What Tess from CRHE Told Connecticut Legislators — And What Her Testimony Really Means
The testimony presented by Tess Ulrey of the Coalition for Responsible Home Education (CRHE) sounded calm, compassionate, and reasonable. But beneath that tone was a clear agenda: normalize government monitoring of homeschool families by framing regulation as a safety measure.
No one disputes that children deserve protection. The real question is whether HB-5468 would actually improve child safety — or whether it would impose state oversight on thousands of responsible families based on rhetoric rather than evidence.
This page examines the key claims made in that testimony and explains why they do not support the policy being proposed.
The Strategy Behind the Testimony
Before addressing individual claims, it is important to understand the structure of the argument presented.
The testimony relies on several recurring tactics that make regulation sound reasonable while avoiding the real policy implications.
1. Personal Success as a Shield
The testimony opens with a personal story: a homeschool graduate who is successful, educated, and active in her community.
This framing serves an important rhetorical purpose. By presenting herself as a homeschool success story, the speaker establishes credibility while reducing resistance from homeschool families.
But personal experience — positive or negative — is not population-level evidence. Public policy cannot be built on individual anecdotes.
2. The “Invisible Victim” Argument
The testimony claims that some homeschooled children are hidden victims who cannot speak for themselves because their parents did not bring them to testify.
This is emotionally powerful, but it creates a category that cannot be verified, measured, or counted.
Public policy cannot be built around invisible populations that cannot be identified or studied. Evidence must be measurable.
3. The “Purposeful vs Non-Purposeful” Homeschooler Divide
The testimony divides homeschool families into two groups:
• “purposeful homeschoolers”
• “non-purposeful homeschoolers”
This framing reassures lawmakers that the bill only targets bad actors.
But the law itself does not distinguish between these groups.
HB-5468 regulates every homeschool family, not just hypothetical bad actors.
Ulrey’s Claim: Connecticut Needs Notification Because We Don’t Know How Many Children Are Homeschooled
This claim suggests that a lack of a centralized database creates a safety risk. But not having a state registry does not demonstrate a child safety crisis. It only means the state does not currently track every homeschooling family. Supporters of the bill must demonstrate something more important:
How does tracking families actually prevent abuse?
No evidence has been presented showing that notification requirements reduce abuse. None. Actually, homeschooling has proven to be so safe – with horrific stories of abuse of children coming from news outlets on a daily basis – citing incidents happening to public school students, often by the adults in the schools.
Tracking students has nothing to do with keeping them safe. Further, it puts their personal data in a precarious situation since data breaches of personal information have happened across the nation. Schools cannot keep such data protected. There is also no reason other than surveillance of children in a database for any legislation to coerce parents into complying with an unsafe system they didn’t choose.
Ulrey’s Claim: Assessments and Portfolio Reviews Are “Modest Accountability”
These requirements are often described as small administrative measures. In reality, they create a framework for ongoing state verification of lawful families. Once that framework exists, the standards can be expanded later through agency rulemaking. Many homeschool families object not because they oppose accountability, but because they recognize how easily regulatory frameworks grow once established.
Claim: The Bill Does Not Prevent Parents From Choosing How to Educate Their Children
This claim does not hold up when the bill is examined. Under HB-5468, a parent who has an open DCF matter could be prevented from immediately withdrawing their child from school. This creates real scenarios where families attempting to remove a child from:
bullying
unsafe school environments
special-needs failures
may be forced to wait for state approval. A right delayed is often a right denied.
What Ulrey’s Testimony Conveniently Leaves Out
One of the most striking aspects of the testimony is what it does not address. Children face real dangers inside school systems despite constant institutional oversight. She seems to selectively care about children’s safety.
The areas of selective vision and hearing for Ulrey include:
bullying and student violence
sexual assault between students
suicide
educator sexual and physical misconduct
unsafe environments for special-needs students
chronic absenteeism and academic failure
This unlikely oversight also fails to include the current disturbing data on the huge population of public school children who are graduating from high school unable to do grade level academic work.
Many families choose homeschooling precisely because those systems failed their children. Yet the testimony treats schools as the default safety net while framing homeschooling as the environment that requires scrutiny.
Children Have Rights Too
Children are not simply objects of state policy. They have rights as individuals. Those rights include the ability to leave unsafe environments and the right not to be forced into any contact with institutions their parents have lawfully chosen to leave. Government oversight should never override the fundamental relationship between parents and children without clear evidence that such intervention is necessary.
The Real Policy Question
Everyone involved in this conversation cares about child safety. The real question legislators must ask is simple:
Would this bill actually prevent the tragedies being cited? The answer is no. There is no data that shows otherwise.
The most frequently referenced tragedies occurred in situations where state systems already had authority to intervene. Before expanding government oversight of families, Connecticut should focus on fixing the systems that already failed the children we know about.
Final Closing
The testimony supporting HB-5468 presents regulation as compassion and oversight as protection. ut the policy it advances carries serious consequences. It asks lawmakers to accept a dangerous premise: that families must prove their legitimacy to the state simply because they educate their children at home. That is not a narrow safety measure. It is a fundamental shift in how homeschooling is treated under Connecticut law. Legislators should approach that shift with extreme caution. Ideally, they should honor their Oath of Office and respond to the will of the people which is clearly and overwhelming majority saying, “NO” to HB-5468.