A California Couple Abused Their 13 Kids—and Weak Homeschooling Rules Helped Them Do It
“The same laws that allow parents to create these thriving innovative settings allow parents like the Turpins to create private torture homes because there’s no accountability.”
EDWIN RIOS
FEB. 7, 2018 6:00 AM
Damian Dovarganes/AP
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Hanging over the case as it begins to move through the legal system is the question of how the abuse was able to continue for so long. One reason, it seems, is because David Turpin essentially gamed the state’s education system by claiming that their residence was a private school—a status which, in the state, afforded the family near total autonomy and privacy. The Turpin case is of course an extreme one, but it reveals just how easily the homeschooling system in California—and in many places across the country—can be abused.
California law does not specifically authorize homeschooling, but rather families who want to homeschool their children must file an affidavit with the state’s Department of Education every year and register their home as a private school. In 2010, the year the Turpin family moved to California from Fort Worth, Texas, David Turpin did exactly that and established the City Day School. He continued to do so each year, eventually changing the school’s name to Sandcastle Day School. Those who register their homes as private schools are also required to get an annual fire inspection, but for an unknown reason, the regulation apparently wasn’t followed in the Turpin case; Perris city officials could not find records that an inspection had occurred at the house.
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And that—the yearly affidavit and fire inspection—was just about all that was required from Turpin to keep his children out of sight. And that’s far from atypical across the country. California does not necessitate periodic academic assessments; less than half of all states do.<snip>
While all this might seem incredibly lax, California actually requires more interaction between homeschools and the government than many states do. It at least requires families register the homeschool with the state; only 15 other states require that. Eleven states, including Texas, Oklahoma, and Michigan, don’t require any notice to the state whatsoever to the state, let alone registration.
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According to Rachel Coleman, co-founder of the Coalition for Responsible Home Education, a group of former homeschoolers who advocate for more regulation in sector, the Turpin case shouldn’t really be that surprising. She says she’s even seen other cases like this one. While no state tracks abuse involving homeschooling families, Coleman says that her organization has compiled data, while incomplete, of more than 380 cases of severe and fatal child neglect, such as physical and sexual abuse and food deprivation, involving home-schooling families since 2000; in those cases, they’ve found more than 120 children have died.<snip>
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In recent years, lawmakers in at least five states have tried to pass measures to make homeschools more accountable. None so far have been successful, even in places with documented abuse. In 2015 in Michigan, which did not require parents to register their schools with the state, two children were found dead in a freezer in Detroit after, prosecutors said, their mother abused them and pulled them out of public school to homeschool them. The incident sparked a legislative effort that year to establish minimum reporting requirements, such as requiring kids to meet with a doctor, teacher, or other individuals twice a year and keeping records on which kids are homeschooled in the district. But the proposal failed to get even a hearing. Ellen Heinitz, the legislative director for Michigan Rep. Stephanie Chang, the lawmaker who introduced the measure and faced a barrage of angry phone calls from homeschooling parents, told ProPublica that year: “I’ve never seen a lobby more powerful and scary. They make the anti-vaxxers seem rational.” Meanwhile, in Iowa last year, after the death of a 16-year-old girl who was homeschooled and died of starvation, a bill to require quarterly checks on homeschooled students also failed to make it out of committee.
