By CHRIS POWELL
In principle children can’t have too many people looking out for them. So state legislators are fairly concerned about the recent alleged abuse of three children who were withdrawn from public school on parental claims that they would be home-schooled. One of the children was murdered at home. Another died at home in circumstances said to involve sexual assault. Another says he was imprisoned by his stepmother for 20 years.
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The reasonable premise of legislation being pursued in the General Assembly is that these awful results might have been prevented if the children had been presented to school or child-protection authorities once a year for a wellness check and maybe an educational proficiency test as a condition of home-schooling.
But a new amendment to the proposal would require the parents of home-schooled children to identify everyone living in their home for a background check by the state Department of Children and Families (DCF), as if state government should have the authority to determine who lives with a home-schooled child. That’s totalitarian.
It’s also hypocritical. For Connecticut is full of abuse and neglect of public-schooled children, abuse and neglect that schools and the DCF don’t catch even as catching it would be much easier where children are already gathered in a government institution. There are no formal wellness checks on public-school students, even as so many of them are not properly fed at home that state government wants to provide free breakfasts and lunches to all public-school students.
Two years ago the grotesque neglect of a public-schooled student in Hartford became a scandal. The girl was graduated from Hartford Public High School even though she was illiterate and arithmetically could do only simple addition. How could she go through 12 years of schooling without her teachers, school administrators, and parent noting and doing something about it?
Hartford’s school superintendent and the state education commissioner promised investigations but never produced any. No legislators asked and none proposed wellness checks for public-school students or even occasional education proficiency tests to ensure that they were learning sufficiently before being advanced a grade.
Even now legislators seem to assume that none of the thousands of learning-disabled and troubled children receiving “special education” in the state’s public schools need annual wellness checks, since teachers and school administrators see them every day. But as is shown by the case of the illiterate Hartford graduate and the vast need for free meals in the public schools, merely seeing the students provides no assurance that they are in good condition.
Proficiency testing for advancement to the next grade would produce valuable evaluations, but the results of such evaluations would horrify the public and might mortify educators and legislators.
So as a political matter only potential problems with the small number of children who are home-schooled can be examined officially, only home-schooling parents can be held to account by state government, and public education in Connecticut must remain an accountability-free zone. Hence the obsession of legislators with the few kids who manage to escape it.
EUPHEMISM CURES NOTHING: Another liberal euphemism is in play in the General Assembly. Some legislators want to allow drug addiction-treatment clinics to become “harm-reduction centers” where the addicted will be encouraged to inject themselves with heroin, fentanyl, and other poisons under the supervision of people trained to administer opioid-reversal medicines like Narcan. The clinics also would distribute new syringes and drug-testing devices to the addicts so their next drug use might avoid infection and overdosing.
Addiction is a tough issue, but “harm-reduction centers” facilitate and rationalize addiction as much as they help cure it. Additionally, the drugs involved remain illegal under federal law, the centers could never be sure of the potency of the drugs their clients would be injecting, and state government’s facilitating their use could get Connecticut in more trouble with the federal government.
Regular drug rehabilitation would be better, but facilitating more drug use would be cheaper, which may be why legislators are more enthusiastic about it.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
Chris Powell column 