A traumatic encounter with an anti-homeschool judge and temporarily losing my child

This is a particularly difficult post to write.

As last updated in this poorly maintained blog, I was homeschooling two of my children, the fourth grade Reo and the ninth grade DrS. While Reo was always cooperative and enjoyed excelling, DrS fought tooth and nail against completing his assigned work. He did complete it. He was not exceptional in his progress but I believe he faired better than he would have in public school. He also learned that homeschool wasn't the free ride he fantasized it would be. There was equal, if not more, demand for study and performance. He asked to return to public school and of course I obliged.

His father has had absolutely no contact with him outside of visitations that I pay for him to have in our son's fifteen years on the planet. Seriously, the man wasn't even there when DrS was born. His father is a continued alcoholic who is unemployed and living in his parents' basement. He is thousands in child support arrears. All of a sudden, his father decides that I'm an unfit mother. He makes up an incredible list of offenses, from claiming that my home was filthy with animal feces, to claiming he had pictures from Florida DCFS, to saying I have never taken my child to a doctor or dentist, to saying I have no education and was providing our son no education in homeschool.

I was blindsided by these accusations. I had no attorney and I was 1300 miles and more time than I had away from having the evidence necessary to stomp all this fiction into the ground. The judge was demonstrably anti-homeschool. Despite my ex-husband being the only one who claimed I was never educated and others, including our son, saying clearly that I was college educated, she settled that there was simply no way to know for sure. She firmly believed that my son, who had passed the ninth grade via standardized testing and homeschool portfolio in accordance with Florida law, was never educated, never attended a public school at any point in time, and I was to blame for withholding legally mandated education from him.

At the end of this legal mess, I will deserve an apology for this outrageous character assassination and verbal abuse from the court and I will certainly never receive it.

I am still homeschooling Reo, who is working on sixth and seventh grade curriculum during his fifth grade year. We live in Florida and even though the Illinois court likes to throw its weight around with ridiculous ways to defend my abuser and rapist as some kind of engaged and suitable parent regarding DrS, I have been married to Reo's dad for many years and no court can prevent Reo from having an advanced and fulfilling education until he decides to return to public school.

At this time, I do not have legal representation in Illinois. Illinois lawyers are expensive and, unlike Florida attorneys, they have this cruel attitude that I can't describe very well, but I can tell you that it cuts into the heart. It's taking time to choose the right professional and, unfortunately, I don't have a lot of time. DrS is already suffering under his father's care.

I will be updating this blog more, if for no other reason than to clearly and publicly document how indepth and demanding a homeschool curriculum is with me in personal defense of what I've just suffered at the hands of anti-homeschool ignorance. Don't get me wrong, Reo has fun, but this isn't a layabout vacation where he does what he pleases and doesn't absorb a considerable amount of information that surpasses that of his peers. The only area where Reo is sorely lacking is handwriting. The boy might have a future as a doctor!

Fourth Grade

Third grade was an awkward beginning to our homeschool adventure, but it provided many opportunities to understand homeschooling and gain confidence in both Reo's ability to learn and my ability to teach. The blogging became too absorbed in how ridiculous the curriculum from Christian Liberty Academy Satellite School [CLASS] was that, naturally, when we went into "just get through it" mode, I stopped blogging. CLASS' fundamental christian and anti-science curriculum did push me into going off-textbook a lot to make sure my son was learning Science and would continue to be above grade level.

Hey, you can't use omnipotent deities to cheat!

I have said time and time again that our local school district rocks. If it weren't for the budget cuts that massacred the wonderful programs that enriched children's lives in elementary school, I would have kept Reo in public school. The teachers and administration at his former school are still awesome. The homeschool office at the district has been fantastic and cooperative with me as I struggled with the difficult CLASS administration to get documents I needed - the "convenience" of those documents was why I chose CLASS in the first place, ironically - for Reo's annual evaluation. Now, Reo is ready to begin on September 1.

Fourth grade is exciting for both of us. We are venturing into unschooling territory, which will allow us to explore the world without sitting for hours pouring over workbooks. I will be blogging more about this year, from start to finish, as well as getting to maintain my first homeschool portfolio. The next post will be Reo's academic goals for his fourth grade year, my academic goals for his fourth grade year, and what our first week's lesson plans look like.

Spoiler Alert: It's all Adventure Class now

Our school year begins on Labor Day, which is a holiday and no school day for the public and private school kids in America. Over thirty years ago, I was younger than Reo, and I asked my father what the point of Labor Day was. He explained that Labor Day is the day we honor the people who made sacrifices to establish unions to protect American workers. He went into age-appropriate detail about the tragedies that happened at the expense of workers whose companies didn't care about their lives and the unfairness of pay for the work that people did. That day, I learned why we celebrate Labor Day and that my workaholic father was very smart and I could learn a lot from him. For both of those reasons, and the added fact that unschooling is a continuous, neverending experience, Labor Day is a perfect day to begin.