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Laura and Michael McIntyre began homeschooling their nine children in 2004, out of an extra office in a motorcycle dealership run by the McIntyres and their extended family. However, Michael’s twin brother Tracy, who’s also co-owner of the dealership, has reported that he has never seen the children reading, doing math or using computers.
Texas Supreme Court justices, from left, Don Willett, Paul Green, Nathan Hecht, and Eva Guzman listen as attorney Chad Baruch argues in a case for a home-schooling family in El Paso accused of failing to teach its kids anything because they were waiting for the second coming of Jesus Christ, Monday, November 2, 2015, in Austin, Texas.
The family got on school officials’ radar when their oldest daughter ran away and tried to enroll in school. The public high school determined that she had to be placed in the ninth grade, because officials weren’t sure she could handle higher-level work.
Laura McIntyre claims that she was using a curriculum created by Pensacola Christian College to teach children from a Christian perspective, but there’s no way to verify that. In his telling, the kids’ education consisted entirely of playing music, and one of the parents said that additional learning was unnecessary because “they were going to be raptured“.
Then the McIntyres responded with a lawsuit of their own, alleging that the school district, its superintendent and Mendoza violated the Texas Education Code, their right to religious freedom and the U.S. Constitution by investigating the family’s home schooling.
The state supreme court’s ruling could have broad ramifications for the ever-growing ranks of home-schooled children in Texas. “Parents should be allowed to decide how to educate their children, not whether to educate their children”, Rachel Coleman, executive director of the Massachusetts-based Coalition for Responsible Home Education, told.
The McIntyres say the public school district is biased against Christians, and they accused school administrators of making a “startling assertion of sweeping governmental power”.
The McIntyres appealed that ruling, and now the case will go before Texas’s all-Republican Supreme Court. But Laura McIntyre said she is “looking for a little clarification” as she continues to teach her youngest child. She and her husband also say that a separate legal dispute between them and Tracy McIntyre for control of the now-defunct motorcycle dealership made him a biased witness.
More than three percent of all American students are homeschooled-a number that has been steadily climbing over the last decade or so.
Home schooling is increasingly popular in Texas, which is home to more than one sixth of the nation’s 1.7 million home-schooled students. If that curriculum is alright for private schools, why shouldn’t it work for private homes?
