“Let Me in or I’ll Huff and I’ll Puff and … I’ll Take Your Kids!”
Wed, 03/21/2012 - 9:20am
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Suspicion
It's a real shame how often homeschooling is a reason for suspicion in and of itself.
Wed, 03/21/2012 - 10:17am
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The link does not work
The link does not work
Wed, 03/21/2012 - 10:26am
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Fixed it
I always seem to forget a " when doing a link. :/
Wed, 03/21/2012 - 5:18pm
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We open our curtains
After each of our children have been born, the hospital has offered to have a visitor come to our house for a visit just to see if there was anything they could help with (I think it was through the county). This is not something that we were singled out for, it is offered to all new parents in the area. With our first child we were actually able to get help with finding a lactation specialist when my wife was having trouble nursing. I do not like the idea of overzealous bureaucrats anymore than anyone else, but we wanted to let people know that we have nothing to hide. That way if in the future anyone makes some false accusations against us, the visitors who came to our house will already have documentation that we have a normal stable home (unless they are completely biased and crazy which is a possibility I guess). If on the other hand they go back and find a record that we always refused visits, then that in itself might raise red flags. I agree that the 4th amendment should be followed, but I also understand that we are living in the reality of a different world and we have chosen to deal with that reality by being as transparent as possible. Besides we were able to have a real good testimony with the workers who came to visit us and they left as friends.
Thu, 03/22/2012 - 6:24am
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Voluntary
That was voluntary- I used a lactation consultant with my youngest child because he was tongue-tied and couldn't nurse, and she helped me find a pediatric dentist who would clip it for me. She was great. Voluntary is good. Coercion is bad.
Here we are talking about illegal threats made in order to gain entrance into a home to follow up on bogus claims. In the above mentioned case, the social workers were following up on an anonymous tip that was 2 months old. So why all the carrying on like the kids' lives were in danger? The bottom line is that social workers and police are NOT above the law. We should never sacrifice our 4th Amendment rights to pacify gov't workers who are not in compliance with the law.
We should also take into consideration what unreasonable searches do to children. I do not believe we should subject our children to the trauma of interviews with leading questions, and body searches by complete strangers because someone thinks homeschoolers are weird. I could give you a long list of homeschoolers I've known who were reported to CPS because family members didn't like the idea of homeschooling, and nosy, prejudiced neighbors called in reports for things like hanging their laundry on a clothesline (where the neighbors could see the family's underwear which obviously means they are being sexually abused), having a privacy fence around their backyard (which means they had 'something' to hide), owning too large of a dog (?), boarding their broken windows up after a storm (which also means they had something to hide, because normal people would have just left their busted windows alone, right?), letting their kids play in the yard during 'normal' school hours (because all home education must take place between the hours of 8 and 3)... I could go on. But this is nothing but discrimination and harassment, and homeschoolers are U.S. citizens too, with all the protections and rights that other 'normal' people have. http://www.freesmileys.org/smileys.php ][img ]http://www.freesmileys.org/smileys/smiley-confused002.gif[/img ]
Thu, 03/22/2012 - 7:57am
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JD Miller wrote:
...we wanted
...we wanted to let people know that we have nothing to hide. That way if in the future anyone makes some false accusations against us, the visitors who came to our house will already have documentation that we have a normal stable home (unless they are completely biased and crazy which is a possibility I guess). If on the other hand they go back and find a record that we always refused visits, then that in itself might raise red flags. I agree that the 4th amendment should be followed, but I also understand that we are living in the reality of a different world and we have chosen to deal with that reality by being as transparent as possible.
JD,
I appreciate what you are saying. But every time we lay down our rights out of fear we give up a little bit more of our (and our children's) future. Somewhere, sometime, someone has to make a stand for what is right. The sooner this happens in the process, the easier it always is to forestall the encroachment of wrong.