One-Family Rule

I blogged the other day about how a few people in Wisconsin would like to homeschool other people's kids along with their own. But it's illegal in this state. As much as I think the government should stay out of education, the reality is that they don't. There are rules, and some of them even have some fairly decent reasoning behind the rules.

Jeff asked about whether it could be considered legal to homeschool someone else's kid because the statute says that the parents can designate someone one else to provide the instruction.

That sentence allows for the fact that homeschool parents are not required, entirely by themselves, to provide all instruction for the child. For example, many kids learn foreign language primarily by speaking with a person who is a native speaker. Even though the kid may study a book, the primary teacher is Grandpa Schmidt who grew up in Germany (or whatever).

In other situations, the parents hire a tutor to be the full-time instructor in their homeschool. I have two friends who homeschool their grandchildren.

So, is it okay "hire a tutor" who is also homeschooling her own children? No. The next sentence in the statutes makes that very plain.

Once upon a time, the government was enforcing all the school codes onto homeschools. In the state of Wisconsin, they asked homeschoolers to have separate bathrooms for boys and girls. They asked for "Exit" signs over the doorways. There were loads of rules. With a lot of lobbying by some committed homeschoolers and some help from a few people in Madison, the legislature (among other legal changes) came to see how ridiculous it was to have the same safety requirements for a building where one family was homeschooling. If the children were safe enough at home from 3:30-bedtime, then they were safe enough there from 8:30-3:30. And so the law that affects homeschoolers no longer requires that they conform to the building codes and safety regulations enjoined upon conventional schools.

But
if I want to start "homeschooling" other people's kids along with my own, should I be exempt from safety rules? (And let's not take up whether the government has the right to enforce such rules. The reality is that they make such rules and enforce them for most public building. For those who disagree with that, you'd have to change the whole system before you can properly address whether this particular instance of building code is valid.) If I homeschool one other child, that doesn't seem like a big deal. But if I homeschool 32 other children from 17 different families, doesn't that sound more like a school than "homeschooling other people's kids"? Where's the line? How many "other kids" makes it a school instead of homeschooling?

That's why the law says that "more than one family unit" does not constitute a home-based private educational program. Saying "Well, that homeschool mom over there is the person I designated to provide my kid's instruction" does not undo the next sentence in the statutes!