The California Court of Appeals reversed its earlier decision today and ruled that homeschooling is constitutional. Worldnetdaily.com had this report:
An appeals court in California has ruled that state law does permit homeschooling “as a species of private school education” but that statutory permission for parents to teach their own children could be “overridden in order to protect the safety of a child who has been declared dependent.”
The long-awaited case resolves many of the questions that had developed in homeschooling circles across the nation when the same court earlier found that parents had no such rights - statutorily or constitutionally - in California.
The ruling released this morning by the 2nd Appellate District in Los Angeles said the dispute came out of juvenile court proceedings in which court-appointed lawyers for two children demanded “an order that they be sent to private or public school, rather than educated at home by their mother.”
The dependency court did not agree, “primarily based on its view that parents have an absolute constitutional right to homeschool their children,” the appeals court said. The lawyers then advanced their case to the appeals level, which earlier granted the order.
“We filed our original opinion on Feb. 28, 2008, granting the petition on the bases that: (1) California statutory law does not permit homeschooling; and (2) this prohibition does not violate the U.S. Constitution,” the opinion said.
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Mike Farris and the entire team at HSLDA and other organizations who worked so hard on this case are to be commended.