By MELISSA NIX
Mark is a divorced New Yorker. His three school-age children live in Fredericksburg with their mother, Kaye. All three have been religiously exempt, against his wishes, from having to attend school.
Mark and Kaye share joint custody of the two girls and a boy, ages 5, 7 and 8. (Mark and Kaye are not their real names; they have been changed to protect their children's privacy.)
According to Virginia law, if parents attest it would violate their religious beliefs to send their child to school, they can remove the child without penalty. Kaye has done so.
And unlike home-schooling parents, Kaye is not required to report her children's academic progress to the state.
Mark said he's going to law school to close the religious exemption "loophole."
After her oldest child spent three months in a Fredericksburg-area public kindergarten, Kaye removed the girl from school. Mark says school records show his daughter was late for kindergarten 17 times during that three-month period. Kaye agrees she was often late bringing their daughter to school, but couldn't recall the frequency. She was newly divorced and having a hard time, she said.
Kaye removed their daughter from kindergarten after being granted the right to home-school her. The following year, school officials granted Kaye's request for religious exemption for all three children.
On a late winter afternoon, Kaye sat in a Fredericksburg coffee shop and defended her decisions.
Kaye and her children practice Messianic Judaism, which she described as "a Jewish tradition in which you believe Jesus to be the promised Messiah." She accepted Christ as her savior at 9, she said.
"I pulled my daughter out of public school from day one because of my religious convictions."
Kaye said she first did so under the home-instruction statute because she didn't know about religious exemption. After joining the Home School Legal Defense Association, she learned more and realized she met exemption criteria, she said.
While Mark, who was living in New York, said he initially agreed to a trial run of home schooling for his oldest, he objected to all three children being granted religious exemption the following year. He believed his ex-wife was lax in educating their firstborn at home the first year.
As a single mom, Kaye is an anomaly in the religious exemption and home-schooling worlds.
"For anyone to say I'm taking the easy way out to be a stay-at-home, home-schooling mom--they don't understand. It was easier for me when I was working full time. I had a child-care subsidy.
"I make it work on $1,400 a month. We don't have cable, we don't eat out. I qualify for food stamps, but I don't take them. My conviction tells me that God told me to do this so God will be my provider."
Mark said that with Kaye being granted religious exemption, she has no impetus to be more conscientious about their children's education.
"The School Board is just giving her license to hurt my kids," he said.
When the children visited Mark over winter break, he had the girls, ages 7 and 8, take an informal reading and comprehension test, which was administered by Mark's mother, a reading specialist.
In an e-mail to The Free Lance-Star, the grandmother wrote that the oldest girl should be at a third-grade reading level, but scored at prekindergarten and kindergarten levels. The second girl should be at a second-grade reading level, but was reading well over two years behind, she wrote.
"While some may believe that my findings are skewed in light of the current conflict over their education, I can assure you that I am a professional and would not jeopardize my reputation by providing false information," the grandmother wrote, adding that Kaye never returned her calls after the assessment was done. "I hoped to provide her with some techniques and manipulatives to enhance my granddaughters' learning experience. Teaching is not as easy as it seems."
Kaye agrees that the oldest girl is behind, but not by one or two years.
"Am I being a negligent parent by giving her all the time she needs?" she asked. She said she was upset that Mark tested their children and questions the validity of the results.
"I can say without a shadow of a doubt that my children are progressing," Kaye said. The children take "unit and chapter tests and end-of-the-year tests" provided by the curricula she uses. "My assessments are based on those tests. They may not be standardized tests, but it doesn't take much to look them over and say, 'OK, you learned that. We can move on.'"
Mark claims their children are victims of the law and wants to fight it in court. He believes the exemption is unconstitutional, in that it denies their children due process and advances religious interests over others.
"I think if people actually knew that there's no oversight over these children, they would be, like, 'Are you joking?'" he said.
Will Shaw, who co-founded the Organization of Virginia Homeschoolers in 1993, has lobbied for years to protect religious exemption from legislative assault. He and his wife home-schooled their children under religious exemption.
"It's a philosophical question," Shaw said. "Do parents become morons when their children become school-age?"
While one might presume he would be unsympathetic to Mark's plight, he's not. Shaw thinks Mark has a case.
"Under the religious exemption statute, the law says, 'The school board shall excuse from attendance at school any pupil who, together with his parents, by reason of bona fide religious training or belief is conscientiously opposed to attendance at school.' That's plural!"
Shaw said the School Board failed to follow procedure if it didn't hear from both parents before granting the exemption.
"Understand, I am a proponent of religious exemption, but I want the [school] boards to properly apply it."
Marci Hamilton, a professor of public law at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York, specializes in constitutional law and the intersection of church and state. In 1997, she won a landmark case in the Supreme Court that invalidated the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. She thinks Virginia's religious exemption statute is unconstitutional and the law should be "void for vagueness."
"States may accommodate religious conduct, but they can't do it any way they want to," Hamilton said. "When just saying you are religious gives you benefits others do not share, that's an unconstitutional favoring of religious beliefs over all others."
She also had strong words for elected officials.
"You have elected officials acting like ostriches," she said. "They are unwilling to tackle any mistakes made by religious individuals and what happens is the child gets sacrificed in the process. Elected representatives have sold out the public good in blind deference to religion."
To reach MELISSA NIX:
Email: mnix@freelancestar.com
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From the Compulsory Attendance Statute (22.1-254): A school board shall excuse from attendance 1. Any pupil, who together with his parents, by reason of religious training or belief, is conscientiously opposed to attendance at school. For purposes of this subdivision, "bona fide religious training or belief" does not include essentially political, sociological or philosophical views or merely a personal moral code. |