Senator McBroom asked and was granted unanimous consent to make a statement and moved that the statement be printed in the Journal.
The motion prevailed.
Senator McBroom’s statement, in which Senators LaSata, Barrett and Horn concurred, is as follows:
Mr. President, a few years ago I was approached by various constituents whose children were being home schooled because there’s a lack of parity. Students can’t go and get work at certain places without a sign-off from their school to have a work permit, and when they’re home-schooled they still had to go to a public school to get permission to go to work. The same public school that decided, you know, that was telling parents that they have to fill out various forms before they can home-school, or the schools that come to me and say, We have to get those home-schoolers because we don’t know what they’re doing. Meanwhile, they have their own problems, they have their own students who are failing. They have their own issues, and yet in a glass house, willing to throw stones at somebody else.
Now we have colleagues trying to excuse themselves from helping kids who want to work while they’re getting their education so they can be on the same footing with students in a traditional school setting, and they have the willingness to get up and self-righteously declare that we can’t give these kids these rights because some bad things happened somewhere else, because bad things happened to home-schoolers somewhere else. Do we pretend that bad things don’t happen at traditional schools? Maybe we should take away work permits for traditional schools too until we work out all the problems and have no more terrible things happen to kids anywhere. It’s ridiculous. Maybe no school that has a teacher who gets in trouble for abusing students should be allowed to issue work permits. Come on.
This is a simple fairness issue. This is a simple opportunity to give students who right now are working hard at their classes at home the ability to also have a job. We give that to all the other students in this state. How dare anyone say it’s wrong to give it to the home-school kids too. And how dare we say to have to fill out forms from their public school or get permission from the superintendent of another school before they’re allowed to be home-schooled, or that we should mimic other states that put parents through testing.
Parents’ rights are paramount in the raising of children and if a parent says, I want to educate my kid at home, that’s their business, and if they want their kid to be able to go to work, that’s their business. Vote “yes.”
The following bill was read a third time:
House Bill No. 4061, entitled
A bill to amend 2016 PA 235, entitled “Public threat alert system act,” by amending sections 2 and 3 (MCL 28.672 and 28.673).
The question being on the passage of the bill,
The bill was passed, a majority of the members serving voting therefor, as follows: