New Jersey is ‘deeply unregulated’ on homeschooling, leaving the system vulnerable to child abuse

New Jersey is not usually thought of as a place that prioritizes absolute deregulation and individual freedom. But when it comes to homeschooling, the state may be even more lax than Texas. It means kids are under the full control of their parents, and abuse can be completely obscured, since school is often the first place children interact with people trained to spot signs of abuse.

A Gloucester Township couple had their first court date Thursday after being charged with abusing, assaulting, and neglecting the woman’s teenage daughter. The victim, who is now 18, was locked inside their home for years, including inside a dog cage and chained inside a bare room, and sexually assaulted by the man, prosecutors said.

The woman charged, Brenda Spencer, took the victim out of public school in 2018 to ostensibly begin homeschooling her and her younger sister. The alleged abuse by her and Branndon Mosley remained hidden until the victim escaped from the home with the help of a neighbor earlier this month, prosecutors said.

» READ MORE: Gloucester Township girl was confined to dog crate as part of yearslong abuse at her mother’s home, authorities say

In New Jersey, there is essentially no oversight for homeschooling families. There are no required tests to demonstrate that the children are getting an adequate education, and there are no mandated check-ins on the child’s well-being. Homeschooling may be a better fit for some students than their available schools, but in New Jersey, the system remains strongly reliant on a blind trust of parents and guardians.

“New Jersey is deeply unregulated compared to other states,” said Jonah Stewart, interim executive director of the nonprofit Coalition for Responsible Home Education.

“Which means that kids can, in effect, fall through the cracks.”

CRHE categorizes New Jersey with a group of 10 other states, including Texas, Oklahoma, and Michigan, that have the nation’s most permissible and unchecked homeschooling requirements.

It goes beyond not having mandates for education assessments or welfare check-ins. Under New Jersey law, parents or guardians do not have to notify a school that their child is being withdrawn for homeschooling in most cases. Parents or others teaching the child are not required to hold any certification or to have graduated high school themselves.

The law states that if a local school board somehow becomes aware that any child age 6 to 16 is not receiving an appropriate compulsory education at home, officials may bring charges against the parent or guardian. But without a monitoring system, there is little mechanism for a board to gain that information.

“How can they possibly do that without some kind of oversight?” said Nina Peckman, an education attorney with Advocates for Children of New Jersey, who works on behalf of low-income families with education issues, including homeschoolers.

“There’s no specific guidance as to what that oversight should look like,” she said.

“This case proves there’s a need to revamp and revisit those laws,” Camden County Prosecutor Grace C. MacAulay said at a news conference on the Gloucester Township case.

There have been efforts to introduce oversight and more regulation to New Jersey’s homeschooling system in the past, but they have largely failed. In 2004, legislators introduced legislation that would have created mandates for academic testing and medical evaluations for homeschooled children after a horrific abuse case brought attention to the deregulated system: A year earlier, police arrested a couple in Haddon Heights who had starved and neglected four foster children who were supposedly being homeschooled. That legislation did not pass.

Lawmakers tried again in 2012, a year after a mother was arrested on manslaughter charges when paramedics found her 8-year-old daughter severely malnourished and beaten to death. The woman was homeschooling the girl and her two siblings, even while the family had been under child-welfare investigation. The proposed legislation would have created education and health oversight and kept families under welfare investigation from homeschooling, but it did not pass either.

The Homeschool Legal Defense Association leads a robust anti-regulation lobby that has successfully kept this kind of legislation from being enacted in New Jersey. Similar to the gun lobby’s refusal to concede any regulation despite its popularity, HSLDA considers any restriction of homeschooling to be a nonstarter.

Without more legal protections for homeschooled children, these kinds of abuse cases are likely to continue. CRHE maintains a database of almost 500 cases of publicly reported abuse in homeschooling environments since 2013, called Homeschooling’s Invisible Children. It includes over 200 deaths.

Stewart said that they have established a trend regarding abuse, while noting that the database is not comprehensive since it includes only publicly reported cases — ones that are more likely to include previous histories of abuse or social service involvement. (It is currently unclear whether there were any reports of abuse in the Gloucester Township family before the children were withdrawn from school.)

In those situations, parents likely began abusing their children and withdrew them from school as a means of keeping abuse and torture hidden.

“School is often where abuse and neglect is initially noticed. That’s where children interface with professionals who are trained to recognize, intervene on abuse and neglect,” Stewart said.

Isolation then exacerbates abuse. “There isn’t a floor in terms of how isolated a victim can be. If a victim who is experiencing severe child abuse is in school … they have social connections that are automatically afforded to them,” they said.

Stewart said that CRHE has noted a pattern of how homeschool abuse is frequently meted out disproportionately, as in the Gloucester case, where the victim seemed to experience more abuse than her sister. They said victims can be scapegoated for various problems, or the abuse can be an enforcement mechanism for family hierarchy.

Both Stewart and Peckman are still believers in homeschooling, even while they advocate for more regulation and protections. Peckman said that it can be an excellent option for her families, who are often low-income people who cannot afford to send their children to private schools when their public schools prove to be inadequate or dangerous. CRHE was founded and is staffed entirely by people who were homeschooled, and their network includes many with positive experiences, Stewart said.

" We care about the reputation of homeschooling. We want to preserve what’s good about homeschooling. We need to root out these bad actors [who] abuse children under the guise of homeschooling," they said.