Connecticut has some of the most laissez-faire homeschooling regulations in the country, but a new bill might change that. “An Act Concerning the Provision of Parent-Managed Learning,” or HB 5468, passed the state Senate, 22-14, along party lines before midnight on May 4. It passed through the House of Representatives on April 23. If it is approved by Gov. Ned Lamont, it will implement significant, and in some cases, unprecedented requirements for homeschooling families.
The bill contains numerous provisions meant to regulate homeschooling in the state. These include requiring parents to appear in person once a year at a school district office to sign a form indicating that they will be homeschooling their child—something no other state requires. The bill would also prevent parents or guardians from homeschooling their children if they or an adult they live with is on the Department of Children and Families (DCF) Child Abuse and Neglect Registry, or is the subject of an ongoing DCF investigation.
“It’s terrible, but unsurprising,” said Peter Wolfgang, the president of the Family Institute of Connecticut Action, a conservative nonprofit that advocates for homeschooling families. “We knew this was going to be the outcome.”
In the months leading up to this vote, homeschool advocates argued the bill infringes on the rights of parents to educate their children. Supporters of the bill insisted it wasn’t meant to target parents, but rather protect children.
“In those rare cases where those children are being abused and being shielded from the oversight and care that they should have, it is the responsibility of the state to provide when the parents cannot,” Sen. Martin Looney (D-New Haven) said during the debate on the Senate floor. “The needs of children should be foremost.”
This bill comes weeks after a homeschooled child, 12-year-old Eve Rogers of Enfield, was found dead in her own home. Since then, her stepfather was arrested in connection with her death and charged with sexual assault.
Rogers is one of three prominent instances that made headlines in the past year where a child was allegedly abused or killed by guardians or adults in their household after being pulled from public schools.
Eleven-year-old Jacqueline “Mimi” Torres’ body was discovered near an abandoned house in New Britain in October. An autopsy showed that she had been severely abused, starved, and had illicit drugs in her system before her death. It also found that she had been dead for more than a year before she was discovered. Her mother, Karla Garcia, sent emails to both the Consolidated School District of New Britain, where Torres used to attend school, and the Farmington Public School District, the district the family moved to, in the summer of 2024 to say that she would homeschool Torres. The email to the New Britain district was sent less than a month before Torres was murdered.
In February, 2025, a man who is identified as “S” set his stepmother’s house in Waterbury on fire to attract the attention of firefighters. S was taken out of public school when he was 11 years old after multiple complaints were made to DCF. Shortly after he was taken out of school, his stepmother allegedly imprisoned him in a small room in her house for 20 years.
DCF did not have open cases into Rogers’, Torres’ and S’ family members, or into any other adults living in their homes, when the three were pulled out of public school. This means that even if a law like HB 5468 had existed in the past, all three children could have still been removed from the public eye for the purposes of homeschooling.
Between 1996 and 2005, DCF received six reports about S, according to a statement from DCF Commissioner Jodi Hill-Lilly. The Department investigated each report, and through the course of the investigation, made announced and unannounced visits to his home, assessed his home conditions and food availability, contacted S’ pediatrician, who voiced no concern, as well as the school nurse. DCF also interviewed him alone multiple times. The Department can only interview a child without parental permission if there are allegations of abuse, not neglect. S wasn’t removed from public school until after the last investigation was closed.
Similarly, multiple complaints were filed with DCF concerning Torres’ younger siblings, both before and after she was pulled from public school. The most recent complaint was filed in 2022 and was found to be unsubstantiated, so it was closed. After she was removed from public school, another complaint was filed about her younger siblings. DCF protocol requires that a worker interview all of the children in a house where a complaint was made, but Torres’ mother kept saying that she was out of state. Eventually, a DCF employee agreed to do a video call instead of a face-to-face interview. A woman in her 20s posed as Torres during the call. Torres was already dead at that point.
As for Rogers, DCF only opened a case for her one week before she died. Police received a report of a theft at a Mobil gas station. When they arrived at the scene, they found Rogers in the store. At around 2:38 a.m. Rogers told officers that she ran away because she was bored, and that she stole an energy drink. An officer paid for her drink and the store did not press charges. Later, law enforcement notified DCF that she ran away, and the department opened a case.
When he was interviewed yesterday evening, DCF Director of Communications Peter Yazbak declined to comment on HB 5468 because it had not passed at the time. Inside Investigator has not been in touch with him since then.
Critics of the bill say that the problem in all of these instances was DCF, not the typical parent homeschooling their child.
“Instead of focusing on actually addressing that issue, saving children’s lives, improving DCF, having accountability upon DCF, requiring DCF to go in person to these visits to make sure that these children are safe, instead of taking those necessary steps to protect children in the state, the Democrats have made it a targeted effort, for whatever reason, on homeschooling parents,” Senate Minority Leader Stephen Harding (R-Brookfield) said at a press conference hours before the bill was debated. “This is a politically targeted effort in an election year on a group of individuals that I think Democrats don’t usually see as voting for them.”
The Acting Director of the Office of the Child Advocate (OCA), Christina Ghio, released a scathing report about DCF on April 30. The report, which took the form of a public letter, found that 93% of all of DCF’s investigations fell short of their own standards in some way. The OCA found that DCF was both understaffed and lacked experienced workers because of a wave of retirements in 2022.
The letter was published days after a child with an open investigation committed suicide. DCF visited the child a few hours before they died, because they had harmed themselves. During that visit, the child told DCF that they did not feel safe at home and wanted to be moved into foster care, but a DCF worker left them there.
For Fran Rabinowitz, the executive director of the Connecticut Association of Public School Superintendents (CAPSS), the issue is deeper than these tragic incidents.
“I feel horrific, horrible, horrible, horrible about those cases,” Rabinowitz said. “But… for me, the thought process in the last 20 years has been, we have an obligation to educate these children. Are they being educated? Period. That’s it.”
Last year, the legislature tried to pass a similar bill that would have increased homeschooling regulations. Parts of that bill incorporated recommendations from the OCA meant to address instances where homeschooled children were abused. But Rabinowitz has been advocating for homeschool reform since 2003, she said.
For her, the most important part of this legislation is accountability for children’s education, she said. Presently, parents of homeschooled children are not required to notify districts if they are homeschooling their kids, only when they remove them from school. That means that state officials don’t know how many students are being homeschooled.
She helped draft the original version of HB 5468, which included a provision that would automatically open a DCF investigation into any parents who tried to remove their children from public school for the purposes of homeschooling. That part of the bill was removed after Commissioner Charlene Russell-Tucker said the Connecticut State Department of Education (CSDE) could not legally do that, because it would violate the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA).
Even though the bill that passed both the House and the Senate requires school districts to alert DCF when students are removed from the district to be homeschooled, Rabinowitz said that this bill would not violate any FERPA rights. The way that the bill is structured makes it so the district would notify DCF if a child were being withdrawn from public school to be homeschooled, and would independently report the number of homeschooled children in the district to the CSDE.
HB 5468 does not require DCF to review the records of parents if they want to remove their children from public schools so they can attend a private school.
When arguing against the bill on the Senate floor, Sen. Rob Sampson (R-Wolcott) said it needlessly targeted homeschooling parents for political reasons.
“That hostility shows itself in this bill. It shows up in the presumption that people who want to homeschool their very own children should be monitored, cleared for approval, tracked, and checked upon,” Sampson said. “That is where my concern, my sympathy, and empathy for the people who are faced with this turns into anger. The more you read the bill, the more clear it becomes.”
For Wolfgang, the fight isn’t over. He says that his organization is going to try to sway Lamont to veto the bill before it becomes law, and if that doesn’t work, they will take legal action.
“Homeschoolers have been activated,” he said. “I think they’re going to be much more political than we have ever seen. I think the majority party here may have awoken a sleeping giant in Connecticut and brought an entirely new constituency, a very large one, into the world of political action in Connecticut, and not a moment too soon.”
Was this article helpful?
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
This is sham reporting Alex and you should be ashamed of yourself for this amount of bias. If you had done even a modicum of further investigation you would have found that this bill is both racist and transphobic. Our vulnerable communities suffer greatly in the school system and often the only option a parent has, if they cannot afford a private school, is to homeschool their child. With this new bill in place it will essentially ensure a ban on homeschooling, not regulation, a ban. Why is it a ban? Because the state will not “grant permission” for a parent to educate their child if there is an open DCF investigation with the family. What can open a DCF investigation? Anyone who wants to call in a complaint for any reason. If they don’t like how you identify or the color of your skin, they can simply prevent you from homeschooling by calling and making a report. There is no limit on the amount of times they can call and while DCF is investigating (and let’s be real, they are wildly understaffed as it is so who knows when they will get to your case) you MUST put your child in the public school or your child will be removed from your home and placed in the school anyway. It doesn’t matter what abuse the child may have suffered in the school, they will be sent back if you cannot afford to send them to a private school. Shame on you for this article. I was considering signing up for this paper but seeing how you conducted yourself with no integrity you have more than lost my support. If you have even heard of the Journalist’s Creed, I can only imagine you are following the line “I believe that suppression of the news, for any consideration other than the welfare of society, is indefensible” with this article but I am here to tell you that you are badly mistaken in your judgement. Your bias was not done for the welfare of society and if you had bothered to do your job properly you would have realized that. Stop thinking in labels and actually pay attention to what people say.