Are abusive parents hiding behind Iowa's home-school laws?
Seth Johnson, 7, of Plymouth, Minn., shared this in common with Natalie Finn, the West Des Moines teen who was starved to death allegedly by her parents: Both were adopted out of foster care and home-schooled.
Seth died in March 2015 on a vomit-stained mattress, bruises all over his underdeveloped frame, in the home of his mom and dad, Timothy and Sarah Johnson.
The official cause of Seth’s death was acute pancreatitis and possible sepsis. But the parents were charged criminally in December, after a yearlong investigation, because they treated their sick boy with prayer, Neosporin and “medical honey” instead of taking him to a doctor.
Authorities said they didn’t know about Seth’s death until almost nine months after it happened. He died in the presence of a 16-year-old sibling while his parents were at an out-of-town wedding.
Natalie Finn’s parents, Nicole and Joseph Finn of West Des Moines, face multiple felony charges in the death of their 16-year-old daughter and the alleged torture of two younger siblings, 14 and 15, who had to be hospitalized when discovered by authorities, according to a state senator briefed on the case last month.
Sen. Matt McCoy said the children were the subject of numerous reports of child abuse for years, mostly by school officials.
“But once they fell off the school radar, they lost them,” McCoy said.
School officials were told “Natalie was on a self-study course with her parents, and she did not need to report to school. Her sister and brother were also on that track,” McCoy said.
Iowa does not require checks on home-schooled children. But some child-welfare experts and advocates, including a national nonprofit that advocates for home-schooled children, say those who abuse or exploit children have used home schooling as a ruse to keep at bay officials obligated to report abuse.
They believe school officials should check in on home-schooled children to assure their safety and education needs are being met.
Some home-school advocates argue such checks would represent an unnecessary government intrusion and a violation of privacy rights.
Bound to a chair
From 2000 to last year, the Coalition for Responsible Home Education, based outside Chicago, identified at least 320 home-schooled children who had been severely neglected and abused. Of those, 116 had died.
One-fourth of those children, 88 in all, had been adopted, according to Rachel Coleman, executive director of the coalition.
Included in that database are children such as 10-year-old Timothy Boss, who was beaten to death by his parents in Remsen, Ia., in 2000.
The special-needs child, who was among four adopted and seven biological children of Lisa and Donald Boss Jr., spent the night before his death bound to a chair in the family’s basement. He and his siblings were locked in that basement at night and forced to wear diapers for urinating on the floor.
The Bosses said Timothy was being home-schooled during the 1999-2000 school year. School officials tried to contact the family for an end-of-year academic assessment, but the Bosses claimed the boy had returned to Michigan to live with family.
A year and a half later, relatives in Michigan reported they had not seen Timothy. Two years after his death, his body was found buried in the family’s basement, and his parents were charged with murder.
Donald Boss is serving a life sentence for murder. His former wife, Lisa, was given a 50-year sentence for attempted murder, voluntary manslaughter, child endangerment and willful injury.
Coleman said there often is no education taking place in so-called home-school situations when there is physical abuse discovered.
“We believe there are some very basic fixes that can prevent at least some of what is going on,” she said.
The torture of children
While home schooling works well for as many as 2 million children nationally, abusers can use it to isolate children, according to Dr. Barbara Knox, medical director of the University of Wisconsin Child Protection Program in Madison, Wis., which serves eastern Iowa.
Knox and five other researchers conducted groundbreaking research in 2014 examining 28 cases of extreme abuse of children in five states.
"I wanted to know if there were any red flags to get children protected before they wound up victims of homicide," she said.
Nearly 90 percent of the children were isolated from anyone outside the immediate family. Three-quarters were put in solitary confinement in rooms or, in one case, a clothes dryer.
Most had their food and water restricted. Nearly half of the victims’ siblings had been coerced into participating in the torture.
In almost half the cases, children who had been enrolled in school were removed to be home-schooled, Knox said.
"But that was a guise," she said. "There was no home schooling or little home schooling taking place. The move typically happened after a child-abuse investigation."
Iowa judges have authority to require a child to go to public school when abuse has been confirmed, but lawyers who act as guardians of children say judges often don't when requested.
Knox said she believes children placed into home schooling after a child abuse investigation should be subject to mandatory checks for a year by child protective workers.
"When they have had an open case and get pulled out of school, that kid is at much higher risk of being victimized," she said.
Iowa: Some of the least oversight
In Iowa, no one who wants to home school a child must undergo a criminal background check, as teachers do. They don’t have to have a high school diploma or demonstrate any proficiency in being an educator.
Home-schooled children don’t have to check in with anyone, including the local school district, if their parents don't want them to.
Parents home schooling their children but not working through a school district program are automatically considered in compliance with the state’s compulsory attendance laws for youth 6 to 16, according to Nicole Proesch, general counsel for the Iowa Department of Education.
“So if someone calls you out if your kid isn’t enrolled this year, if the parent said, 'I’m doing (independent private instruction) this year,' you could not file truancy on that child,” she said.
McCoy said details he’s learned since the Natalie Finn case, and a similar abuse case recently reported by Watchdog, underscore the need for legislation he’s introduced that would put more scrutiny on the most at-risk home-schooled children — those not already touching base with a school or home-school coordinator.
“It looks like one of the first moves an abusive parent makes is they pull the kid out of the school, and the whole case goes dark,” he said. “We’ve got this system in place … and we allow parents to home-school. As a safety net, we need to have their safety checked on."
McCoy, a Democrat from West Des Moines, where Natalie died, said he is drafting legislation to require that children who aren't working with school districts through a home-school coordinator or dual enrollment be checked on every three months.
“The bill will require parents check in their children with the district’s home-school coordinator outside the presence of the parent,” he said. “I would have liked to do it at the (family’s) house, but I got a lot of pushback on that.”
Sen. Herman Quirmbach, a ranking Democrat on the Education Committee, said he also is working on legislation that would provide more accountability for independently home-schooled students with no ties to school districts or home-school coordinators.
He, too, said he's heard of students in Iowa who have been pulled out of school when mandatory abuse reports are made.
Quirmbach, of Ames, said he knows his legislation would create more work for parents who home-school responsibly, but it's necessary.
"The (Finn) situation demonstrates that there just needs to be some responsibility," he said.
The proposal is opposed by home-school advocates and at least one child welfare reform group that advocates for the rights of parents.
Bill Gustoff, legislative liaison for the Network of Iowa Christian Home Educators, said while Natalie's death is a tragedy, such suggestions are misguided.
"This case has nothing to do with home schooling, and increasing government red tape imposed upon law-abiding home-school families is not the answer," he said. "Clearly there was a breakdown in the child welfare system that allowed a healthy, vibrant young girl to be starved to death even after this situation was reported by school officials, neighbors and Natalie’s siblings."
Richard Wexler, executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, said: “If there is a purpose for regulating home schooling, it should be for maintaining educational standards, but never for surveillance. It’s very reasonable to have regulations geared to what children are learning. But the idea that you would try to spy on home-schooling families is reprehensible.”
Wexler likened any systematic attempt to monitor home-schooled children to President Donald Trump’s campaign suggestion that Muslims should be banned from entering the U.S. in an effort to prevent terrorist attacks.
McCoy notes that the U.S. has no system in place for regularly checking on all children, but that schools remain the best vehicle to do so.
Introducing financial incentives
Police officers, doctors, nurses, dentists and even chiropractors in Iowa are among mandatory reporters of child abuse, which means they must make a report within 24 hours when they believe it has occurred.
Teachers, principals and other school district employees also are mandatory reporters and have long been among the most active watchdogs for children across the state.
The Iowa Department of Human Services received more than 50,000 calls to the state's Child Abuse Hotline last year, and about 14 percent, or nearly 7,200 of those calls, were from educators.
"The role of the mandatory reporter is critical in identifying and reporting suspected child abuse," said Amy Lorentzen McCoy, an agency spokeswoman.
Iowa is widely considered one of the most relaxed home-schooling environments in the country: The state is one of 11 that do not require parents to notify anyone if they are home schooling.
Some home-school organizations and state legislators would like to further expand parents' educational choices. This year, lawmakers have introduced at least two pieces of legislation that would extend educational savings accounts to parents who educate children at home.
Senate File 29, sponsored by Sen. Brad Zaun, R-Urbandale, would eliminate the Department of Education, redistribute its responsibilities and allow private school or home-schooled students to spend their state education funding on personal education expenses.
Zaun said reimbursement for expenses such as tutoring could be sought from the student's education account, but the vendor would have to be approved by the state of Iowa. The vast majority of money, he said, could be used for the student's college expenses.
"None of the money would go directly to parents," he said.
Sen. Jerry Behn, R-Ames, also is sponsoring similar school-choice legislation that includes savings accounts, but it does not abolish the Department of Education, Zaun said.
Such programs promise flexibility and a way to circumvent state constitutional provisions that prohibit public spending on religious schools, but critics fear they will create a more unregulated system, leading to waste and abuse.
Tammy Wawro, president of the Iowa State Education Association and a teacher from Cedar Rapids, said she supports school choice. But Iowa already has children who suffer “academic injury” from parents who are ill-equipped to teach at home. Often, those students re-enter public schools lagging behind their classmates, she said.
Wawro said she fears financial incentives will not only worsen that kind of neglect but widen the abuse of children who aren't on anyone’s radar.
“Why would we not want those children to be seen outside their homes?" she asked. "For pure safety reasons, we don’t want them falling through the cracks.”
Wawro also sees hypocrisy in moves by state leaders to increase accountability by public schools while requiring little from home-school families.
She cited this example: Lt. Gov. Kim Reynolds introduced a task force to crack down on chronic absenteeism in public schools, based on research showing children who miss school twice a month will fall behind in key subjects.
No similar concern has been shown for home-schooled students in Iowa, Wawro said.
“And now they want to make kids a cash cow — with no accountability and taxpayer dollars,” she said. “If that’s the scenario, the Finns could have made even more money” on top of state adoption subsidies.
Coleman, whose nonpartisan organization includes a board made up entirely of previously home-schooled students, said the group recommends requiring annual notifications that children are being home-schooled and criminal background checks for home-schooling parents similar to those teachers would undergo.
“Your healthy, ordinary family is not going to have a problem with that," she said. "Offenses that would prevent them from teaching would be the same as those that prevent teachers from teaching."
The group believes home-schooled children should undergo assessments either by taking standardized tests or by having a portfolio of work reviewed by a certified teacher. The portfolio would include a student's materials, reading lists, samples of tests and papers.
"We recommend requiring that the reviewer meet with the child and requiring that the reviewer be a neutral third party," she said. "Typically, if the reviewer determines that the child's progress is inadequate, or if the student's test scores are below the minimum threshold, the parent is permitted to continue home schooling under a remediation plan, which in some states requires quarterly reports on the child's progress and in other states involves home schooling under the supervision of a certified teacher.
"If the child does not show progress in future assessments, the superintendent is typically allowed to disallow home schooling and require that the child attend a school (public, private or charter)."
Coleman said Iowa had some requirements until their repeal in 2013.
"The goal is to ensure that the child is being educated without requiring that the child's education look identical to that provided in the public schools," she said. "We like to say that parents should be allowed to choose how their children are educated, but not whether their children are being educated."
Iowa's home-school history
In 2013, key House Republicans promised to scuttle Gov. Terry Branstad’s education reform bill if the package didn't include additional home-school options and fewer regulations.
Until 1991, all children in Iowa had to be taught by a teacher licensed in Iowa. But that year, a new law allowed any parent, guardian or custodian to teach kids. The following year, home-school assistance programs were added to the equation, allowing dual enrollment for students and partnerships with districts so home-schooled children could benefit from some school instruction or activities, according to the Iowa Department of Education.
In 2013, the Legislature enacted significant changes in state law that eliminated reporting requirements to the state for thousands of home-schooling parents.
The changes also provided for independent private home-school instructors to teach up to four unrelated children. Those instructors don’t have to be licensed, they are not required to be mandatory reporters of abuse and they are subject to limited contact from school districts.
At the time, some legislators, including former Sen. Tom Courtney, D-Burlington, expressed concern that the state needed more oversight of home-schooled kids. He noted the Iowa Legislature had a disproportionate number of lawmakers who home-schooled their kids.
“It shouldn’t hurt those in this state who are doing it right," Courtney said at the time. "I would think they would be proud to have the state come in and say: ‘Boy, you’re really doing a good job here.'”
At the time, Courtney also expressed concern about 20-year-old Andrew Wells of Burlington, who lived in a home where 10 children were being home-schooled. Wells told police he had sexually abused his siblings for years. Wells had an education comparable to a fifth-grader. He pleaded guilty to sexual abuse, incest and lascivious acts with a child, and was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
Today, there’s no required monitoring of home-school children if parents opt out of testing or reporting, according to Amy Williamson, chief of the Bureau of School Improvement for the Iowa Department of Education.
Iowa currently has at least five state representatives and four state senators who have been or are involved in home-schooling.
In 2012-13, the state counted 10,732 children who were home-schooled. State officials say they have no idea how many are being home-schooled now. Nationally, the National Center for Education Statistics estimates that around 3.4 percent of school-age children in the U.S. are home-schooled.
No recent legislation adding regulation or monitoring of home schoolers has been passed in states across the country after organized efforts to defeat such legislation, according to the National Conference of State Legislators.
Five states — Arizona, Florida, Nevada, Mississippi and Tennessee — have initiated some sort of education spending accounts. All of the states except Florida require prior public school enrollment, meaning parents currently home schooling their children would have to first enroll their child in a public school before receiving an ESA grant.
Each of the states allows parents to use the ESA funds for curriculum, meaning they can home school their child so long as they meet all program regulations.
Nevada’s program is not operational following a state supreme court ruling this past fall that ruled its funding source was unconstitutional.