Connecticut’s hotly debated homeschool bill meets parental pushback

A homeschooling regulation bill in Connecticut, now under consideration by state lawmakers, has parents like Timothy Knotts worried. Knotts, a father of four homeschooled children, believes the legislation will intrude on his and other families’ educational decisions. As the president of TEACH CT, an association of Christian homeschoolers, Knotts said the bill has brought fear to families across the state who could be viewed with unwarranted suspicion under the proposal.

“It’s a pretty gross intrusion of the state into parents’ lives, into family lives,” Knotts told me. “Schools don’t have a great track record of educating children and doing it well. And so to force private schoolers and homeschoolers to submit themselves to examinations by a failing school system is sort of ironic, at the very least.”

Connecticut’s House Education Committee passed a homeschool regulation bill in a narrow vote last week. Proponents of the legislation say it protects children’s safety while equipping parents with extra educational resources. But homeschool advocates say the measure misidentifies the problem it claims to address, targeting homeschooling parents instead of reforming the state’s existing child services.

Under the bill, a family seeking to withdraw their child from public school would have to notify school district officials, who would then contact the Department of Children and Families. DCF would confirm the child’s parent or guardian is not the subject of a protective order or on the department’s abuse and neglect registry before approving the homeschooling request. The bill would require parents to inform school officials of their intention to homeschool again every year.

The measure would also require families to prove they are providing their children with “equivalent instruction” on par with public schools. Families would have to submit a portfolio demonstrating the child’s work for the past year or have their child take a standardized test. The bill also includes a measure allowing homeschooled students to take up to two classes a year from their local public school and participate in extracurricular activities.

Last week, four Democrats and 16 Republicans voted against the bill while 26 Democrats voted in favor. If the bill passes the House and Senate and receives Gov. Ned Lamont’s signature, it would go into effect for the 2028-29 school year.

Legislators proposed the bill after two high-profile cases of child abuse occurred in Connecticut. Jacqueline “Mimi” Torres-García was found dead in a plastic bin two months after her mother withdrew the 11-year-old from school under the guise of homeschooling in 2024. The girl’s mother, Karla García, and García’s boyfriend, Jonatan Nanita, were charged with murdering the child by starvation. Their cases are still ongoing.

In 2025, authorities arrested a woman in Waterbury, Conn., for allegedly imprisoning and torturing her stepson for decades. When the boy was in fifth grade, his stepmother used homeschooling to explain his absence from public school. He is now an adult.

Connecticut’s bill tackles the reality that some parents can use homeschooling as a shield to engage in abuse and neglect, said Tess Ulrey, the executive director at Coalition for Responsible Home Education. The organization says it has tracked nearly 500 cases of abuse of homeschooled children, involving nearly 200 child deaths, occurring between 2000 and 2024.

“I’m hopeful that the conversation can be reframed to what is best for children,” Ulrey said. “Regardless of which side of the aisle you’re on, I really hope that people are able to center the children in this.”

Connecticut is one of 12 states that do not require parents to notify districts of their intent to homeschool, with New Hampshire considering legislation that would make it the 13th.

A lack of required notifications can make it difficult for child welfare services to follow up on children, Ulrey argued. She added that the Connecticut bill would add a protection that only one other state has. Tennessee is currently the only state that bars parents from withdrawing their children from school if the parents are under an active child protective services investigation.

“Connecticut has absolutely no safeguards for children in terms of homeschooling,” Ulrey said. “Even putting one, one or two things in place … I think the families are scared of what that means, because they’re at zero right now. We’re asking them to go from zero to one.”

A week before the Education Committee’s vote, thousands of individuals gave verbal and written testimony in response to the bill. Most speakers opposed the bill during the nearly 19-hour-long public hearing.

There is no evidence that the extra control the bill proposes would actually prevent abuse, Brian Ray, the president of National Home Education Research Institute (NHERI), said in an interview. According to a 2022 study that Ray and a University of Buckingham professor conducted, homeschooling is not a significant risk factor for child abuse, compared with demographic factors.

Ray argued that while bills like Connecticut’s often come in response to evil incidents that elicit a strong emotional response from the public, they ultimately give more control to the government in hopes that it can prevent sin.

“You have to have evidence that controlling people is going to improve society before you do it. There’s not, there just isn’t,” Ray said. “That would be like saying to somebody, ‘Well, if you are going to maybe choose Roman Catholic schooling, we might need to put you through more hoops, because some time ago, there were Catholic priests harming children.’”

Ray also pointed out that personnel at public schools still harm students, despite the presence of mandated reporters. Nearly 12% of U.S. students experience sexual misconduct by school personnel before they graduate. “This whole idea of focusing on, trying to stop this minuscule number of homeschool parents who do bad things, is completely misplaced,” he said.

In the Waterbury case, the former principal of the elementary school, Tom Pannone, told local media that the school notified DCF 20 times over concerns about the abused student’s wellbeing. “We knew it. We reported it. Not a [profanity] thing was done,” he told NBC Connecticut last year.

During the public hearing for Connecticut’s bill, parents also expressed concern about the equivalent instruction requirements. They said required benchmarks are the reason they withdrew their children from public schools in the first place—children with autism, medical needs, or accelerated achievement might not fit into these. The DCF cautioned the Education Committee that it would struggle to process the new notices from families, which it estimated could be as many as 2,000 a year.

Knotts, the homeschooling father of four, says he’s concerned passing a bill like this wouldn’t stop legislators from continuing to restrict homeschooling.

“This is just this version of the law.
If they implement this, what comes next year?” he asked. “Or what comes the year after that, that further clamps down on homeschool rights and privileges?