Liberty is always at stake but never more so than when the legislature is in session and promising to “empower” parents.
Leeper Day is a remembrance of the legal battle that homeschoolers of an older generation fought in order to tell the state government to back down and leave us alone.
The Texas Legislature begins on January 14, 2025, and if certain politicians and power brokers have their way, homeschool parents may be celebrating their last true Leeper Day on June 9th, 2025.
This fight involved visits from CPS, from local school truancy enforcers, local Sheriffs, and actual arrests of parents for violating an arbitrary regulation put in place by the Texas Education Agency (TEA).
In 1981, the TEA claimed that homeschools were not private schools under state law, which therefore made those students subject to the compulsory attendance law of 1915. Parents eventually started fighting back, but the Texas Legislature remained silent on the matter, and the Texas Supreme Court did not rule on the case- Leeper vs. Arlington ISD- until 1994. Thirteen years of absolute tyranny.
Now many in this same Texas Legislature want to create a new “School Choice” program that, under most proposed bill language, will be administered by the Comptroller’s office and actually create new bureaucracies within it that will be informed by this same Texas Education Agency.
The TEA will get to approve accreditation agencies for private schools, and an unnamed “third party” will approve all vendors, applications, and expenses.
The conservative advocates claim that private and homeschools who take the money will somehow remain autonomous and not be regulated. They downplay the seriousness of the trap of government funds flowing into the private sector, and they ridicule those sounding the alarm regarding what it would take to lose our hard-fought freedoms.
They retort by saying that the Legislature could pass a bill to regulate homeschoolers at any time, so why all the fuss?
Here’s the fuss: State bureaucracies are much faster and more adept at finding ways to regulate people than the Legislature is.
Therefore, when the Legislature wants to empower bureaucracies in the name of empowering parents, they are opening the door wide open for the trampling of rights and mismanagement of funds.
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What can Texas homeschoolers do to help save us from repeating our recent history?
- Find out who represents you in the Texas State Legislature – both your Texas State Representative and Texas State Senator. These are different from who represents you in Washington D.C.
- Call them and see if you can set up a meeting to discuss your concerns.
- Educate yourself, and then educate them. Build the relationship.
- Join us for our Texans for Homeschool Freedom Capitol Day in March 2025! More information is coming soon, so join our list to stay updated.
- Donate to help Texans for Homeschool Freedom spread freedom to other homeschoolers across Texas.