COLUMBUS, Ohio — An Ohio anti-child abuse bill, dubbed by opponents as the “worst-ever home-school law proposed,” has been suspended after a wave of outrage erupted over provisions that would have granted child protective services, not parents, the final say in the decision to home school their child.

State Sen. Capri Cafaro, D-Hubbard, proposed Senate Bill 248, or “Teddy’s law,” on Dec. 3, in response to the horrible torture and murder of 14-year-old Theodore “Teddy” Foltz-Tedesco at the hands of his mother’s abusive boyfriend, Zaryl Bush. Teddy’s mother, Shain Widdersheim, had removed the teenager from public school after teachers reported his abuse, alleging that she was going to home school her children.

But the bill proposed by Cafaro would have required social workers to determine whether home-schooling was in “the best interest of the child” before parents could remove their children from school for home or Internet-based instruction. The bill would have required parents to submit to background checks with in-person interviews conducted by social workers with the parents and the child.

In the face of intense opposition, Cafaro announced Dec. 19 that she was suspending the bill after consulting with Teddy’s family members. She explained in a news release that she wanted to strengthen child protections and not engage in a “policy debate about educating children in the home.” The senator said she was withdrawing the bill in favor of more comprehensive legislation, which will not include “any content related to education in the home.”

“Through this process, it is our goal to craft a new bill to honor Teddy’s legacy and to protect vulnerable children like him in the future,” she said.

Cafaro’s decision to drop the bill was welcomed by home-school advocates, particularly the Home School Legal Defense Association, which raised concerns about the bill’s impact on parental rights.

“It’s a very good result, on many levels. We’re very happy about it,” said Michael Donnelly, an HSLDA staff attorney who covers member affairs in Ohio, the District of Columbia and a number of other states.

Donnelly credited the victory to the swift action of advocates and said the HSLDA would continue monitoring the situation.

“We’re very thankful for the calls and emails that our members and friends sent out to achieve this great victory for home-schooling freedom in Ohio, and we’ll continue to be watching this particular legislation until it is no longer a threat.”

Ohio Catholic Conference's executive director, Carolyn Jurkowitz, told the Register that the Church opposed any legislation that “would threaten the right of parents to be the first educators” of their children.

“Anything that would take the decision-making about a child’s education out of the hands of parents is something we would be very concerned about,” she said. However, Jurkowitz doubted that Cafaro’s bill would have gotten any traction, given Republican control of the legislature and the governor’s office.

 

Tragic Cases Make Bad Law

Donnelly pointed out that Cafaro’s proposed solution in S.B. 248 failed to get at the real issue: Despite numerous attempts by teachers, friends and neighbors to report Teddy’s abuse, law enforcement failed to intervene.

“This bill was positioned by its sponsors as a response to a tragedy, but it does nothing to address what happened in that particular case,” Donnelly said. “Rather, this bill would infringe on the constitutional liberties of tens of thousands of parents in Ohio, and essentially presume that they’re all abusive, until they’re proven that they’re not.”

The bill also could have made home-schooling difficult for families that had ever been investigated over unsubstantiated allegations of child abuse. The law would have required public children’s services officials to perform background checks on parents and children and automatically disqualify the family for home-schooling if “a record or report of any investigation at any time” existed in a statewide child-welfare database. The family would then have to successfully complete a comprehensive intervention program in order to be eligible to home school.

“There is a gross amount of over-reporting of insignificant or minor issues or of untruthful and non-accurate concerns,” Donnelly said. “So if someone just happened to have had a report made against them, then that would substantially interfere with their ability to home school, even if that report had turned out to be unsubstantiated.”

While a number of U.S. states have laws requiring the removal of records of unsubstantiated allegations from their databases, Ohio is one of 10 states that (as of June 2011) do not have statutory language on expunging records, according to ChildWelfare.gov.

Statistics from the Children’s Bureau of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services report that out of 3.8 million children who were subjects of a child-abuse report during fiscal year 2012, only one-fifth were found to be victims of abuse, while “four-fifths of the children were found to be nonvictims of maltreatment.”

 

Investigative Failures

Donnelly said something has to be done to prevent more cases like Teddy Foltz-Tedesco. While Teddy’s horrific abuse had been known and reported, the larger question is why police officers and social workers tasked with investigating these allegations did not intervene.

Teddy died from head trauma in January 2013. The murderer, his mother’s boyfriend, was sentenced to life in prison, eligible for parole in 33 years. Teddy’s mother, who covered up the abuse the boy endured, was sentenced to 15 years in prison on charges of child endangerment and obstruction of justice.

Cafaro told the Register that she would not be “calling for an investigation of local authorities” to examine whether they mishandled Teddy’s case.

“Our legislative code of ethics in Ohio generally discourages legislators from getting involved in those types of investigations,” Cafaro explained.

Instead, the lawmaker said she would be pursuing hearings and gathering public input to assess “the kind of policy changes that need to be made to assure that children services and law enforcement have the tools to act in the best interest of all children in Ohio.”

Peter Jesserer Smith is a Register staff writer.