Michigan State Officials Call for Registry of Homeschooled Children

Michigan officials are calling upon state lawmakers to enact a mandatory state registry of all homeschooled children in Michigan.

Since December 2023, Michigan state officials — including Attorney General Dana Nessel, the state House and Senate Education Committee chairs, the State Board of Education, and State Superintendent Michael Rice — have criticized homeschooling and called for stricter government regulation and oversight over homeschooled students and their parents.

The motivation for these attacks was the arrest in December of two couples in Clinton County for “allegedly abusing and financially profiting from foster and adopted children.”

However, instead of focusing on the crime itself — or on the high levels of abuse in government schools — these officials are broadly attacking homeschooling and parents seeking alternatives to government schools. For example, Attorney General Nessel alleged that homeschooling had contributed to the couples’ actions.

In a tweet on December 6, she wrote:

The homeschooling environment allowed abuse in [one of the homes] to go unnoticed; implementing monitoring mechanisms is crucial to ensure that all children, including those homeschooled, receive necessary protections.

The day prior, state Representative Matt Koleszar (D-Plymouth), chair of the House Education Committee, decried Michigan’s homeschooling laws and claimed that “abusive parents are taking advantage of [the absence of a homeschool registry] to avoid being found out.”

In January 2024, Superintendent Rice sent a letter to state legislators asking them to enact legislation on various education-related issues. Among these was a proposal to require parents to register their homeschooled children with the government, something parents currently are not required to do.

“Having a record of all children enrolled in these four buckets [public/charter schools, private schools, parochial schools, and homeschools] would provide an understanding of the children not currently enrolled in any learning environment,” Rice wrote. “The issue of ‘missing children’ is a national problem with potential negative consequences for too many children.”

A mandatory homeschool registry would be a major step toward government intrusion into the homes and daily lives of families. It would also enable government to later impose additional restrictions on families who homeschool.

State Senator Jim Runestad (R-White Lake) noted the dangers of this proposal, describing it as “the very definition of an unconstitutional invasion of privacy and extreme violation of parental rights.”

When the United States was founded, the vast majority of children were homeschooled, and parents freely raised their children as they saw fit. As a result, the American electorate was well-educated and adhered to strong moral principles — and the United States became the most prosperous country in human history.

Now, Marxist-influenced individuals and groups are seeking to eliminate homeschooling and force parents to send their children to government schools where they can be easily indoctrinated with Marxist ideology. Notably, modern-day public schools were themselves originally created by statist and Marxist-influenced individuals to control the next generation and how it views the world.

Government schools today are failing to truly educate children, and as a result, record numbers of parents are pulling their children out and pursuing homeschooling and private schools that uphold American values, such as FreedomProject Academy. The Michigan Legislature would be wise to avoid meddling in this trend, and to instead get government completely out of education altogether.

Michigan residents can contact their legislators in opposition to a homeschool registry by visiting The John Birch Society’s legislative alert here. And everyone can take action to save our children from government schools by visiting JBS’s “Save Our Children” action tools page here.