Reasons to Homeschool: Parental Rights, Avoiding Car Lines, and Getting Arrested

Here’s a true statement: there are as many reasons to homeschool as there are people homeschooling. Increasingly, though, parents are choosing to homeschool because of the type of incident that happened in Tennessee this past week. A Dad, Jim Howe, walks up to the school to pick his children up and walk them back to his car, which was in the car line.

Not only did the school refuse to allow him to retrieve his children, once he began quoting Tennessee state law, Avery Aytes, the school resource officer (and sheriff’s deputy) arrested him for disorderly conduct. Thankfully, his girlfriend was on hand to videotape the whole incident.

According to a report on Yahoo Shine:
“In the video, before his arrest on a disorderly conduct charge, we see Howe telling Aytes, “They’re walking with me when school is dismissed, per state law.”

“No they’re not,” an agitated Aytes says.

In the video, shot by Howe’s girlfriend, the 40-year-old dad is shown calmly debating the lack of safety in the new pickup policy and calling the sheriff to discuss the policy. The policy dictates that parents must wait in their cars in a line that can stretch to a mile long alongside a major highway, according to Howe. He adds that while students can get parental permission to walk along the highway to their parents’ cars, parents are no longer permitted to park and go into the school to get their kids.”

The trend in schools these days is to bar parents from having access to their children while on school property. This is a parental right’s issue, because in many states schools are taking the stance that they can supersede parental rights for any number of reasons that the school officials deem legitimate.

Please take a minute to watch this video, and note how calm and respectful the parent was before the officer snapped and arrested him.