Special Situations in Homeschooling Your Child (continued)

Avoiding referrals is the best way to prevent CPS intervention in your homeschooling experience. Compliance with one of the legal ways to homeschool is crucial. The following factors may result in a referral: Pulling children out of public or private school after a dispute with the school (i.e.: ongoing truancy problems); custody battles; welfare referrals; or neighborhood disputes. What can you do if you are in one of the "high-risk" groups for referral? First, it may be in your family's best interest to consider a public independent study program, a charter school offering homeschooling, or a program offered by a commercial private school. Second, know your legal rights.

If you are involved in a custody situation or are investigated by Children's Protective Services, you will need to consult immediately with a local attorney who is familiar with not only homeschool law but also custody and juvenile dependency law. If you ever have any hostile contacts regarding homeschooling, please inform an HSC board member. HSC maintains a list of attorneys and experts with experience in these areas or can assist your attorney with homeschooling questions.

Also see:

• How Can Homeschoolers Avoid Truancy Officers or Children's Protection Service?
• Responding to a Visit from Children's Protective Services
• Protecting Ourselves from Truancy and CPS Investigations: Avoiding Referrals
• Children's Protective Services, Educational Neglect and Homeschooling

E. Welfare Benefits

Families should be able to receive welfare benefits and still homeschool their children using any of the legal options, including operating a home-based private school. As soon as a homeschool family is denied welfare benefits based on a truancy allegation, a verification of enrollment and attendance in school should be provided to the agency, together with a copy of the private school affidavit, if you operate your own school. Under most circumstances, no additional school records or information should be given to the agencies. Your local legal aid office can help you keep your benefits. If the attorney needs information about the legality of homeschooling, he or she can contact HSC Legal (or 1-888-HSC-4440) for further information. Most of these cases can be handled quickly and easily at the first contact, but become more complicated if not handled effectively at the beginning.

F. Communities with Curfews

If you live in a community with a curfew, HSC recommends that your child have a school identification card (which can be made at Kinkos) and a note from your school administrator whenever he or she is out in the community. Your child should be aware of the risk that he or she may be stopped and questioned by the police, and he or she should be prepared to show the authority the school identification card and be able to get in touch with you at all times.

Also see:

• list of communities with curfews

F. Do public high schools accept homeschool credits when a homeschooler enrolls in public high school?

Recently a few parents have asked whether public schools can refuse to accept credits from non-accredited schools, including private homeschools. Unfortunately, the answer is yes. In fact, they don't have to accept credits from ACCREDITED private schools. This has practical implications for homeschooling families, as we discuss at the end of this article.

Public schools generally accept credits from other public schools, although we can't find anything in the Education Code or the associated regulations that requires that; we believe they probably do so under a more nebulous "full faith and credit" concept that requires one state to respect proper governmental actions taken in other states, such as California respecting your marriage license from Connecticut. For instance, if you move to California from Alabama after your child has completed sixth grade there, the local public school usually accepts that placement, even if it feels the old school was not as good as the current school. In special situations, such as a prior school permitting acceleration for a gifted child, they might quibble, and, in the higher grades especially, there will be issues about whether prerequisites for various courses have been met by classes taken at other public schools, but for the most part the public schools give credit to their counterparts throughout the state and in other states. We believe this would mean that if a child is transferring into a regular "brick and mortar" public school from a public independent study program, either a district ISP or charter school, they should respect the placement used by, and give credit for work satisfactorily completed at, the independent study program. We can't, however, find any regulations that would require that.

Individual school districts are given wide latitude in assessing the appropriate placement of incoming students who are transferring other than from other public schools. While we believe that most public schools would respect placement decisions made by private schools they think are the same as or similar to public schools (think of the more rigorous "college prep" type private schools, or the large Catholic parochial school system), they are more likely to challenge work done at smaller schools about which they know nothing, including private family schools. The following is right from the California Department of Education website's FAQs:

QUESTION: I have been home schooling and would like to enroll my child in a private or public school. The schools in my area refuse to place my child in what I believe is the appropriate grade level and are not accepting the credits my child has earned through home schooling. May the schools refuse to accept credits earned through home schooling?