Mom found guilty of permitting truancy

ABC 7 Chicago ^ | May 26, 2006 | AP

[NuclearDruid]

A Marion woman convicted of allowing her 15-year-old son to remain truant for nearly an entire school year says she was home-schooling the child.

[NuclearDruid]

This is a follow-up to last year's thread: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1393645/posts

ND

[fatnotlazy]

I'm surprised that this truancy was investigated and prosecuted. Where I live, we don't have the resources to investigate for the most part, or if there is something to investigate, people just don't care. I think the school districts are also afraid of lawsuits, especially if they turn out to be wrong about a particular child's situation.

[Clara Lou]

Maybe she was homeschooling, maybe she wasn't. There are people who are just too lazy and too self-serving to care if their kids are educated at all.

[cinives]

Your point and evidence thereof is ... ?

Parents who are "lazy and self-serving" want their kids in school to get them out from underfoot. How many people do you know or have heard of (documented please) keep their kids home but are "too lazy or self-serving" to do anything with them.

Perhaps you would be "too lazy and self-serving" to see that your kids get an education but homeschooling parents are surely not.

Homeschool ping.

[Tired of Taxes]

HOMESCHOOL PING!

SNIP:

A Marion woman convicted of allowing her 15-year-old son to remain truant for nearly an entire school year says she was home-schooling the child.

[Tired of Taxes]

Link to the original article:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1393645/posts

[Clara Lou]

Your hostility is showing. Why?

[ZGuy]

Here is the entire article :

A Marion woman convicted of allowing her 15-year-old son to remain truant for nearly an entire school year says she was home-schooling the child. Williamson County Judge Ronald Eckiss found Kim Harris guilty on Wednesday of knowingly and willfully permitting her son to persist in truancy throughout the 2004-2005 school year. The charge is a misdemeanor. Harris had claimed to be home-schooling the boy. But an investigation by the Regional Office of Education determined that the child was not being home-schooled. Her sentencing is scheduled for July 12th.

ND-No need to excerpt an article that's only 6 lines long! :^)

[gedeon3]

bump

[jdm]

I wuz homeskooled and terned out okay.

[blu]

I know parents who are both lazy and self serving who "homeschool" their students. Well, they start. They might buy a book or two, maybe tell them to do the work, then Mommie heads off to work and dates and wonders why, a year later, Darling Sonny has done exactly two assignments. How do I know this? Because Darling Sonny ended up in my "I'll Homeschool Your Kids Because I'm Meaner Than You" homeschool.

Truthfully, only about 3 of the 15 or so kids I've homeschooled fit this situation. Almost all of the kids wanted to be homeschooled, but the parents were afraid they (parents) couldn't do it. Taking a high schooler, with a fully developed network of friends, alibis and a cellphone out of their natural environment can be very difficult on the parent/child relationship. When we talk about homeschoolers, we must remember that there's a zillions reasons why.

All that being said, a few years ago our local prosecuting attorney decided he was going to crack down on truancy, by sending the parents to jail. As far as I know, the only ones to go to jail (mom and dad) were on the lower level of the socioeconomic scale. After the PA allowed some truly jackbooted thug type operation (you can read about it on HSLDA0), truancy ceased to be such a big deal.

I don't have a problem with truancy at my school. My little darlings know if they don't show up, and I don't get a really good reason from the parents (oh, and the stories the Mommies can tell for their boys!), they are done.Parents owe their children an education, and the first part of that is making sure they go to school, whether it be at the local building that looks like a prison, or the kitchen table.

[cinives]

I am a homeschooling single parent. Over the years, ever since the introduction of public schooling, homeschoolers have had to put up with many cheap shots and gross inaccuracies by people who are hostile towards or ignorant of homschooling and who speak/write with only emotion, not facts, as their guide. Your comment struck me as just another of the same.

Homeschoolers fought long, ugly legal battles against government authorities for a parents' rights under the Constitution to direct the education of their own kids. We don't take that lightly. After all, what is the end of education but to enable your kid to be a better human being and to life as a full member of their community.

I could ask you the same - what information/source was the origin of your comment ? Personal observation, news reports ? Tarring some homeschool parents, if indeed they are homeschooling, as self-serving and lazy is pretty hostile towards homeschoolers.

I could make your same comment about public school parents - they're too lazy and self-serving to raise their kids themselves.

[Tired of Taxes]

I decided to look for more details on this story. So, I did a Yahoo search on "'kim harris'homeschool", and look at search result #21 "User Posts":

http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=%22kim+harris%22+homeschool&toggle=1&ei=UTF-8&pstart=1&fr=FP-tab-web-t&b=21

If you click on it, all of your posts come up. :-0

Well, anyway... all I can find so far are blog articles on this story:

http://spunkyhomeschool.blogspot.com/2005/04/whats-going-on-in-illinois.html

http://www.cobranchi.com/archives/005006.html

No details anywhere.

I know a lot of "unschoolers" who wouldn't be able to produce a "curriculum" or records, but their kids are bright and do very well.

[fatnotlazy]

I personally have no objection to homeschooling. God bless those parents and childcare givers who do. I don't know that I would have the wherewithal to do it myself, but if you do, that's great.

What I would object to is if, as the article says, this woman was CLAIMING to be homschooling her child, but was not in fact doing so. Obviously, a tremendous disservice has been done to this child if he hasn't been receiving an education.

[Clara Lou]

I was not making comments about home schooling or attempting to disparage home schooling. I can tell you this, though: Not everyone who says that he/she is homeschooling is actually doing so. In my own town, one woman withdrew her teenage daughter and told the school district that she was going to homeschool her. Mom, however, went to work every day and left her daughter at home with Mom's 2nd husband. The daughter was not being given scholarly homeschooling, although she did receive a hands-on form of sex education.
Everyone is not honest.

[cinives]

"Education is not the filling of a bucket but the lighting of a fire." - Yeats

Those "lazy and self-serving" parents are not "homeschooling" their kid(s) - you are educating them in what amounts to a private school. And how are they "lazy and self-serving" by sending them to you as opposed to the public school ?

I'll be really radical about this. If the "little darlings" don't want to learn, they won't. Period. No matter how long you keep them in "school", whether it's at home or at public school. If the kid has no desire to learn even enough to eventually make their own way in the workworld and in life, nothing mommie daddy, or you do is going to change a thing. That kid will need to attend the school of hard knocks.

You said - Parents owe their children an education, and the first part of that is making sure they go to school, whether it be at the local building that looks like a prison, or the kitchen table.

I can't disagree more. If you haven't inculcated a love of learning of any type into the kid by middle school age, seat time does nothing. Better to send the kid out into the work world to let them see the consequences of ignorance and stupidity than to pollute a classroom with a mischevious, unmotivated slacker. Better a kid learn to dig ditches than be a slacker in a classoom. And, if the parent(s) want to insulate their kid from the school of hard knocks, then the parents will be forced to provide for junior (at least until they're old enough for welfare). Truancy laws do nothing in these situations.

[Tired of Taxes]

Not much more background.

But Garnati calls it a "test case":

http://www.southernillinoisan.com/articles/2005/04/29/top/102599.txt

[cinives]

It doesn't help that there is no substance to the article. We don't know anything, really - was she homeschooling and the authorities arbitrarily decided she wasn't, or what ?

It is a fact that an average child can make up in one morning the amount of learning that occurs in a school during one week. If a child is home from school due to long-term sickness and the district sends a visiting teacher, most state laws only provide that teacher for 2 hours a week - what does that tell you ?

What I'm driving at is that even if the kid did no book work the entire year, it is unlikely that the kid can't "catch up" fairly easily. People who get GEDs usually pass after about 4 months study, for example.

You have to get out of the school notion that learning can take place only at the pace and length that school authorities say so.

[blu]

And how are they "lazy and self-serving" by sending them to you as opposed to the public school ?

The parents are NOT being lazy by sending their kids to me. The parents who allowed their kids to stay home and watch tv all day and called it "homeschooling" are the lazy ones.

As for the rest of your post....maybe I didn't get my point across? The kids (and their parents) I teach are motivated, otherwise they wouldn't be here. If they are not motivated (and I'm so smart that I recognized "not motivated type behaviors" such as sleeping in class -pretty hard to miss when the kid is sitting across a table from me, not showing up, or simply not doing the work). Those kids are sent home. I won't waste their time or mine. If a career in food service is their goal, good for them.

Frankly, I'm a little offended by your post. You seem to imply that these kids are handcuffed to a chair and forced fed an education. You couldn't be more wrong. I wonder how much you actually know about homeschooling? If you knew anything, you'd know that if a kid wanted to learn to dig ditches, we (parents and I) would see to it that the kid learned how to dig ditches. He would also learn how to be on time, be polite, dress properly, and communicate effectively with his co-workers. Odd that you should pick ditch digging as a lower end of the scale type job. That is the one example I always give kids, as in "Any job you do, doctor or ditch digger, as long as you do it well, you'll be fine. There is honor in a job well done."

[nicene]

The people who pass the GED are grown adult who have a slightly longer attention span and know what a responsibility education is.

A child needs constant reinforncment of ideas to make them stick.

In grammar school you learn the basics, you build on these basics as your grow older and are able to retain more information. By the time you reach high school there is so much knowledge to be absorbed it does take all day to digest.

I am the product of the public inner city school, I'm also a magnet school kid (which is slightly different) but I am proud of my education. I went to a wonderful school with passionate teachers and more resources than some private schools (and i realize that my school was an exception) but this doesn't change the fact that my education was a 12 year ordeal not because i wasn't capable of understanding the information but because the slow progression of the educational system is meant to reinforce the ideas of a steady march through childhood to eventual adulthood.

I hear people complain everyday about kids growing up too fast, is the alternative to speed them through their education?