When homeschooling means torture

Last year, two twin children, age 10, were adopted in Florida through the foster care system and then hastily pulled out of public school by their adoptive parents who told the Miami-Dade School District that they were going to be homeschooling the children going forward. The two children were not homeschooled, however. Instead, they were brutally, sadistically and methodically tortured. The boy, Victor, survived, but his sister did not. She was bludgeoned to death. This has prompted the state of Florida to review how it tracks children who are taken out of the system for reasons of preferential homeschooling.

The Department of Children & Family Services did nothing short of turning their back on reports of abuse offered by witnesses who contacted the agency on the children’s behalf. Many serious and obvious red flags witnessed by the department itself were systematically ignored. If blaming the school district is their way of scapegoating, there is plenty of blame to go around. These children were discarded and knowingly left in the hands of madmen because government employees decided that the abuse wasn’t heinous nor egregious enough to be worth their time.

And their pain was not brief. According to the Sun Sentinal:

There Nubia and her twin brother, Victor, were “repeatedly hit, punched beaten…bound and left for days on end” and locked inside a bathroom by their adoptive parents, according to police

The parents are now in jail and charged with bludgeoning Nubia to death. Her body was found Valentine’s Day in the back of a pickup truck alongside Interstate 95 in West Palm Beach. Victor barely survived a chemical dousing.

Getting back to the homeschooling aspect of this story, as this is an interesting and viable point. A Florida Board of Education member, Roberto Martinez, made the problem of unmonitored homeschooling clear when he said this about the Victor and Nubia:

These kids were not home schooled. They were home-detained, tortured and executed.

The state of Florida acknowledged that there is far too little oversight of homeschooled children especially for those children who are at risk, but how do you continue to follow and monitor these children without legitimate homeschooling parents, who often want to be completely off the public school grid, getting their panties in a wad?

This isn’t the only case that raises concerns about the homeschooling excuse. The Sun Sentinal goes on to report that another child, young 7-year-old Roberto Fortin III, was also taken out of the Miami-Dade school system to supposedly be homeschooled and although these families are completely unrelated, young Roberto was found many months later at a local Children’s hospital…

…malnourished, in diapers, and covered in wounds that had become infected. He weighed only 40 pounds

Since I write many new stories about child abuse on this very site, my anecdotal experience has shown me that half of all severely beaten and tortured children are either not in school or supposedly “homeschooled.”

The real question is, will homeschooling parents allow more transparency at the expense of their privacy and rights to ensure that children are properly protected? If objections occur, one has to wonder just how altruistic these homeschoolers are. Children being removed from society cannot be the loophole which allows these types of crimes against children to go unnoticed. Perhaps children should be required to check in with the school, in person, once a month. I don’t know what the answer is, but the current setup certainly isn’t to the benefit of all children.