After Irvington suspected neglect case, legislator reconsiders home-schooling laws

When Collingswood police found four brothers literally starving in their own home eight years ago, then-Assemblywoman Loretta Weinberg proposed a law requiring other home-schooled children to get an annual physical and pass standardized tests.

Irate home-schooling parents flooded her office with calls, and a group of some 30 people followed her around the Statehouse one day urging her to withdraw the bill, recalled Weinberg, (D-Bergen), now a senator. Without support from her colleagues, she complied.

“You would have thought I had suggested the end of the world as we know it,’’ Weinberg said.

But Weinberg said she’s thinking about reviving the issue after the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office last week charged an Irvington woman with aggravated manslaughter in the death of her 8-year-old daughter, who authorities said died of complications from an untreated broken leg. Irvington school Superintendent Ethel Hasty has said Venette Ovilde, the child’s mother, never enrolled any of her three children in school.

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This person is just trying to use this case for her own personal agenda. She is looking for a way to place more regulation on homeschooling. This family in no way represents homeschoolers as a whole. There are children who are in the public school system who slip the cracks.