Scandalous: Some Colorado homeschool families access a portion of their education-directed tax dollars for programs benefitting their own children. Clearly this is a problem demanding emergency legislative action.
Controversies surrounding tax-funded enrichment programs for homeschoolers have been swirling since 2023, culminating in end-of-session legislative amendments this year severely curtailing such programs.
Years of controversy
As I’ve reviewed, in 2024 the state’s Board of Education cut off a program that in many cases reimbursed homeschool families for education-related expenses. My family used that program. Although some people would frame the program as government subsidizing homeschool families, I saw it as a way to get back some small portion of my family’s education-directed tax dollars. Why should I have to pay to educate other people’s children and have no access to those funds for my own child’s education?
This year, the Board of Education, the Department of Education, and the legislature, especially the Joint Budget Committee, collectively brought up four related issues:
1. A multi-district organization (formally Board of Cooperative Educational Services, or BOCES), specifically the Education ReEnvisioned BOCES, has been authorizing enrichment programs throughout the states, well beyond the boundaries of member districts. This one BOCES has facilitated a rapid expansion of enrichment funding. The legislature moved to limit the ability of a BOCES to authorize programs.
2. Some of the enrichment programs are not academically oriented. As Ann Schimke of Chalkbeat quotes the JBC’s Emily Sirota, enrichment funding has in part gone toward “private ski lessons, private horseback riding, [and] private jiu jitsu classes.” Of course, public schools also fund athletics programs. And Sirota and Schimke decline to mention that some enrichment programs authorized by ReBOCES, such as Falcon AeroLab, are rigorously academic. Regardless, I don’t see the problem if homeschool parents provide core academics on their own and use enrichment programs for things like athletics, music, and art. To me, the core problem is not that ReBOCES authorized so many programs; it is that other districts did not authorize them.
3. Because of quirks in the rules, enrichment programs in many cases got half the funding of a regular school program for only a quarter of the hours. I agree those numbers are hard to justify, and the Board of Education may come back with rule changes. On the other hand, what’s wrong with homeschooling families having some flexibility in how they access their educated-directed tax funds? My son has very much enjoyed an in-person, once-per-week enrichment program for the last three semesters, and we face the very real risk that his program will disappear or change dramatically with funding cuts.
4. Colorado’s home-based education law authorizes a child “participating in a nonpublic home-based educational program” to also attend “a public school for a portion of the school day.” But there’s an oddity in how “homeschooling” is defined. Colorado has long-recognized three types of “homeschooling”: operation under the home-based education statutes, homeschooling by a licensed teacher, and participation in a private “umbrella” school that facilitates what in effect is homeschooling. To date, enrichment programs have let in children from umbrella schools; now the legislature has moved to end that.
An undemocratic process
Here’s how legislating is supposed to work. Legislators introduce a bill. The bill first winds its way through one or more legislative committees, where members of the public may testify. This process gives interested people and organizations time to analyze the proposed legislation, communicate with their representatives, educate their friends or members, and comment in public.
Then, except in cases of emergencies, legislators are supposed to pass bills with the opportunity for people to collect signatures against it, potentially leading to a state-wide vote. In practice, legislators usually lie, claim there is an emergency when there is none, and pass a bill under the emergency “safety clause,” bypassing voter approval.
This year, in the final few days of the legislative session, rather than propose changes to enrichment funding through the democratic means described above, legislators introduced substantive floor amendments to the School Finance Act with no committee hearing, passed under the bullshit emergency declaration.
Whatever you think about the substance of the changes, the process was substantially undemocratic, and it left the homeschool families affected by the changes with almost no voice in the process. That is a shameful way to conduct state business.
Whose money is it?
Sirota complained (per Schimke) that “public school dollars are paying for home school and private school students to receive all sorts of things.” In Sirota’s worldview, that money, which the state forces people, including homeschool families, to pay through taxes, unreservedly then belongs to the “public,” effectively meaning to politicians, end of story. How much of your money belongs to the government? As much as the government says, obviously.
I, on the other hand, think that by default the wealth that a family earns properly belongs to that family, and if the government is going to forcibly seize some portion of a family’s wealth, it had better have a damn good reason for doing so.
We can argue another day about whether government has the moral authority to confiscate people’s wealth to fund education. If government is going to force people to finance education, then, in my view, homeschool families who also pay education-directed tax dollars have a strong moral claim to the benefit of at least some of those dollars.
I will again lay my favored proposal on the table. Rather than fund enrichment programs for homeschool students, government should instead simply let families who homeschool or use private schools keep their hard-earned education-directed tax dollars to spend how they see fit. Then my family could use that money for whatever educational programs we want without worrying whether Rep. Sirota approves.
Legislators praise homeschoolers
Given the legislature’s crackdown on homeschool enrichment programs, you might be surprised to read the legislature’s near-unanimous resolution praising homeschoolers. The resolution reads, in part, “Parents who have home-educated their children are to be commended for their extraordinary sacrifice and commitment that has produced millions of home-educated graduates who are equipped to be successful and productive citizens because of the values, education, and training they have received from their parents.”
Although the resolution itself does not state as much, its declaration of April 9 as “Home Education Day” corresponds to the Capitol event organized by Christian Home Educators of Colorado, a group with which I have substantial disagreements. Nevertheless, I was pleased about the recognition. I would have rather had the opportunity to publicly comment on the legislation cracking down on homeschool enrichment funding.
Counting homeschoolers
Here is an oddity. According to a January 13 release from the Department of Education, Colorado has 10,367 homeschooled students. But according to the legislative resolution, Colorado is home to 57,000 “home-educated students.” So what’s going on here?
The lower number pertains only to families operating under the home-based education statutes. This omits, say, students attending an umbrella school. The higher estimate seems to come from a CHEC report by Brian Ray, and I think it’s more of an extrapolation than an actual count. For what it’s worth, in January the Board of Education reported that 18,695 “part-time homeschool and private school students” participated in programs using “public school funding.”
One likely result of the legislature’s changes is that the official homeschool count will go up as some families switch from umbrella schools to the home-based education rules to remain eligible for enrichment funding. Regardless, many other students not counted in Colorado’s official homeschool statistics will continue to effectively homeschool through umbrella schools.
Homeschoolers have rights too
I hope in the future legislators will remember that homeschooling families have a right to participate in the democratic process rather than have last-minute amendments shoved down our throats with no opportunity to comment publicly.
I also hope legislators will remember that homeschool families earn the money that they are then forced to pay into education. They deserve to benefit from the resources that they earn.
Ari Armstrong writes regularly for Complete Colorado and is the author of books about Ayn Rand, Harry Potter, and classical liberalism. He can be reached at ari at ariarmstrong dot com.
