Читать книгу Homeschooling For Dummies - Jennifer Kaufeld - Страница 50

If you know what you’re supposed to do and what you aren’t, you’re already a long way toward resolving any potential conflict. Many times school officials demand to see curriculum, attendance, report cards, testing results — that they may or may not be entitled to by law. In my state, for instance, no one can ask me to show the curriculum I use with my children. (I’m not sure why they’d care anyway, but that’s beside the point.) If someone in an official capacity did ask, and I didn’t know that person well enough to know why they were asking, I would simply parrot my state regulations: “My state law requires this, and this, and this.”

Do I have any personal reasons for not wanting to show my Greek curriculum? Not really, except that nobody outside other homeschoolers or genuinely interested persons needs to paw through my books. It’s not necessary, and it tends to leave fingerprints.

If you’re like most homeschoolers around the country, you know your law a heap better than your local education officials do. Some of them simply assume that because they want to see this or that, you’ll willingly hand it over — they think you don’t know any better. Or they don’t know enough not to ask.

Many areas have so many homeschoolers, and they’ve worked with the homeschoolers for so many years, that the local officials already know the ropes. They’re so used to seeing portfolios and paperwork year after year that they glance through it looking for obvious errors, check it off, and move on to the next one. As homeschooling continues to grow, this will hopefully become the case almost everywhere.

Your goal is to become familiar enough with your state law that you know what is permissible and what isn’t. Reading through the law (or even a reputable interpretation) may give you enough information to talk about it coherently. Knowing what the law says also helps when you get questions from fellow citizens. Most homeschoolers find themselves hearing all kinds of questions when they meet strangers who realize they teach their children at home. (Some of those questions can be a bit intrusive, and you have no obligation to defend yourself against random nosy or opinionated people.)