There’s a website, Homeschooling’s Invisible Children. It was founded by two women who were homeschooled themselves, Rachel Coleman and Heather Doney.
Inspired by the recent high profile deaths of several homeschooled children, including Lydia Schatz, Hana Williams, and Nubia Barahona, HIC shines a light on the dark side of homeschooling, where a lack of outside protections for homeschooled children has led to some horrifying consequences.
Homeschooling can be a useful educational tool in the hands of the right parents, but when it falls into the hands of the wrong parents the results can be disastrous, and it is the children who suffer.
HIC documents and archives cases where homeschooling was not in the best interest of the child and was instead used as a means to isolate, abuse, and neglect, resulting in exceedingly harmful or fatal outcomes. This is for Lydia, Hana, Nubia, the children of the Gravelles and Kluths, and all of those whose stories we may never hear.
Warning: This site’s content includes mention of severe child abuse, torture, and untimely death and contains pictures of children who died under such conditions.
The most recent post there is about Miranda Crockett. [trigger warning - abuse, murder]
10-year-old Miranda Crocket was tied up when she drowned in an ice cold bathtub, the culmination of months of abuse at the hands of her father’s girlfriend. Miranda lived alone with her father, Dan Crockett, until her father’s girlfriend, Chandra Rose, moved in with them with her three children, aged 4, 6, and 11, in the summer of 2012. Miranda was withdrawn from school and was homeschooled by Chandra that fall alongside Chandra’s children. Chandra claims that Miranda threatened her children, and that the abuse she heaped on the girl was retaliation. Chandra locked Miranda in the bathroom, tied her up, forced her to take ice baths, and shut her in a hard plastic storage box barely big enough to fit her body. The day Miranda died, she had escaped from the locked bathroom and Miranda had retaliated by tying her hands to her ankles, tying a cord around her neck to cause her discomfort, shutting her in the storage box for several hours and, ultimately, putting her in the ice cold bath where she drowned.
If she hadn’t been taken out of school, she could have asked for help. Children don’t always do that, because they’re afraid to, but the possibility would have been there. But she was taken out of school and “homeschooled” – which being interpreted means, tortured to death.
The Oregonian reported last March:
The judge also unsealed court documents that for the first time publicly revealed what happened in the Fairview apartment the girl shared with her father, Rose and Rose’s children, ages 4, 6 and 11. It describes abuse heightened by Miranda’s isolation after she left the public school system so Rose could home-school her with the other children.
According to the probable cause affidavit, Rose told police that in the hours before paramedics arrived at the apartment, Miranda had escaped from the bathroom and wouldn’t tell Rose what she used to unlock the door. Rose said she tied the girl’s hands to her ankles with scarves and uninflated balloons. She also tied a cord around the girl’s neck and legs to try to make her uncomfortable.
She placed the child in the fetal position in the storage box, leaving her there for 30 minutes to three hours. Rose also put Miranda in an icy cold bath.
Miranda was home “schooled” all right.
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)