Home-schooler ordered to attend public school

A New Hampshire court ordered a home-schooled Christian girl to attend a public school this week after a judge criticized the “rigidity” of her mother’s religious views and said the 10-year-old needed to consider other worldviews as she matures.

Ever since the judge’s ruling came out in July, the case has aroused the interest of home-schooling groups nationwide, whohave asked why a court has the power to decide whether someone’s religious views are too extreme.

The girl’s mother, Brenda Voydatch, has engaged the Alliance Defense Fund, a Christian legal group based in Scottsdale, Ariz., to contest the ruling, in which the judge granted a request by the girl’s father, Martin Kurowski, that the girl go to a public school.

On Tuesday, the girl, Amanda Kurowski, started fifth grade at an elementary school in Meredith, N.H., under court order. Amanda’s “vigorous defense of her religious beliefs … suggests strongly that she has not had the opportunity to seriously consider any other point of view,” District Court Judge Lucinda V. Sadler said.

The case is the latest in a series of disputes this summer which have tested the limits of parents’ right to raise their children in line with their religious beliefs.

• Two court cases saw parents who relied on prayer being tried for the deaths of their children. In Wisconsin, Dale and Leilani Neumann were found guilty of second-degree reckless homicide in the death of their 11-year-old diabetic daughter, Kara. In Oregon, Carl and Raylene Worthington were acquitted of manslaughter in the pneumonia death of their 15-month-old daughter, though the father was found guilty of a lesser count, criminal mistreatment.

• The case of Daniel Hauser, a 13-year-old Minnesota boy with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, precipitated a national manhunt that dominated the news in May. Mother Colleen Hauser defied legal authorities that ordered the boy to be treated by oncologists and fled with her son, citing family beliefs in traditional American Indian medicine.

But those cases all involved physical danger and the state attempting to prove that parents were acting recklessly. In the New Hampshire case, the court ruled that extreme religiosity by itself constitutes grounds on which to rule against a parent’s wishes.

According to court documents filed in Laconia, a small city in the central New Hampshire’s Belknap County, Amanda is a well-adjusted childwhose parents were divorced in 1999.

The mother has primary physical custody of Amanda, whom she has home-schooled for several years in math, English, social studies, science, handwriting, spelling and the Bible.

The course load, except for the Bible study, is similar to what public students get and the mother’s home schooling has “more than kept up with the academic requirements of the [local] school system,” the judge’s statement said. The child also takes supplemental public school classes in art, Spanish, theater and physical education and is involved in extracurricular sports such as gymnastics, horseback riding, softball and basketball.

Her parents have been feuding for years over how she should be educated. The father tried to get Amanda removed from the mother’s tutelage in 2006, but another judge ruled against him. However, the court did appoint Janice McLaughlin as a guardian of the child’s legal interests.

The father continued to push for some changes in the way his daughter was educated.

“[Mr. Kurowski] believes that exposure to other points of view will decrease Amanda’s rigid adherence to her mother’s religious beliefs and increase her ability to get along with others and to function in a world which requires some element of independent thinking and tolerance for different points of view,” Judge Sadler’s ruling said.

The ruling quoted Mrs. McLaughlin as saying the child “appeared to reflect the mother’s rigidity on questions of faith.” The child would “be best served by exposure to different points of view at a time in her life when she must begin to critically evaluate multiple systems of belief and behavior,” it added.

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