Category: Homeschooling

Immigration Bastardy Update

Government Thugs, Homeschooling

From HSLDA comes this email:

Dear Kim,

We just received news from ICE that the Romeikes are going to be given a one-year stay of deportation on Wednesday. This is excellent news! According to our friends on Capitol Hill, this outcome is the direct result of your calls, your petition signature, and your outreach to Congress on this issue. Now the reality is that until this is signed on Wednesday this is not guaranteed, but we do expect a positive outcome. We are sending our attorney, Kevin Boden, to join the Romeike family while they meet with ICE next week.

According to Kevin, “I spoke personally with the ICE officer in Knoxville, who told me we can anticipate them signing the order of supervision out for another year. And while we are very grateful for this news, we are continuing to advocate for a long-term solution for the Romeike family to allow their permanent stay in the United States.”

As Kevin said, this stay is not a permanent solution. It’s a bandage, but a very important one—and one that could not have happened without your diligent efforts on the Romeikes’ behalf.

The long-term solution is that the Romeikes need to be granted either asylum or permanent residency status. While we still have work to do, we are very grateful for this temporary reprieve. Please continue to support the Romeikes as we move forward. To do that, please go to hslda.org/Romeike.

We will update you as to the result of the Wednesday meeting. Thank you so much for your signature, calls, emails, donations, and prayers.

Sincerely,

 

I don’t like the fact that this is only a temporary stay of deportation.  I bet that ICE and the apparatchiks who “changed” the original orders are hoping that in a year’s time we’ll all have forgotten about them and their persecution of this family.  But I’m going to be following it closely.

For the back story of this saga, here are Part One and Part Two.

Do Something To Stop The Bastardy

Gummint, Homeschooling

A little while back I talked about how some refugee family (actual refugees) had fled Germany to homeschool their kids, because the German public school system is like our own, only worse, and they being Christian, thought they could find refuge Over Here and school their children according to their own beliefs and not in the godlessness of the public school system (as prescribed by German law).

So now they’re facing deportation because Gummint.

It’s bad enough that the German government was fucking them over — the State fucking people over has a long and storied tradition Over There — but now our Gummint is fucking them over despite the family not having broken a single U.S. law.

I urge you all to follow this link and sign the HSDLA petition.  Please.

And pass the link on to everyone you know who might support this family.  Every bit helps.

“Change Of Orders”

Government Thugs, Homeschooling, Rights

Here’s a “connect the dots” moment.  I’ve mentioned this sad case before.  First, courtesy of Annie Holmquist, some background:

Would you be willing to risk arrest by the government in order to choose the best education for your child?

That’s the situation the Romeike family faced a number of years ago when they lived in Bissingen, Germany. They chose to homeschool their young grade school age children even though homeschooling was illegal in Germany. The reason? Their children were bullied and scared about the violence they were facing in their local state school.

That choice resulted in a visit from police, and soon three of their children, ages six to nine, were hauled off in a police vehicle and forced to attend the official state school. Recounting the 2006 incident, father Uwe Romeike told one media outlet that he “felt very helpless,” going on to note, “My children were crying, the police were shouting.”

Faced with hefty fines, the Romeikes fled Germany for America in 2008, seeking asylum. Settling in Tennessee, the family continued homeschooling while they fought for protection from their German persecutors. In 2014, the Department of Homeland Security allowed the family to stay in the U.S. “under order of supervision and indefinite deferred action status,” according to the Homeschool Legal Defense Association.

The family—which has now grown to include two more children and two in-laws since the trauma in Germany—has continued to dwell in the U.S. for over a decade, living peacefully and homeschooling their children.

Until now. 

Let the Government bastardy begin.

On Sept. 6, 2023, the Romeikes went in for their annual immigration visit and were shocked when they were told they had four weeks to get their passports in order and self-deport to Germany. “The family had no prior warning, and was offered no explanation, other than that there had been a ‘change of orders,’” a Home School Legal Defense Association media posting explained.

What could possibly have caused this “change in orders”?  Let us now connect the dots, with this little statement from the Biden Cabinet Secretary of Education:

“I don’t have too much respect for people that are misbehaving in public and acting like they know what’s right for kids.”

Seriously?

Here’s the thing.  Tennessee is a homeschool-friendly state — i.e. the state government has no problem with people homeschooling their kids.  But:  immigration is a federal issue.  So if the Dept. of Education drops a little whisper in the ear of INS, the federal government can step in and fuck with people like the hapless Romeike family, essentially making Tennessee’s jurisdiction meaningless.

There is, of course, another interesting aspect to all this.  Since arriving in the U.S., the Romeikes have had two more children — and according to U.S. law, the two kids are U.S. citizens (yeah, they’re “anchor babies”).  So can the federal government deport U.S. citizens when in fact neither they nor any of their family have broken any American laws?

I hope the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSDLA) climbs into this with might and main — because this is precisely the kind of matter that is in their remit.

Read all of Annie’s article, because The Naked Communist  is clearly fast becoming part of official U.S. government policy.

In the meantime, let us think about the proper treatment for an unelected gauleiter government official who thinks that parents don’t know what’s best for their kids, but the government does.

Just to make my own position clear on this issue:  if I were being put in a similar position when homeschooling my own kids, I’d be making that difficult decision about calling in the HSDLA, or just going to the guns.  My kids belong to me, not to the State, no matter what the State thinks.

Oh, and Annie:  welcome back to Intellectual Takeout.  You have been sorely missed.

Socialization

Education, Homeschooling, Seen On Campus

Homeschoolers are almost always grilled about their kids not learning “socialization skills” at home.

Uh huh.  In an article headlined “Teacher, 23, snuck into pupil’s home for sordid sex romp while his parents were away“, we see the associated links:

Well, I guess that does classify as socialization… I mean, “sex romps” says it all, really.

En passant:  “snuck”?  In a newspaper headline?

Bullying With Bureaucracy’s Tools

Education, Homeschooling

Here’s a good one  (“good” in the sense of fucking evil bastardy):

Madison Bratcher, the mother of a girl who was enrolled in the Bridgeport Independent School District (BISD), received an odd reaction from her daughter’s school after withdrawing her.
“Her daughter was bullied, exposed to inappropriate sexual talk by other students, and mistreated in classes and on the bus. Bratcher said she raised these issues with her daughter’s school, but they were not addressed,” according to a report from The Texan.
“All of these incidents show that Bridgeport doesn’t have the best interest of students at heart,” Bratcher told the news outlet.
Bratcher and her husband made the decision to homeschool McKinley, their daughter, who is in the sixth grade. They sent an email to the school notifying them that they were removing her from the school.

Which, according to Texas state law, is all you need to do if you want to homeschool your kid.  The response from the school?

The parents did not receive a reply to their email. Later, Bratcher received a phone call from the school informing her that registration was now open. She told the individual that she would not be enrolling her daughter and would be homeschooling her instead. School officials called twice more even after being told that Bratcher was educating her daughter at home.
On the third phone call, an official told her that she needed to fill out some forms indicating her intent to withdraw her daughter. This person also asked probing questions about what program Bratcher would be using to educate McKinley. “At this point, Bratcher said she became very uncomfortable and asked the school to send her the forms via email.”

And as for the content of the “forms”:

The forms required her to acknowledge “dangers, concerns, and disadvantages” of homeschooling. One of the forms also said the district could investigate a family if it has “reasonable cause … to believe that the assurance” given that the child would pursue a bona fide program of homeschooling is not true.

All of which is total bullshit, of course — the “investigation” procedure does not exist, is not backed by any Texas law or regulation, and is pure intimidation.

This all happened at the school level, apparently, because when Our Intrepid Mom got hold of the school district brass, she got a groveling apology, and an assurance that the “forms” were not authorized by the district.  (One hopes that this would result in someone getting fired for cause, but I wouldn’t put money on it.)

Why would the school stoop to this level?  Ah… follow the money.  Each student pulled from a state school means reduced state funding.

Texas residents, take note.  Other states’ residents:  find out the steps required by the state before you pull your kid.

Of Course You Can’t Do That

CRT, Education, Homeschooling, Marxists

It IS the most fundemental issue facing us right now:

The American Left (aided and abetted by some conservatives) believes that the government, not parents, should determine the content of a child’s mind—their ideas, their principles, and their values. A few weeks after McAuliffe’s tone-deaf faux pas, two authors writing in The Washington Post summed up the Left’s position in the title of their op-ed: “Parents claim they have the right to shape their kids’ school curriculum. They don’t.” Parents should have neither the right nor the authority, according to the Post’s writers, to determine the ideas taught to their children. This task should be left to the “experts”—to the experts of the Education Establishment. The authors go on to claim that “education should prepare young people to think for themselves, even if that runs counter to the wishes of their parents.”

And:

“When it comes to society’s interest in protecting children, the legal precedent is unambiguous: The rights of parents come second.” But the question is, if parents’ rights come second when it comes to protecting or educating their children, then whose rights come first? And the authors’ answer is obvious: society’s rights, the government’s rights, the rights of the public-policy experts trump those of parents.

I need to quit now, because bullshit like this makes one of my fingers twitch really badly.  Let’s call it this one, just for the official record:

(but I could be lying)

And that’s even after having completed my own kids’ homeschooling many years ago.  But despite that, this is a hill I’d be prepared to die on, if called to do so.

Quick reminder to the “experts” and the State-sponsored thugs they use for “enforcement” :  if you want to see a serious piece of social upheaval, start fucking with people’s kids.  Virginia parents’ reaction to the CRT curricula isn’t even an appetizer.

Our kids are ours.  They are not the possession of the State.  But go ahead and poke that nest of rattlesnakes with your short little sticks…