Justice Department: Home Schooling not a 'Right'

Really? So what does that mean for homeschoolers here in the US????

Since this hits close to home - so to speak, I thought I pass this on. I think if enough people know about this, we can then stand together to keep the right to homeschool here in the US. It is the land of the free and should remain the land of the free!

The U.S. Justice Department says home-schooling is not a fundamental right.

That was the argument the Obama administration made in federal court against an evangelical Christian family from Germany seeking asylum in the United States.

Germany broadly forbids home-schooling. So the Romeike family was forced to flee the country or risk losing their five children to the German government, which was trying to force them to put their children in public schools.

The Homeschool Legal Defense Association is working on the Romeike family's behalf.

Michael Farris, founder and chairman of HSLDA, wrote about Germany's home-school ban in his blog saying, "It is thought control. It is belief control. It is totalitarianism dressed up in politically correct lingo."

For more on this important case and its potential impact on home-schooling in the United States, CBN News spoke with Michael Donnelly, director of International Relations for HSLDA.

The Romeikes claim their religious freedoms are being violated.

But U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has filed against the Romeike family in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. He said that asylum should not be granted to home-schoolers since home-schooling is not protected under religious freedom.

But Farris wrote, "In most asylum cases, there is some guesswork necessary to figure out the government's true motive -- but not in this case."

"The Supreme Court of Germany declared that the purpose of the German ban on home-schooling was to 'counteract the development of religious and philosophically motivated parallel societies,'" Farris explained.

Source:
http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/politics/2013/February/Justice-Department-Home-Schooling-not-a-Right/

Beginning of the week

Mondays are usually a little difficult for us. It isn't so easy to get started again, especially since we didn't do anything over the weekend due to the winter storm warning. Though in our particular neighborhood we didn't experience anything too awful. We thought we better play it safe and stay at home, which was really nice and cozy. Which made the start of this week really hard :)
We started out school day a bit later than intended, but it all went well. Jeremy did one whole math lesson from Math U See in about 30 min! Yes! He really had fun doing it and I enjoy to see that he has fun and understands this part of math easily. In Science he is doing Human Anatomy and Physiology from Jeannie Fulbright this year. It is a good curriculum and has some really fun and easy experiments. Boys really seem to like those, the girls, in general didn't care much about experiments. Anyway, Mrs. Fulbright came out with an audiobook for Anatomy, which Jeremy listened to and followed along in the science book for a little. Then he decided that he wanted to color some pages from the accompanying student journal while he listened to the audiobook. This was really awesome for me, because while he was learning, I was able to make food! I was surprised how much he retained from listening. So we had a good school day and he felt pretty independent.

In December Jeremy started with Karate and I am happy to say that he really likes it. Last week he was allowed to break a board, he was really happy that he succeeded :)
For the next week he is going to train a lot because he is going to his first Karate tournament at the end of this month. He also has his pinewood derby with his cub scouts at the beginning of March and he working a lot on his little car. I haven't seen it yet, because he goes to a friends house because the friends dad has all the tools they need. We only have a bread knife ;-)  I will post some pictures about that after the derby. In the meantime, here are some Karate pictures of my little guy when he broke his board. Though really, he isn't that little anymore :)

the teacher is explaining what to do

test run on how to hit the board with his knee

He did it !