According to the Empire Center for Public Policy, over the past 10 years, homeschool enrollment has increased by 178%. Last year, there were more than 50,000 homeschoolers across New York state with over 14,000 in New York City.<\/p>\n
Families choose to homeschool for a variety of reasons, however, for one school district, the choice to homeschool has now become a legal matter after a superintendent has said she would not sign a letter that shows a student completed their homeschool education due to how their final assessment is administered.<\/p>\n
Although she does have the legal right to do so, a homeschool parent in the district is concerned about the impact the new policy could have.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Andrea Denekamp has been homeschooling her son, Warren, since the pandemic, when she saw how he was being taught remotely.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI had a really good look at what they were doing and some of the stuff online, even that they were sending home. And I wasn’t too thrilled with the perspectives they were teaching, or the quality or the content of the material, \u201c said Denekamp.<\/p>\n
Denekamp has continued to homeschool her children ever since. But last August, she got a message from the Edmeston Central School District she wasn’t expecting.<\/p>\n
Superintendent Christine Nichols informed parents they are no longer accepted administrators for the final assessment test. Nichols said that person needs to be state certified and not related to the student.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe is claiming parents cannot be trusted to be unbiased evaluators of their children’s progress,\u201d said Denekamp.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Spectrum News 1 reached out to Nichols about the change and she issued a statement saying,”The district’s decision does not change a family’s right to educate their children at home, and a parent may still administer an assessment themselves. However, unless the year-end assessment is administered through a qualified individual with the consent of the superintendent, a letter of substantial equivalency will not be issued.”<\/p>\n
\u201cBy far, New York is the most highly regulated state in the nation,\u201d said Ralph Rodriguez, a staff attorney with the Homeschool Legal Defense Association.<\/p>\n
He says there is a significant amount of touch points that a homeschool family has with a school district.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI think, all told, we’re talking about seven pieces of documentation, from the letter of intent all the way to the final quarterly report, along with the annual assessment,\u201d said Rodriguez.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Rodriguez said the superintendent should give a legitimate reason based on merits of the situation.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cOnce again, you’re dealing with the family several times throughout the school year. You should see by now whether this homeschool program is up to par or not,\u201d said Rodriguez.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Denekamp, a former college professor, showed her weekly lesson plans, which she also has to submit to the school district.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Denekamp says hiring someone to administer the final assessment test is not cheap. She says, on average, it could run close to $100 per hour and the test takes about four hours.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThis could cost significantly more because, you know, testing for a young child is not usually, like, let’s do this for four hours straight. It’s usually split up over multiple days in multiple periods,\u201d said Denekamp.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The students are ultimately the ones most affected by this and Denekamp’s son, who’s beginning his senior year, is concerned.<\/p>\n
\u201cWithout that letter of equivalence, then it would be pretty hard to get a job, of course, earning money. The more money you earn, the more you can do,\u201d said Warren Denekamp.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Andrea Denekamp and a handful of other parents have filed an appeal with the commissioner of the state Department of Education.<\/p>\n
Rodriguez said this could hopefully be resolved by spring.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"According to the Empire Center for Public Policy, over the past 10 years, homeschool enrollment has increased by…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":312781,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[203,257,67,9,24,55,54,49,12,56,23503,200],"class_list":["post-312780","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-app-education","tag-central-ny","tag-education","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-new-york-city-headlines","tag-new-york-city-news","tag-new-york-state","tag-news","tag-ny","tag-shalon-stevens","tag-vod"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312780","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=312780"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312780\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/312781"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=312780"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=312780"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=312780"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}