Conservapedia:Andy Schlafly on Eagle Forum Live/segment 9

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Segment 9 - Previous - Next

Caller: Andrew.

Transcription: Phyllis in normal text. Andy in bold text. Caller in green.

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Hello Andrew, welcome to the program.

Hey Phyllis, hey Andy, thanks for taking my call. I don't need to tell either one of you that the public schools have gotten progressively worse over the years, and they're likely to get much worse with the new administration coming to Washington. And so I predict that there are going to be a lot of parents who are going to want to increasingly get their kids out of public schools and explore homeschool options. Probably many of these parents don't know where to begin, so if you had to offer some advice to the steps that need to be taken to homeschooler children just in a very quick bullet point format, what would they be and do parents have to register homeschool children with the local public schools?

Andrew, that varies from state to state. New Jersey is one of about 9 states where there are no requirements at all. You don't have to register, you don't have to tell anyone, you just simply pull your child out of public school, get connected with one of the homeschooling groups that you can find on the internet. You can just search your state and find out what the homeschooling groups are and call them up. You'll see there's a church or a community center where they get together and you start to meet them and then you learn of the courses that are available by word of mouth and so on. In some other states you do have to register. Pennsylvania, where homeschooling is also very popular, there is a pretty intensive regulatory scheme where you have to keep track of the hours that you're instructing your child and so on. So it depends on the state.

And in some states don't they allow homeschoolers to participate in public school athletics?

That's right. That was the deal that they made in Pennsylvania, where the homeschool families agreed to more regulation, and in exchange they got the right to participate in the public school sports programs.

Is that a good deal?

No. No. We're against that deal in New Jersey. That's being offered to us in New Jersey and we say no, we don't want that. We don't want the regulation. Really, it's a mixed bag competing in the public school sports because then you're back in the culture. You're back with the same issues of drugs and profanity and hostility to Christianity and so on. We'd rather develop our own sports teams, and we're doing that. We have our own basketball team. We have our own baseball team, and so on.