Legal News

Appeals court rules home-schooling parents need teaching credentials

By Jason Siegel

A California appellate court ruled that parent's home-school their children without getting teaching credentials, KCRW's "Which Way L.A." reported (LISTEN).

The ruling is being appealed to the California Supreme Court and enforcement will likely be put on hold if the court agrees to review the ruling, the San Jose Mercury News reported. It stems from a case against a Lynnwood couple facing allegations of physical abuse involving some of their eight children. A lawyer representing two of the children requested that they attend a public or private school rather than being home-schooled by their mother.

A trial court disagreed but the 2nd District Court of Appeal unanimously overruled that decision, finding that parents don't have a constitutional right to home-school their children and that the mother in the case was violating state laws by teaching without a teaching credential, the Los Angeles Times reported.

People who disagree with the ruling, including the Home School Legal Defense Association, said the ruling amounted to a ban on home-schooling in California.

Supporters of the ruling disagree and say the ruling didn't change law. "They just affirmed that the current California law, which has been unchanged since the last time it was ruled on in the 1950s, is that children have to be educated in a public school, an accredited private school, or with an accredited tutor," Leslie Heimov, the executive director of the Children's Law Center of Los Angeles, told the San Francisco Chronicle.

The Children's Law Center of Los Angeles represented the two Lynnwood children in the case. 

Full post as published by Legal Pad | LA on March 07, 2008 (boomark / email).