn on us. The State was
targeting families that were of other races!

 

It was
already obvious that they were trying to locate families that were
marginal, isolated, potentially ostracized, poverty-stricken, or living
on the fringes of society. But then we took note of the other common
denominator: Archie Bear was Indian; his wife Anna was white. Aaron
Rivera was Hispanic; his wife Theresa was white. Mrs. Poulos was a Greek
immigrant; Mr. Poulos was an American. We believed the Des Moines plan
family was African-American, according to the limited information we had
at the time.

 

Did the
State of Iowa presume that no one would rush to the aid of these
families? Did they hope these families would be easy targets? Were state
officials operating under the serious misconception that the homeschool
leadership was racist? Did they suppose we would abandon these families
to the courts?

 

I still
vividly recall the day I was standing in my kitchen, talking on the
phone with Dee Gillman, when this fact first hit us. We both dissolved
into tears. We knew what we had to do. Quietly and quickly we began to
phone support group leaders across the state. We told them that they
needed to be on the lookout because of this racist profiling. We told
them to take care of the homeschoolers in their area who were marginal
or isolated for whatever reason—people of color, “too many” children,
poor, broken tractors on the front lawn, atypical marriage and family
configurations, different religions, etc.

 

In Des
Moines, it became my unfortunate and painful responsibility to have to
phone a prominent African-American leader whose wife was white, and warn
them that they would no longer be safe in Iowa as homeschoolers. They
left the state.

 

We later
heard reports that support groups began to minister in unprecedented
ways to needy homeschool families in their area, including families that
were substantially different from them in faith, lifestyle and/or
worldview.

 

In
retrospect, this unprecedented response from the homeschool community
seems to be a miracle. But then we all knew full well the risks inherent
in our inaction or apathy. There was too much at stake. If Kathy
Collins—who was scouring the state for another test case—caught even a
glimmer of a hint that there was a single family out there that we
wouldn’t all rally behind, that family would become a sitting duck for
prosecution. And, if any family lost, we all would lose.

 

More bad bills

Shortly
before the 1990 legislative session, more bad legislation surfaced. The
State Board of Education submitted a proposal to the General Assembly
for amending Iowa’s compulsory attendance law to include an “alternative
for private instruction.” The proposal would create a new chapter in the
Iowa Code permitting parents to provide a child’s education in a setting
other than a public or accredited nonpublic school by “retaining a state
licensed teacher subject to certain limitations.” A child under
instruction by a non-licensed instructor would be tested annually and
would be required to make “adequate progress or be subject to
remediation or removal from private instruction to an accredited school
setting.”

 

Many
homeschoolers supported the State Board of Education bill because they
felt it would once and for all serve to make homeschooling “legal” in
the state of Iowa. They naively assumed that being “legal” would solve
all problems and that they would then be “safe.” In all fairness to
them, the climate was so fearful in Iowa at the time that some families
simply desired to grasp onto any solution that might relieve them of
anxiety.

 

Despite
these hopes for a “safe” solution, however, the minutes of the State
Board of Education meeting on November 15, 1989, tell another side of
the story. In an extended discussion about the proposed “homeschool”
bill, concerns were raised by several board members about “child abuse.”
One member expressed concern “regarding child abuse and the opportunity
for children to fall behind in their educational program.” Other members
expressed “concerns regarding penalties/sanctions, testing and child
abuse.”

 

It
quickly became quite apparent that a two-pronged assault was going on.
The two bills were companion bills! On the one hand, S.F. 149 would
define “truancy” by suggesting remedies such as CHINA. On the other
hand, the State Board bill would define “competent private instruction”
(homeschooling) so narrowly that most homeschoolers would not, or could
not, comply with the bill’s stringent requirements. This restrictive
definition of what constituted “competent private instruction” would
have the chilling effect of creating a vast new group of “truants” in
Iowa—homeschoolers who were noncompliant with the law for whatever
reasons. Special education, testing, certified teacher, religious
beliefs, and other issues would adversely affect a huge number of
families if these two bills worked together in lockstep.

 

In other
words, it was very precarious and dangerous time to pass a homeschool
bill because of how the courts might define “truancy,” and how the legal
remedies for “truancy” might be applied; i.e., child abuse charges. And,
if S.F. 149 also passed, it would guarantee that “truancy” would
be defined legally as a form of child abuse and subject to the worst
punishments imaginable—loss of one’s children.

 

A
division began to arise within the homeschool community. Many held to
the position that “anything is better than nothing; take what they give
you and run.” These folks wanted a homeschool bill. Others believed it
was necessary to hold to a firm bottom line, that no bill was better
than a bad bill. The only common ground was that S.F 149 was bad and
needed to be defeated.

 

We were
part of the group that worked against a homeschool bill. Our group
believed that each and every concession would endanger other homeschool
families. We begged these other homeschool leaders not to barter away
rights while things were still so dangerous. We fervently tried to
persuade them that each act of concession could result in something
terrible happening to somebody else—a child could be forcibly removed
from parents’ loving, protective arms and tossed over to the State.

 

Those of
us who resisted compromise came from divergent theological traditions.
Yet there was a unity of faith. Because of this ever-widening division,
and some of the attacks that inevitably came with it, we delved deeply
into the Scriptures together. Were we wrong? To answer this, we asked
ourselves some very hard questions. Were we our brother’s keeper? “Yes!”
we declared unanimously. How could we then agree to a “little”
concession and then look a father or mother in the eye the next
day—after they had lost a child to the “system” because of our
compromises?

 

Our
little group determined to stand on a firm principle: we would not do
anything to risk the loss of a single child.

 

We
likened compromise to the psycho-social “lifeboat” or “survivor” game.
Nobody’s child would be tossed overboard. Could we, in good conscience,
agree to testing when we knew that some kids couldn’t pass the test for
such simple reasons as test anxiety or illness? What was the penalty for
not being able to pass the test? Under S.F. 149 it could be CHINA, and
ultimately that child’s removal from the home! Some families had
children with special needs. Other families had strong religious
convictions against government education, State-certified teachers, and
the psychological foundations of standardized testing. Would our concessions jeopardize
their Constitutional freedoms?

 

One day,
in the midst of a heated argument with some homeschool leaders who
wanted to negotiate away the right to special education, I piped up: “We
are all just one car accident away from having a special education
child.” Immediately the conversation became more sober.

 

The meeting in the Governor’s office

Unity
among homeschool leaders began to deteriorate rapidly. By November of
1989, homeschool leaders from various segments of the widening divide
were called to a meeting in Governor Branstad’s office. Our group was
told that the purpose of the meeting was to forge a consensus on some of
the critical issues facing homeschoolers in the upcoming legislative
session. Given the growing disunity, we were excited to be a part of
this effort. It seemed like a positive development. We looked forward to
the opportunity to speak to the Governor one-on-one about our grave
concerns.

 

Until
this meeting, we had not been certain about Governor Branstad’s stand on
homeschooling. He had verbally indicated support, but he was also a
leader in the rapidly burgeoning education reform movement. He had
declared himself the “Education Governor” and sought a national
reputation among his peers for progressive reform. We were dismayed by
this development, but still had high hopes that we could persuade him to
defend the rights and liberties of homeschooling. We were, after all, a
growing block of his voting constituency.

 

We were
to be sadly disappointed. As the meeting unfolded it became apparent
that this was an orchestrated meeting. A legislator, whom we thought was
friendly to our cause, presented a prepared homeschool bill which he
asked everyone in the room to support. We read the first paragraph. It
read the State had a “compelling interest” in the education of our
children. Our hearts sank. We understand the legal nuances of that
particular legal language and knew we would be signing away our parental
rights and freedoms to homeschool. The rest of the bill was basically a
re-hash of the State Board of Education’s proposed legislation.

 

When
some of us objected to the bill in particular, and to any homeschool
bill at all, the legislator responded with angry outbursts. The
Governor’s staff also responded in threatening tones. We were perplexed
and dismayed by this reaction. Some leaders were even attacked for their
religious beliefs!

 

In the
middle of the meeting, I took my baby across the hall for a nursing
break. My friend, Karen Kurth, went with me. We decided to pray. While
praying, it came to us that something disturbing was going on that we
didn’t understand. Why had a meeting, that was supposed to bring
homeschoolers together in unity, so quickly degenerated? We asked the
Lord to show us what was really going on. “Reveal what is hidden in
darkness to light,” we specifically prayed.

 

Our
prayer was quickly answered. Soon after we re-entered the meeting, one
man incidentally remarked that he had been privy to seeing the bill
beforehand. I spoke up and inquired about this point. We had been told
that nobody had seen this bill prior to the meeting, I noted. How was it
then that he had seen the bill ahead of time?  Obviously caught, he then
confessed that some leaders in that room had been prepped ahead of time,
on the drive down to the State Capitol building, to support this
homeschool bill. It was part of an effort to put pressure on the rest of
us to compromise.

 

At this
point, the meeting disintegrated into disarray. A Governor’s aide
stormed out of the room angrily. The legislator was upset that things
had not gone according to plan. We were all upset.

 

After
this meeting, one group of homeschoolers was openly pitted against
another in high-level political maneuvering to pass any one of a number
of extremely restrictive “competent private instruction” (homeschool)
bills in the Iowa legislature. The homeschool bill proposed that day in
the Governor’s office was later re-forged into something called “The
Governor’s Bill,” and it was just as unpalatable as ever. IHEA broke
ranks with the rest of us and began to actively support these bills,
with some minor modifications in language. There were times during the
legislative session when one group of homeschoolers would be actively
lobbying against another. Our group was characterized as “the handful of
radical few” by one of the Governor’s top aides. Other homeschool
leaders quickly latched onto that term in a pejorative fashion. That
term stuck and it was nearly impossible to overcome the negative stigma.
We were ostracized and alienated.

 

That day
in the Governor’s office we also learned for certain that we could not
count on the Governor to stand with us and support us in the upcoming
legislative session. We knew he would sign the bills if they ended up on
his desk. This was the darkest time in Iowa homeschool history. We were
a small remnant of people, hopelessly divided, with no monetary assets,
no political clout, no friends in high places, and by all natural
appearances, no hope.

 

Two bright spots during the darkest hours

Yet,
other things were changing, a little bit at a time.

 

Throughout the year of 1989, Maxine Sieleman kept phoning me. She was a
well-known evangelical Christian leader in Des Moines who hosted a
popular early morning radio interview show on the local Christian radio
station. She had been recruited to set up an Iowa chapter of the
national group Concerned Women for America. She wanted me to serve on
the board of her state committee because of my expertise in issues and
politics.

 

Experience had already taught me, time and again, that I was not a model
“Christian Right” leader. I always seemed to get in trouble with the
“powers that be” because I wouldn’t compromise. Maxine persuaded me that
I could do quiet things behind the scenes to monitor issues that might
adversely affect children and their families. This was an activity I was
already doing. I consented to becoming involved once again, but in this
minimal capacity. I thought it wouldn’t take a very big time commitment.
I was so wrong!

 

Maxine
Sieleman was eventually able to launch a state chapter of Concerned
Women for America in November 1989. This group would go on to become a
vehicle through which the opposition to the bad homeschooling
legislation could operate. A state organization would enable us to send
out alerts. National CWA had a legislative liaison on staff at the time,
Ellen Smith, who understood the gravity of the situation and supported
our state efforts. Much later we came to realize that this unique
situation was an anomaly, and it probably wasn’t supposed to happen.
There were deep fractures developing in the national Christian Right in
the early 1990s, particularly over education issues.

 

At the
premier public meeting to launch the state chapter of CWA, I happened to
ask a lady to my right—a complete stranger!—to watch my baby boy while I
ran to the bathroom. To this day, I still don’t know what provoked me to
ask this friendly-looking woman and her husband to hold my precious
baby! Even more surprising, she agreed. This woman, Marla Quenzer, would
quickly become one of my best friends. Together we watched a satellite
feed from Washington promoting CWA. Ironically, the feed showed the face
of Paul Zylstra, as he and the other men were being hauled out of Pastor
Silevan’s church in Nebraska!

 

In the
coming months, as they learned about the homeschool crisis, Dr. Del and
Marla Quenzer assisted the state chapter formation of CWA and provided
the funds to re-publish two issues of Samuel Blumenfeld’s Blumenfeld
Education Letter in a newsprint format. By this time, Sam Blumenfeld
had explicitly given us the permission to reproduce two newsletters that
pertained to the Bear and Rivera family court battles. We were able to
reprint 10,000 copies of this newsletter in a newsprint format and
distribute them across the state. (Blumenfeld Education Letter,
Vol. V, No. 4, April 1990 and Vol. V, No. 6, June 1990—see later remarks
towards the end of this story.)

 

The
state leaders of CWA met weekly in the library at First Federated Church
for prayer. We were all young mothers at that time and Maxine hired
someone to babysit our children so that we could share and pray. Prayer
was the glue that held everything together. Each week we would meet,
share stories about what was happening, and pray. We made a commitment
to keep balance in our lives by making our families our top priority,
and would frequently challenge and encourage each other on this matter.
The homeschool crisis was to dominate all other issues for the next year
and a half until this state committee dissolved.

 

Another
positive development proved to be most providential. One day I received
a phone call from my friend Mary Stuart. She asked if Lynn and I would
be willing to go to a meeting with some Dallas County homeschoolers and
explain to them what was happening. We were invited to speak at the Dave
and Jean Koch home. I already knew Jean Koch. Several years earlier
Mary, Jean and I had been part of a Bible study for young mothers that
met in western Dallas County. For some odd reason, we had a profound
sense of “destiny” back then—that God was preparing each of us for some
future plan that we couldn’t yet see. Little did we know!

 

At this
meeting I shared the history of what had been transpiring. I previously
had told many people this story, but encountered apathy, unconcern, and
sometimes even disbelief. I was therefore totally unprepared for the
reaction to my talk. The young parents in that room listened to the
story and said, “We have a responsibility to do something. We have to
help. We live close to Des Moines. What can we do?”

 

Lynn and
I were stunned. Here was a group of people actually offering to help!
Mary later told me that God had been preparing the hearts of these
people for the task that lay ahead. The Dallas County support group
formed a critical foundation to our efforts at the State Capitol in the
spring of 1990. In 1991 they sponsored their own homeschool bill, which
did not compromise away the rights of any homeschoolers.
[Unfortunately, it did not pass, ed.] They would later go on to form
NICHE.

 

These
uncompromising Dallas County couples became the real unsung heroes in
the battle to save homeschooling freedoms in Iowa. Day after day, week
after week, month after month, they relentlessly and sacrificially stood
against the persecution—not only at the State Capitol, where they were
to have a profound impact, but also across the entire state of Iowa.

 

One
interesting event, which cannot be left in obscurity, illustrates the
great pains that the State of Iowa was taking during this period of time
to eradicate private religious education. The Dallas County support
group included a homeschooling family that was from an Anabaptist church
not unlike the Amish. I had met the mother on a field trip when we were
both nearly nine months pregnant and awkwardly trying to hike rocky
paths at a nature preserve. It was to become a fortuitous encounter.

 

One day
in the fall of 1990, Susan (Sharp) Spencer picked up the notes for the
pending State Board of Education meeting. She attended these meetings,
along with Johann Hicks, so that homeschoolers could be kept informed of
any new dangers lurking in the bureaucracy. Susan told me that the State
Board intended to create more trouble for the Amish. It was quite
apparent to her that the State had no intention of contacting the Amish
in advance before significantly altering the “Amish exemption”
requirements. Past protocol indicated that the State had at least been
decent enough to alert Amish elders before changing rules. This time,
they were simply going to ramrod the whole issue through.

 

I picked
up the phone and contacted Jean Koch. She was able to contact the
Anabaptist homeschooler. And, amazingly for a people who had few
telephones, the message quickly crossed the State within a matter of 24
hours. That next State Board meeting, some Amish elders showed up. Their
mere presence thwarted the State Board’s plans.

 

Preparing for the 1990 legislative session

Shortly
before the legislative session starting in January 1990, Paul Zylstra
called another meeting at our house. During that meeting we
realistically assessed the potential worst-case scenarios that could
arise. We fully expected that S.F. 149 would quickly pass in the House
in the opening days. It would then be swept off to a conference
committee, where if it passed (and we fully expected that it would
pass), it would then be sent to both Houses. If things were greased,
this could go quickly. We had every reason to suspect that the
machinations behind the scenes were already being worked upon, to see to
it that this bill’s quick processing would be fully orchestrated. After
passage, we estimated that it could land on Governor Branstad’s desk
within 20 minutes. There was nothing to stop the Governor from signing
this bill. It would be all over for us once he signed.

 

We also
considered the sobering fact that all of the bad bills, previously
mentioned, that arose during the 1989 legislative session were still
alive and viable in 1990. And now there were at least two new homeschool
bills to worry about. It was a multi-pronged threat.

 

To
respond to this crisis, we developed a unique strategy, based upon our
extremely limited strength, to stand and resist the bad legislation that
was aimed at us from all directions. First, we formed a coalition of
divergent groups to fight these bad bills. One group wouldn’t be enough.
CWA, Iowans for Moral Education, Iowans for Christian Education, Iowa
Home Educators’ Association, VOCAL, Women for Constitutional Government,
Grandview Park Baptist Home School Satellite Program, the Dallas County
Home School Support Group, First Federated Home School Support Group,
and Iowa Home School Youth in Action all supported this effort. Other
groups and families joined our effort in a more limited capacity.

 

Homeschool teens above the age of compulsory education formed the Home
School Youth in Action group on their own initiative in order to lobby
on behalf of their younger brothers and sisters. Our oldest son, Colin,
who was only 9 years old at the time, volunteered to do the computer
work. (Back then computers were old clunkers with very little memory.
Fax machines were rare and there was no Internet. We had to rely upon
old-fashioned phone trees and mailings for alerts.)

 

It was
decided to hold weekly meetings in our home throughout the legislative
session so that everyone could be informed and stay on course. Over the
next few months, many families were to come from all across Iowa to our
home to share in this experience. Often our meetings had approximately
100 men, women and children in attendance. Our house would look like a
disaster the next morning. It was a rugged time for me as I kept up with
four children, became pregnant with my fifth, homeschooled, and
coordinated the legislative activity on a daily basis. Each morning I
would awaken and wonder if this was the day that we would get the knock
on the door. I would cry out to the Lord for mercy in prayer and then
get on with my day. I am thankful for the many people behind the scenes
who prayed for our strength and protection during those turbulent days.

 

Johann
Hicks agreed to go to the legislature every day that she was physically
able. (I am sure that she went to the legislature even on days when she
wasn’t feeling well.) She informed us that we would need to make sure
that somebody was always present at State Board of Education meetings,
education committee meetings in the House and Senate, and any other
meetings pertaining to education. Several volunteered to help her with
those duties, most notably Susan (Sharp) Spencer and Marla Quenzer.

 

John
Harvey informed us that bad legislation could pop up literally anywhere
in the legislative arena, and that we would need somebody to scrutinize
other bills emanating from other committees. He volunteered to look
under every rock to see if any bad language appeared in other bills that
didn’t seem germane on the surface. Indeed, over the years, John was
often able to locate “truancy/child abuse” language when it popped up in
many strange places.

 

It was
apparent that we needed around-the-clock monitoring of the legislature.
Once the bill passed the House, the conference committee could meet at
any time. Dee Gillman, a homeschool mom from the east side of Des
Moines, offered to be a key person to monitor this committee. We
developed an elaborate phone tree. It had to work in such a way that
those phoned could immediately drop everything and show up at the
Capitol on a moment’s notice. Here was where the Dallas County support
group came in. Dallas County is directly west of Polk County, where the
State Capitol Building sits atop a hill on the east side of the city of
Des Moines. Dallas County folks said that they could drive to the
Capitol Building in less than a half hour. Some of the fathers,
including my husband, worked in downtown Des Moines. These men offered
to go to the Capitol on their lunch breaks. Others offered to come in on
a regular basis when they weren’t busy farming or at their jobs.

 

I
declined to lobby except in emergencies. Besides obvious family duties,
I reminded the people that I was a known face. “If I show up at the
Capitol Building I’ll be too easily recognized,” I said. Everyone
agreed. We decided that the best course of action would be to develop a
citizen corps of lobbyists—anonymous faces, unknown faces, constantly
changing faces. This proved to be a fortuitous decision. It would have
been easy for the conference committee to meet if they could easily
identify one or two lobbyists and take note of when they were gone. With
a large, indistinguishable group of people constantly coming and going
at the legislature, it would be more difficult for the conference
committee to do their dirty work.

 

Homeschoolers from across the state volunteered to come to Des Moines
and spend a few hours at the Capitol whenever possible. Many members of
the Plymouth Brethren Church in Stratford, Iowa, donated time in this
manner. When Maxine Sieleman of CWA heard about this big volunteer
effort, she exclaimed excitedly, “You need a grandparents brigade!” She
proposed a strategy whereby people who weren’t at risk, who weren’t
homeschoolers—meaning supporters of homeschoolers and older people who
no longer had young children in the home—could go on our behalf to
lobby. Johann Hicks volunteered to head up this Grandparents’ Brigade,
and was later honored and written up in a national CWA publication for
her faithful work on our behalf. Mary Ellen Nicholls joined her. The
Zylstra family’s teenage daughters volunteered, at great risk to their
own family, to appear publicly at the Capitol Building to engage in an
authentic exercise of civic government education.

 

Each
individual act took great courage—if homeschoolers stuck their neck out
of the foxhole they could become easy targets for prosecution. In years
past, things had been so bad in Iowa that homeschool families had
sometimes gone to lobby at the State Capitol with paper bags over their
heads. Even though the danger was greater this time around, it was
decided that it would not be right to hide our faces.

 

There
were many families who were more comfortable assisting in quiet ways in
the background, and we were grateful for their faithfulness. We were
especially indebted to Heather McCargar, a mature teen who donated time
to our family without pay, and to all others who were willing to babysit
while parents went to lobby. The effort would have failed without the
many private families who wrote letters, made phone calls, and alerted
others. Each person’s work was a valuable and essential part of the
overall resistance to this bad legislation. (To all of you, on behalf
of those who now experience the freedom to educate their children in the
state of Iowa, THANK YOU!)

 

One more
individual must be credited for his incalculable assistance: Jan
Mickelson of WHO Radio, which blankets the entire state of Iowa. From
the earliest days of the homeschool crisis, he offered leaders a
platform on his morning radio show to proclaim the danger across the
state. As he heard more of the story, he became gravely concerned. One
day he promised Paul Zylstra an amazing thing, which gave many families
hope during the darkest hours. He told Paul that if a social worker ever
knocked on a door to take away a homeschooled child, he would blast the
news across the state. He then made this commitment publicly on his
radio show.

 

Upon
hearing of this commitment, we sent news to all of the support group
leaders. We instructed them to make sure that at least one homeschool
family in their network had a video camera, tape recorder, and/or
camera. We boldly stated on Jan’s radio show, hoping that State
officials could hear, that should that knock ever come at the door,
homeschoolers were ready and “armed” with media equipment to record the
entire event. We hoped that this proclamation would serve as an extra
layer of protection. We wanted State officials to know that the entire
state of Iowa would be able to see and hear the nightmare of children
screaming and crying as they were hauled away from their parents.
Obviously, this strategy hearkened back to the effectiveness of the
original award-winning photo of the panic-stricken Amish child fleeing
the burly Sheriff’s deputy.

 

Some
support groups took our recommendation very seriously and arranged every
detail in the event of this worst-case scenario. Some even timed the
driving distances between each other’s homes. They weren’t going to take
any chances.

 

The legislative session of 1990

Our
worst-case predictions proved to be correct. In the first days of the
legislative session, S.F. 149 quickly and easily passed the House. It
was then supposed to be sent to conference committee so that the
wrinkles could be ironed out. For some reason it never made it to the
conference committee that day. Then a week went by. Then two weeks. We
soon began to realize that it was stalled. But why? Were the legislators
simply playing games with us? By this time we had a steady corps of
volunteers covering the Capitol every minute of the day. Some of these
citizen lobbyists had become known, but not all were recognized. It must
have slowly dawned on the legislators that somebody was always up there
watching them. The conference committee meeting continued to be delayed
time and again.

 

By
mid-March the constant monitoring at the Capitol began to take its toll
on the regular volunteers. Some simply couldn’t maintain that level of
activity day after day. We were thankful for the many occasional
volunteers, some from far away, who would come in and relieve the
regulars.

 

One day
Rep. Horace Daggett, a staunch homeschool supporter, approached Dee
Gillman. He told her, “You don’t always have to come up here. I’ll call
you if the conference committee members all leave the floor at the same
time. I’ll try to stall things so that you’ll have a few minutes to get
here.” From that time forward, Rep. Daggett made a habit of doing a
regular head count on the floor of the House to see if the particular
members were all missing at the same time. If all of them suddenly
disappeared from the floor, he’d run out of the chamber after them to
see if they were headed to a conference committee meeting. There were a
few false alarms.

 

Interestingly, our effort was going so well that a few legislators that
session attempted to write a bill to stop citizen lobbying! This
ridiculous idea obviously wasn’t going to fly with the public. It
encouraged us to learn that our methods were so successful.

 

In years
past, homeschoolers had shown up at the State Capitol building en masse,
at big rallies with baby strollers and toddlers, and lots of noise and
confusion. This had not been well-received, and we became aware of some
negative stereotypes that had developed. We determined that it would be
best to exhibit more restraint. We decided the best course would be to
quietly, calmly, and peaceably attend to one-on-one conversations with
individual legislators. Rather than engaging in aggressive “lobbying” we
encouraged the volunteers to simply state their positions. This approach
was particularly suitable to the largest number of homeschoolers, some
of whom had religious convictions against “lobbying.” The men and women
were encouraged to dress appropriately in business and/or church attire.
Fact sheets were prepared that succinctly explained the homeschooling
position opposing these bad bills.

 

People
were asked to speak for themselves, but also to soberly consider that if
they began to make concessions such as, “Well, I could live with a
homeschool bill that included testing,” that it could adversely affect
other homeschoolers. It remains a remarkable fact to this day, that most
homeschoolers who went to the legislature that spring did not make
statements that compromised away the freedoms and rights of other
homeschoolers. Despite the diversity and large numbers of citizen
lobbyists, the message was consistent and on target. The special care
that these families took to look out for their weakest brethren will
always be remembered and appreciated.

 

Believe
it or not, the “spin” machine was still working overtime to persuade
legislators that S.F. 149 did not pertain to homeschoolers. Legislators
still scolded us that S.F. 149 was just a “truancy” bill. To counter
this disinformation campaign, we amassed a stack of legal opinions and
handed them to the legislators.

 

Each
group in our coalition was responsible for its own legislative
activities and approached the issues from various perspectives. Iowans
for Christian Education (I.C.E.), headed by Paul Zylstra, represented a
large number of Iowa Christian homeschoolers who had a “conscientious
objection” against working with the State education system, based on
their doctrinal beliefs and historical research. I.C.E. handed out
one-page legislative fact sheets on a very regular basis, which served
as useful tools to educate the legislators about religious diversity and
tolerance, as well as private and home education matters.

 

One of
I.C.E.’s most effective legislative handouts was entitled “Conviction
vs. Preference.” This paper described preference as a choice
— not unlike, “I prefer steak but I will settle for hamburger.”
Compromise would be a normal part of choosing a preference. But
the statement “Give me liberty or give me death!” would represent a conviction. The handout explained: “A conviction may be something
for which an individual would be willing to lose monetary or material
possessions, go to jail, suffer injury, or forfeit their life to
maintain. Conviction does not compromise.”

 

The
legislators were urged to accommodate those homeschoolers who had
convictions. Nevertheless, more than one legislator reprimanded
homeschoolers with this statement: “You have the right to believe
anything you want, but you don’t have the right to practice those
beliefs.” We were learning quite about the sad state of religious
freedom and tolerance in America in the late 20^th century.

 

The final hours

Throughout the legislative session IHEA leaders had attended many of the
weekly meetings at our home. Despite our disagreements, we did not ever
exclude anyone, especially since we were all in agreement about
defeating S.F. 149. In the waning weeks of the 1990 legislative session, IHEA leaders introduced “compromise” language in a final attempt to pass
a homeschool bill. Some still believed that their hopes rested on making
homeschooling “legal” in Iowa. IHEA lobbyist, Ed Dickerson, told us that
the compromise language had been written by HSLDA. It offered minimal
protection for a very small percentage of homeschoolers. The rest of us
would be less fortunate. Thankfully, this last-ditch attempt went
nowhere. No “homeschool” bill passed.

 

In the
waning hours of the 1990 legislative session, one day the call came
forth from Rep. Daggett. The Senate File 149 Conference Committee was
going to meet immediately. Within a matter of fifteen minutes, several
dozen homeschoolers packed the tiny room where the conference committee
was meeting. Some of the committee members were already discussing the
bill. One legislator loudly proclaimed that she would once-and-for-all
like to get rid of a particular private homeschool satellite program.
Just then Clarence Townsend from Grandview Park Baptist School walked
into the room. She had been talking about his program! Her face turned
red. Another legislator showed up who was not on the conference
committee, Senator Charles Bruner. I had long suspected that he had a
hand in writing the bill because he had extraordinarily bad views about
traditional families. By this time, there were well over three dozen
homeschoolers at the State Capitol. Most of them had been regular
volunteers at the legislature all session.

 

As
expected the conference committee easily worked out their differences
and passed S.F. 149. It quickly and easily passed the
Democrat-controlled House of Representatives a few moments later in its
new form. Moments later it went to the Republican-controlled Senate. Our
only hope was to completely stop the bill in the Senate. But, most
Senators were not known to be favorable to homeschooling. Because of the
stance of the Governor throughout the legislative session, and the
ambitious activities of his legislative aide in promoting this bill, we
thought there would be few Republican Senators who would have the
courage to vote against it. And because the teacher’s union so heavily
controlled Democrat politics in Iowa, we held out even less hope for
Senate Democrat votes against the bill. Things looked very grim.

 

Homeschoolers packed the upper balcony to watch the proceedings. The
floor debate started. All of the typical pros and cons were stated by
the legislators we had come to know, both for and against this bill. But
then, suddenly, something unexpected happened. Senator Jim Riordan, a
well-known liberal Democrat from Dallas County (Dallas County!),
stood up and proclaimed his opposition to the bill. He said that he had
watched his constituents come in day after day during the legislative
session. He said he now recognized that they should have the freedom,
based on the Constitution, to practice their beliefs and their faith. He
pronounced that he would vote against S.F. 149.

 

Then
something even more dramatic happened. Senator Tom Mann, the only
African-American in the Senate, also a Democrat, rose to speak. He
defended the right to homeschool from a Constitutional perspective. His
stand was very courageous and revealed his deep commitment to human and
civil rights.

 

In the
meantime, a curious event transpired. Republican Senator Paul Pate took
a walk. No one really ever learned why he took a walk that day. We like
to think that he didn’t have the stomach to vote for this bill.

 

The vote
was taken. A miracle happened! S.F. 149 was defeated by one vote! One vote!

 

We
quickly scanned the vote tally. Who had voted for the bill, who had
voted against the bill? There were many unexpected votes that day. Some
homeschool support groups it seemed had made a real difference.

 

Homeschoolers stood around the rotunda, stunned and amazed, and
rejoiced. They wept and expressed great joy, and this went on for a few
moments.

 

It was
up to me to burst their bubble. “Look, you all can’t go home yet!” I
called out to those who started walking away. They all stopped and
looked at me in amazement. I think they thought I was absolutely crazy.
I gathered everyone around in a close circle and told them a story in
hushed tones. I explained how that bad school-based clinic bill that I
had successfully worked to defeat in 1987 had suddenly appeared in an
appropriations committee bill in the middle of the last night of that
legislative session. It had only been because I had found favor with the
Governor (pertaining to his re-election campaign and the Right to Life
vote in 1986) that he had agreed to line-item-veto the offensive
school-based clinic language out of that appropriations bill.

 

But this
time we were not going to be that fortunate. “If the language in S.F.
149 appears in a last-minute appropriations bill, we know that the
Governor will not line-item-veto that language out of the bill,”
I cautioned

 

Another
miracle happened. Nobody left! Fathers stayed while moms went home to
care for the children. Approximately 30 people stayed all night that
night. Legislators kept climbing up to the Senate balcony to persuade
everyone to go home. But nobody did. Shortly before midnight, a lobbyist
from a manufacturers’ organization approached my husband and some other
fathers. He told them that he didn’t want to see the homeschoolers get
harmed. The good behavior of the people who had come to the legislature
day after day, month after month, had been exemplary. He had learned
that we were all decent, ordinary people with solid convictions about
doing what was right. He then warned the homeschool dads that there was
going to be an attempt to put the language of S.F. 149 into an
appropriations bill!

 

When the
bedraggled group of homeschoolers walked into the small room at the back
of the Senate chamber where Lieutenant Governor Joy Corning was just
about to add the language of S.F. 149 to an appropriations bill, she
looked up and her face sank. It wasn’t going to work. She dropped this
last ditch attempt.

 

But
still nobody went home. It wasn’t until the 1990 legislative session was
officially over, and the gavel sounded at 10:30 the next morning, that
these people left and wearily drove themselves home.

 

One
battle down, but there was still more to come.

 

The meeting with Kathy Collins

On
September 6, 1990 I had to face the “Great Nemesis” of homeschooling in
person! Kathy Collins had been invited to speak to the Juvenile Justice
Advisory Council. They had tabled Dr. Montgomery’s proposals for nearly
a year and this was the day that they would address his concerns. Kathy
was clearly upset about Bill Kurth’s legal victory with the Poulos case.
She described the legal technicalities of the compulsory education
statutes and referred to the previous homeschool cases.  She also talked
about the Barry Bear case in a manner which indicated that she was
familiar with every single detail. Dr. Montgomery then reiterated the
situation in Sioux City where he claimed that genuinely truant families
were using homeschooling to hide behind so that they could abuse their
children.

 

Then I
was asked to speak. Shaking inside and out, I began by stating that I
had been homeschooled as a child and it had been a positive experience.
This fact surprised many on the Council. I explained that there are two
vastly different family structures, calling upon my background as a
family counselor. I drew an illustration. I pointed to one end of the
continuum where the most seriously dysfunctional families are—the type
where the mother is drunk and passed out on the couch and the children
are roaming the streets unsupervised. I noted that these families
eventually enter the child welfare system, and that truancy is a symptom
of greater problems that were frequently addressed through the many
options available to the juvenile court. I then pointed to the other end
of the family continuum. I said that these families often represented
the most rock solid, dedicated families left in America. These were
parents who loved their children, devoted their time and energy to
educate them, sacrificed careers, and were exemplary law-abiding
citizens in every way. These were the homeschoolers.

 

I then
carefully explained how the various bills proposed so far in the
legislature had lumped the seriously dysfunctional families together
with the profoundly functional families. I stated that by refusing to
clearly define truancy and homeschooling as separate and distinct legal
issues, these two ends of the continuum would continue to be linked
together, and would end up clogging the juvenile court system with kids
who weren’t truly truant.

 

When I
finished talking, there was a slight pause in the room. Then a man on
the Council who had spent years in the trenches of the juvenile justice
system leaned back in his chair and folded his arms across his chest. He
quietly stated, “Well, I have never seen a homeschool kid in the
system.” Several others quickly agreed with him. There was another
slight pause. And then someone made the recommendation to drop the issue
of truancy altogether. The official position of the Council that day
forward was that truancy was not a juvenile justice issue.

 

We won
that small battle. Miraculously, once again God had given me the courage
and strength to stand before our enemy, face to face, and state the
truth with boldness and conviction.

 

Later, I
met with JJAC member Sylvia Lewis, who had been a juvenile court referee
at one of the Barry Bear hearings. It was her decision, favorable to the
Bear family, which had been appealed to and overturned by the Iowa
Supreme Court. She confided something that I had always wondered about.
She said that Barry Bear did not belong in the juvenile court system and
that she had always felt badly about the way things had gone for him. I
was gratified to be reminded that there were decent people like her
working in the court system.

 

The visit to meet Barry Bear

In
November 1989, in the role of legislative liaison of the Iowa chapter of
Concerned Women for America, I sent a letter and packet of documentation
on Iowa’s homeschool crisis to various Christian ministries and media
outlets across the country. We sent packets to Marlin Maddoux, James
Dobson, other large media ministries, and homeschool leaders. We naively
assumed that these ministries and organizations would care about what
was going on in Iowa. We even tried to communicate in our opening
paragraphs the reasons why we believed this was a the beginning of a
national move.

 

Christian Liberty Academy responded with encouragement and an offer to
warn their people in Iowa. We received only one other response. Sam
Blumenfeld, author of Alpha-Phonics, NEA: Trojan Horse and Is
Public Education Necessary?, became very interested in what
was happening in Iowa. Sam wrote about the Barry Bear family in his
April 1990 Blumenfeld Education Letter.

Sam
contacted me and said that he wanted to visit with the Bear family
personally. We had been advised by the HSLDA attorneys to have no
contact with the Bears, based upon the fact that they weren’t “really”
homeschoolers. Michael Smith told me that if we kept our distance from
the Bear family it would be a form of protection for us—avoiding a
“guilt by association” appearance.

 

Sam was
quite insistent, however. He called at the right time. Some of us had
been stricken in conscience about the Bear family. We knew that Barry
had been removed from his parents and put into foster care. Somehow we
felt guilty about this family’s grief. We knew that Barry Bear was
simply a tool that the State was wielding in order to get at us. As
committed Christians we felt a responsibility to find out if this family
needed our help or assistance in any way. Sam’s prodding gave me an
excuse to finally find out what we might do to help. I contacted the
Bear family’s attorney in Marshalltown. The attorney was quite pleasant
and said he was certain that Anna would be willing to talk with us.

 

When I
phoned, Anna indicated that she might be willing to talk. But first I
had to state emphatically and repeatedly that neither Sam nor I were
associated with the Bureau of Indian Affairs in any way. She briefly
explained the historical context of her concerns and said that if we
were not being honest that the interview would be immediately
terminated.

 

When she
realized that Sam would want to meet Barry personally, Anna got excited.
She thought up a strategy that was both subtle and clever. Anna
indicated that she would contact Barry’s social worker and tell her that
some “eminent guests” would like to interview him. She never told the
social worker precisely who we were. She simply indicated that we were
“important” and “officials” concerned about Barry’s welfare.

 

Sam
Blumenfeld flew to Iowa and stayed at our home. The next day we took a
trip to the Meskwaki Indian Reservation. As we drove down the dirt lane
I noticed an Indian man waving to us on the left side of the road. Anna
greeted us at the door. Soon after, Archie walked in—the same man who
had waved to us from the road. I was immediately struck by his
appearance. If I had been an artist I would have wanted to draw his
face. It had the most remarkable characteristics of the proud and
stately Indian countenance that I had ever seen.

 

Archie
did not greet us, however. Instead we had to once again state
emphatically and repeatedly that we were not in any way, previously or
presently, associated with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. After this went
on for a bit, we were welcomed into the home by Anna. Archie sat on the
couch expressionless for the entire meeting, staring straight ahead
while we chatted. The house was clean, but unfinished and sparsely
furnished.

 

I
explained how the Barry Bear case had set court case precedent against
all homeschoolers. Anna was quite interested in the history. Sam told
Anna some national homeschooling history, and she chatted with him from
the perspective of being a teacher. We learned her story, how she had
married Archie and moved onto the Indian reservation. She had been hired
as a certified teacher to work in the tiny school located on the
reservation. She then related a complicated family history about
Archie’s background. It turned out that there was a tribal dispute about
inheritance and genealogies that had been going on for several
generations. (A few years later, when the gambling business became an
official Meskwaki occupation, we realized the economic significance of
this dispute.)

 

A few
hours later, as we were getting ready to leave their house, I addressed
Archie directly. I told him, “I am here today because they want to do to
me what they did to you.”

 

His
entire countenance changed. He got it! Suddenly he was very friendly. He
began talking rapidly about many things. He told us a story which was
quite interesting. He said that he had also been taken away from his
family when he was young, and had been raised by a foster family due to
a tribal dispute at the time. He said that the Indians had learned an
effective way to punish those they were having disputes with. They
simply contacted the child welfare agency and claimed that child abuse
was going on. It was a form of punishment on the reservation that began
back in the 1930s. 

 

Later,
Sam and I had an opportunity to visit with Barry Bear and his social
worker in a park in Marshalltown. Anna and Archie and one of their older
sons accompanied us. Barry Bear was 14 years old at this time and living
in a foster home. He was a handsome young man. It was evident that he
had some sort of mild mental handicap. Sam spent some time with him,
analyzing his school work and his abilities. The social worker probably
thought that Sam was some expert on education, but she instinctively
began to get more and more nervous as time went on. Sam and I took many
pictures that day. They show a relaxed Barry Bear, clearly confused
about why he had to live apart from his mother and father, enjoying the
company of his big brother on the swings. It was manifestly clear to us
that this child had never been abused during his upbringing. Sam wrote
about this visit in a subsequent Blumenfeld Education Letter.

 

Sam also
wanted to meet Aaron and Theresa Rivera and talk to them about their
court case. He had written about their situation in the June 1990 issue
of his Blumenfeld Education Letter. We held a meeting in our home
and many homeschool families from all across the state came to meet Sam.
Aaron Rivera arrived with bright yellow bumper stickers that said “Free
Barry Bear.” Many of us took those and put them on our cars. It stayed
on our black van for many years until Barry was finally freed.

 

During
the meeting, Sam gave us some radical advice. “I know you all want to go
hide,” he said. “I know that you all want to flee the state or go
underground. But that is the worst thing you can do. Then you are easy
targets. What you really need to do it to publish what is going on.
Proclaim it from the housetops! Then the whole world will know what is
going on.” Sam quoted the Scriptures about light and darkness. He said
we needed to walk in the light. He asked for a volunteer. Who would be
willing to publish the truth about what was going on in Iowa so that
everything would be done in the light?

 

I was
stunned when my husband Lynn raised his hand. Sam immediately gave us
permission to reproduce his newsletters about the Bear and Rivera cases
and distribute them across Iowa. We decided to reprint 10,000 copies in
an inexpensive newsprint format. We sent out thousands of these flyers
right away, and it accomplished what Sam had predicted. Quickly the
whole state of Iowa became familiar with the homeschool crisis.

 

The fruit of our efforts

In the
years to come, many things happened as a direct result of the Iowa
homeschool crisis, including some things that we could have never
predicted. In the darkest days of the homeschool battle, some of us used
to pray that God would greatly multiply our efforts. We felt so weak and
so powerless that this seemed a good thing to pray. We hung on this
Scripture: Now unto Him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above
all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us.
(Eph. 3:20) Indeed, He did.

 

Iowa
homeschoolers continued to sit in on legislative committee meetings,
State Board of Education meetings and education conferences for years to
come. The dangers still lurked everywhere and no one rested. A
compulsory education bill was passed in 1991 which made everyone very
nervous. There were too many loopholes for State mischief. The situation
required continual monitoring for the next few years. Many families were
still in grave danger. The Barry Bear case still hovered over our heads
like a dark cloud.

 

During
the next few years homeschoolers came out of the closet and began to
become more organized. Their numbers were rapidly growing. By 1991, Mary
Syverson began to faithfully attend to matters at the legislature. Julie
Naberhaus began to take over the responsibility of answering the dozens
of phone calls each week from new homeschoolers. The Dallas County
support group set up the NICHE group. Bill Kurth set up an Iowa chapter
of the Rutherford Institute for a few years to assist some of the
threatened families, thwarting a few more test cases that the State was
trying to create.

 

It was
Iowa homeschoolers who first stumbled onto David Hornbeck’s education
reform plan which would to massively transform education for the 21^st
century. It was Iowa homeschoolers who first discovered a
state-developed global education curriculum that openly promulgated the
religious doctrine of “Gaia” worship. It was Iowa homeschoolers who
first began publishing national articles warning other homeschoolers
about the multi-pronged threats created by the encroachment of federal
education reform.

 

Our
family eventually went on to assist Wayne Wolf in the publishing of a
little newspaper first called The Iowa Report. Wayne had a real
heart for family issues. Within two short months it became a national
publication, and he renamed it the Free World Research Report.
For several years it had a major impact on education reform across the
country, especially those areas that negatively impacted homeschooling.
Because of the Iowa crisis, we now had a solid understanding of the many
divergent ways that homeschool freedoms could be jeopardized and could
warn other states.

 

When
that publication discontinued, Lynn and I began publishing The
Christian Conscience magazine. For the next few years we covered
issues pertinent to homeschooling, education reform and other Christian
family issues. In 1999 we formed Conscience Press and published
Charlotte Iserbyt’s landmark book on the history of education reform, the deliberate dumbing down of america: A Chronological Paper Trail,
which was a best-seller on for a long time (http://www.deliberatedumbingdown.com).

Some of
the Iowa homeschool story is contained within its pages.

 

Our
family moved away from Iowa in 1998. Our oldest son was permitted to
participate in the NICHE graduation with his peers in June 1999. We were
blessed to see the fruits of our labors. I cried when children I
recognized—some of them seriously threatened in 1989—walked across the
podium that day. These children were now grown. They were now “safe.”

 

Barry
Bear’s situation went from bad to worse for many years. He was moved in
and out of foster homes, group homes and institutions. He was
maltreated, abused and his medical problems were never adequately
diagnosed or treated. The education his mother had given him, declined.
His mother wept in a court hearing when a social worker testified that
while in the custody of the State he had “learned to tie his shoes.”
Anna had taught him that skill when he was very young.

 

Barry
ended up in a State institution for adults and was given heavy doses of
psychotropic medications. His health continued to decline. State
officials went to great length to keep his case viable, even to the
point of absurdity. The Bear family continued to press on with every
possible maneuver in the Courts.

 

Eventually one day in the late 1990s the State of Iowa forgot to file an
important paper that would keep Barry imprisoned as an adult. Anna and
Archie immediately picked him up and took him out of state. When Anna
came back into Iowa she was thrown into jail for contempt of court for
refusing to divulge the whereabouts of Barry. When Barry finally came
home proper medical care revealed the source of Barry Bear’s childhood
illnesses—stomach ulcers, which could have been easily treated.

 

Barry
Bear’s tragic story has a bittersweet ending. It stands as a constant
reminder and warning to us that our freedoms are precious and very, very
fragile.

 

In May
of 1990, after the legislative session was over and S.F. 149 was finally
defeated, we prepared a paper for posterity. Below, it is copied in its
entirety. May you be blessed by reading it. An epilogue follows.

 

TO GOD
BE THE GLORY!

For the miraculous defeat of
Senate File 149, a scourge on the homeschoolers in the State of Iowa for
the past two years, we, the following represented groups that formed a
coalition for the purpose of defeating said bill, hereby go on record to
give God the Glory, Honor and Praise. Great is the Lord, and worthy to
be praised. We thank Him for miracles, both big and small, many of which
we will never know of until eternity. We mention some so that other
Christians will know and also give God the Glory He so richly deserves
for this victory.

 

o       
For alerting
homeschoolers about the dangers of S.F. 149 in the first place and
providing legal opinions at timely moments throughout the two-year
period.

o       
For alerting
three families that they were in danger of CINA and providing a way for
them to flee the State of Iowa before their children were in danger.

o       
For providing
monies, cars that worked, food, weather, people, resources, volunteers,
babysitters, and timely words.

o       
For giving
people the vision to pray, for giving some the burden to fast, for
causing them to do so with joy, expectancy and faith, and with no
recognition save the Lord.

o       
For giving
people the vision to get active, for holy boldness, for courage in the
face of mocking and persecution, for words of wisdom in the face of
intimidation and fear, and for equipping simple people of faith with a
message of the truth that in the end defied all lies of the enemy.

o       
For shining
testimonies that were consistent in children, teens and adults over time
and tribulation.

o       
For unity
despite diversity and the ability to speak forth the truth in one voice.

o       
For friends in
high and low places when extra voices were needed.

o       
For little
miracles each day.

o       
For accidents,
fires, delays, screw-ups, falls, sicknesses and other difficulties,
because God’s time and ways are perfect.

o       
For
faithfulness, perseverance, and consistency in believers to follow
through to the final hours of the battle without wavering or fleeing.

o       
For the ability
to endure a hopeless situation with hope and a clear mind centered on
our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ.

o       
For allowing us
to soften hearts with a message of God’s love in an atmosphere of
constant evil, and giving us the ability to shine as lights in the great
halls of darkness that is the Iowa Legislature.

o       
For forewarning
us before every significant event in miraculous ways, and for giving us
the vision of the battle ahead so that we were incredibly prepared every
step of the way.

o       
For loving us
despite our human frailties, weaknesses, imperfections, sins, impatience
and human errors.

o       
For giving us
compassionate friends, supportive groups, and committed organizations to
fight along side us.

 

To GOD we give thanks. He
alone deserves all Praise, Honor and Glory. Amen.

---

Epilogue

 

No
homeschooler ever lost a child in Iowa during those turbulent years. We did
not compromise away the rights of other homeschool parents during this
volatile era.

 

I wish I
could say that this is the end of the story. I wish I could say that the
crisis we all experienced fifteen years ago has gone away. It would be
wonderful to report that homeschooling is completely free and no longer
under this threat.

 

But this
isn’t the case. The very same agenda, which attempted to equate
homeschooling with child abuse, still exists across America today. One need
only do a simple Internet search on Google to discover that “homeschooling”
and “truancy,” or “homeschooling” and “child abuse,” appear together
frequently in unfavorable or badly misinformed newspaper articles and media
stories.

 

The
threatening agenda still lurks in darkness. The multi-pronged threats,
coming at all truly private education from every conceivable direction,
still exist. There are still people in positions of power, both political
Right and Left, who have sinister plans to link homeschooling with child
abuse. It is not a time for homeschool leaders to become complacent. It is
not time to let down your guard, nor to be soothed into a false sense of
peace and safety.

 

The plans to
reform education contain elements of luring and enticing homeschoolers into
the net of public or quasi-public  (“choice”) programs. Some reformers drew
diagrams depicting children educated in the home linked to the government
“system” by computer technologies. The reformers promised that “no child”
would be left behind. They eagerly anticipated the final extinction of truly
private education—by a state-controlled psycho-social assessment
testing mechanism that would require that all children be
enrolled, monitored and databanked in the “system.” They proposed severe
penalties for non-compliance.

 

Days of
trial and testing for homeschoolers—and all truly private schools—will
quickly set upon us once again. Will we be able to stand and withstand?
May
God have mercy on us all!

 

---

CONVICTION vs. PREFERENCE

  

“I prefer steak but I
will settle for hamburger”

 

This
statement is a preference. It is a desired outcome made among
acceptable choices. Compromise is a normal part of choosing a
preference.

 

 

“Give me liberty or give
me death!”

 

This
famous statement reflects a conviction. Conviction goes beyond a mere
refusal to eat liver. A conviction may be something for which an individual
would be willing to lose monetary or material possessions, go to jail,
suffer injury, or forfeit their life to maintain. Conviction does not
compromise.

 

The
Black Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s is a good example of active
conviction. Because Black Americans demanded the same rights,
privileges, and opportunities afforded other Americans, they suffered the
destruction of their private property, jailing, and even loss of life.
Amish, Mennonite and Quaker religious groups practice what is considered as
passive conviction. This is characterized by nonparticipation in
certain activities for the sake of conscience, such as refusing to fight in
a war.

 

 

*      *      *

 

A
great many homeschool families have a passive conviction
regarding participation in the public school system. They consider the
institution of government education to be deleterious and destructive to the
Christian family. These beliefs are rooted in an historical and theological
understanding of modern education. These beliefs are convictions, not
preferences.

 

You
may not understand these convictions. They may be entirely different from
your own. Homeschool parents can understand disagreement with their
position. However, they do not understand why the State of Iowa would force
them into subjection to a system of which they conscientiously object to
being made party.

 

We
urge you to accommodate both the preferences and the convictions of the
homeschool families in the State of Iowa.

 

---

 Iowans for Christian Education, 1990.

 ©Homeschooling
Under Fire, Lynn and Sarah Leslie. This document may not be re-published
in any form, all or in part, without the written permission of Lynn and
Sarah Leslie,  conscien@nacs.net.

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