Texas Supreme Court sides with family who refused to school their children because the ‘Rapture’ was coming

The Texas Supreme Court has ruled in favor of a homeschooling family that refused to teach their kids because the “Rapture” was coming soon.

According to the Christian Science Monitor, the Court’s 6-3 vote came as the result of a technicality. Laura and Michael McIntyre claimed their Fourteenth Amendment rights were violated when the El Paso school district investigated their children’s education. Charges of truancy were filed by the district but later dropped.

At the heart of the issue is the question of where to draw the line between individual parents’ liberties to educate their own children and requirements designed to ensure that homeschooled children are learning at an acceptable rate. While the court ruled in favor of the family in this specific instance, they did not address the more fundamental issue, a development that could be important as the number of Americans choosing to homeschool their children rapidly grows.

Ms. McIntyre started educating some of her nine children about 10 years ago in the empty office of [a motorcycle dealership] in El Paso, Texas, where she worked with her husband.

The McIntyres brought their case to the Texas Supreme Court last year after an appeals court ruled against them.

Numbers released by the Texas Homeschool Coalition via the CSM says that Texas’ homeschooling community is disproportionately larger than the rest of the country’s with some 300,000 families participating.

Twenty-four states have rules that insist home-schoolers take some kind of assessment, usually via standardized testing or portfolios. Only nine states require that test scores are turned in for review by state bureaucrats.

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