CHOIS Connection is published quarterly by Christian Homeschoolers Of Idaho State.
This article appeared in a previous issue.
CHOIS Connection
Tidbits
by Linda Patchin
"Freedom's Price"
Summer 2006
"Enroll your children in the local public school, or they will be forcefully removed from your home and you will go to jail."
Can you imagine what it would be like to hear these words from an official, and to know that acting upon your convictions would create such severe consequences? Come along with me on a journey to the not-so-distant past. A time when homeschooling in Idaho was nearly extinct, and over-zealous officials ruled the land.
Home education in the early 1900's was fairly common in Idaho. Our large state was still a vast wilderness area, and brave homestead families didn't have much access to schools and teachers. Move forward just one generation, and we will find our "boys" serving their country "over there," and our women rosily riveting in the workforce, and fewer families educating their children at home. Move forward yet another generation and we will find flower power, the Equal Rights Amendment, Viet Nam and the Watergate scandal. Home education at this point in time was gasping its last breath, eerily close to extinction.
Yet wait! Though down for the count, it was not out! Slowly, it struggled to open one eye, as it began to rise from its impending doom. A family here, a family there, began to question the status quo of their day, and the rebirth of home education was just around the corner.
In 1982, a family of three brothers, and their wives began home educating their children in New Plymouth, Idaho. Sam and Marquita, Robert and Cecelia, and Floyd and Roxie Shippy decided to remove their school-aged children from the public school system and teach them at home according to their spiritual convictions. This provoked a series of legal confrontations under state of Idaho compulsory attendance and truancy laws, whereby the Shippys were caught between legal authority and the need to obey their own spiritual values. After two years of equivocation on both sides, during which time the Shippy children attended school irregularly, the Shippy parents decided to stand firm on their beliefs, thus setting off a wildfire.
The Showdown
In the fall of 1984, the Shippys once again did not send their children to public school. School officials decided to vigorously pursue the matter. In November, the Shippys were prosecuted for probationary violations under Idaho statue. All six parents, including the mothers who were each nursing infants at the time, were ordered jailed for six months or until the Shippy's compliance was secured. The men were placed in cells separate from their wives. A felon convicted of child molestation and sentenced to just four months, occupied a nearby cell. Three weeks later the parents were released from jail after the Sheriff and deputies removed their school-aged children from their homes and placed them with foster parents who sent the children to public school.
The children were permitted to go home for Christmas, and the Shippys took another look at the state's homeschooling requirements. The requirements included demands for a "full description of the proposed homeschool; including names and qualifications of teachers; samples of all instructional materials; the schedule of instruction by hour, day and week; the methods and standards for measuring academic achievement; and the methods by which normal social growth and peer interaction will be provided." Requirements were also imposed on the physical place of instruction to ensure that their homes would meet state safety regulations for public buildings.
Then Idaho Congressman, Larry Craig stated that these rules were "quite rigid and were obviously written to discourage home teaching. I am sure they were written to keep as many children in public school as possible because the amount of state and federal aid to the district is determined by attendance."
Unwilling to agree to the demands, two of the brothers saw their children returned to foster homes after the new year began. Foster parents did not come to pick up the children of Sam and Marquita, and so they remained in their home.
January 10, 1985, armed deputies returned to the farm, and in a tearful, emotionally charged scene, seized the unwilling children and physically carried them away. It wasn't until the next day that the distraught parents were informed of their children's whereabouts. The children remained in foster care until the end of the school year.
The Prevailing Attitude of the Day
"Society has some selfish interest in seeing that everyone… gets some education. A parent who denies his child an education cripples that child for life... and the government, the community, owes that child protection from such a parent, even if that means stashing such parents in jail." ~ Lewiston Morning Tribune, December 3, 1984
The Idaho Statesman, December 4, 1984 agreed, asserting the state's right on the issue and declaring that the Shippys were "challenging a basic tenet of our society." Citing the Idaho Code allegedly granting the state final authority on education for children, the Statesman claimed the Shippy's "brought it on themselves," that compulsory attendance laws are "meant to ensure an enlightened and productive society, " and implying that the state's action may be rescuing the children from an unwanted simplistic lifestyle.
Readers were treated to a steady diet of articles that portrayed the Shippy families in an unfavorable light. Letters to the Editor assured readers that home educated children would eventually all end up on welfare, or worse yet in prison. Surely the state, the presumption went, would never jail parents, or break up families without just cause. These curious non-conformists must represent a threat to their own children, if not the community at large.
The truth was often misplaced or hard to find where these families were concerned. Their neighbors told of a close-knit, loving family, all living within a few hundred yards of each other on the Snake River Valley. A seventy-nine acre dairy and a successful land-leveling and irrigation construction business attracted more business than the three brothers could handle, by word of mouth alone.
Then State Representative Robert Forrey stated that the judge in the case told him that he didn't know of a "finer, more upstanding, honest, productive family in the community."
The Fire
Move forward just one more generation, and we'll find that homeschooling is alive and thriving in Idaho. Twenty-two years have come and gone since the Shippy children were removed from their home. These children are now grown with children of their own. What are the results of these peace-loving families' passive-resistant civil disobedience? Very few of us are left who even remember their names. Just what exactly did they accomplish all those years ago?
They ignited the fire that has since swept across our state!
They were the car-wreck that turned the freeway into a parking lot simply because every other car had to stop and take a look. They were the center of our local media frenzy. Theirs were the faces that our lawmakers couldn't bear to look at without shuddering, and questioning whether such force was necessary. They were innocent families, trying to be obedient to what their God had called them to do, and they were one of the critical reasons that our favorable homeschooling law soared through the Legislature.
These three families, acting upon their convictions brought freedom to us all! And yet I wonder, would I have the courage to stand upon my convictions if it meant that the consequences would be so costly? Could something like this ever happen again in our state? Could the flame of freedom that these families ignited ever be extinguished?
If we are not diligent keepers of the flame then it is possible that the light of freedom will indeed flicker out. I'd love to think that things like this don't happen anymore in "civilized" nations, and yet I know that Germany has recently jailed parents for homeschooling, removing children from their homes. German homeschool families have fled to other nations, and yet even there the long-arm of German authority attempts to wield European Union power to force these children back into public schools. Am I doing all that I can to help these families?
If only I could see into the future just one more tick on my generational clock! Will home education still be free from government control when my children and grandchildren are parents? Will succeeding generations, who have not paid the heavy price for freedom, still cherish it, or will they succumb to the slumbering arms of complacency, the entangling arms of dependency or the iron grip of bondage?
Heaven only knows.
Linda and her husband, Paul, serve on the CHOIS board of directors. They have homeschooled their 4 children for 14 years, in Boise, Idaho.
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