Christina Samuels writes at
Education Week:
A draft proposal in Connecticut that home-schooled students with disabilities receive individualized education programs and be monitored by their local school districts is meeting with resistance, the Hartford Courant reports.
The recommendation is one of several under consideration from an expert panel in the wake of the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary in December 2012 that left 20 children and six adults dead. The draft proposal was released Feb. 12; the final recommendations are expected to be submitted to Gov. Dannel P. Malloy Friday.
...
The chairman of the panel told the Courant that the reporting requirement, if approved, would only apply to children who had once attended public school. But the recommendation infringes on the rights of parents to educate their children as they see fit, home-schooling advocates say.
Deborah G. Stevenson, the executive director of National Home Education Legal Defense in Southbury, Conn., has written a lengthy rebuttal to the proposed recommendation, noting that Lanza was not home schooled and that federal law already provides a mechanism for children to be evaluated for special services with parental consent (this provision of the IDEA is called "child find.")
