Connecticut’s Education Committee advanced a bill that would create new reporting requirements for families removing children from public school to homeschool or enroll in private school, even as opponents questioned whether the measure would protect children or simply add oversight burdens to homeschool families.
The vote on House Bill 5468 came Wednesday, a week after a public hearing in which the committee heard from hundreds of speakers and received thousands of written submissions, most of which opposed the bill. During the committee vote, four Democrats joined all 16 Republicans in voting against the legislation, while 26 Democrats voted in favor.
House Bill 5468’s proponents say the legislation is designed to address what they call a blind spot in Connecticut’s oversight of children who leave public school, particularly at a time when the state has “virtually no contact” with students who are removed. A May 2025 report from the Office of the Child Advocate concluded that parents with ill intent can exploit that lack of oversight to cover up misconduct, and proponents said attention increased further after the discovery of Jacqueline “Mimi” Torres-García’s body months after the report’s publication.
Before the committee vote, Republicans subjected the bill to criticism while proponents—led by Education Committee co-Chair Jennifer Leeper, D-Fairfield—argued for a limited check rather than a broad change to homeschooling. Leeper and other backers said the bill is intended to separate a handful of bad actors from the thousands of parents educating children in good faith.
What House Bill 5468 would require
Under the bill, parents would have to appear in person to notify the district that they intend to remove a child from the public school system for homeschooling or private school enrollment, and then reaffirm that intent each following year. For families intending to homeschool, two days after notice, the district would contact the Department of Children and Families to determine whether the parents are subject to a protective order or are on the department’s abuse and neglect registry; the bill would allow homeschooling if the parents are not subject to those conditions.
The legislation would also require parents to submit some evidence that the child is receiving “equivalent instruction.” The bill describes possible options including a portfolio or having the student take a statewide mastery exam, and it would require families to keep records of that instruction for three years.
Republicans on the committee said they found that framework unclear and questioned how it would work in practice. Ranking Member Rep. Lezlye Zupkus, R-Prospect, asked what “equivalent instruction” means in Connecticut’s different localities, saying, “What is equivalent instruction? Is it equivalent to Prospect’s education, Bridgeport, Waterbury, Greenwich, Darien, East Haddam? I don’t know.”
Leeper responded that the answer can be found in Sec. 10-184 of the General Statutes, which identifies “equivalent instruction” as an alternative to public school but does not supply an explicit definition. Leeper said the term is generally understood to align with homeschooling and that its inclusion in the bill does not impose new standards for what homeschooling entails.
Concerns about pushing homeschooling toward public-school norms
Sen. Heather Somers, R-Groton, said she was dissatisfied with the bill’s approach. Somers argued that “By homeschooling being evaluated and really being pushed to public school standards, this bill is pressuring families to mirror the public school system,” a concern she raised during the committee discussion.
Leeper said there were no specific curricular standards in the bill for what parents would have to submit. She said the threshold was low, noting that lawmakers would ask families to “annually, electronically submit a form one year, beginning in two years from now, and showing that you have educated your child in some way is a very, very low bar.” Rep. Mary Welander, D-Orange, likewise said the bill did not dictate a curriculum, adding, “There is nothing in this legislation that dictates the curriculum. You can have a curriculum that is faith-based. You can have a curriculum that is based on outdoor activities.”
Other Republicans focused on whether a portfolio-style requirement could be meaningfully reviewed without an evaluation of content. Rep. Greg Howard, R-Stonington, questioned what would happen if parents submitted evidence that did not reflect academic progress, saying, “Let’s suppose that I have a freshman and a junior, and I bring in their portfolio in March, and it says that I’m teaching them the ABCs. I hope we can agree that they’re academically way behind,” before asking how the state would respond. Leeper replied that families would meet the requirement by demonstrating “equivalent instruction,” and she added, “If you would like to propose a higher standard, I would be happy to talk about that.”
Opponents argue the focus should be on public-school safety and state agencies
Several opponents said the Education Committee should treat concerns about children’s welfare and safety as a problem rooted in the public school system, not homeschooling. Somers praised homeschooling children she said she has met, saying, “Every single homeschooler that I’ve had the privilege of meeting, their kids are smarter. They’re graduating early from high school. Some of them are taking college courses or actually getting two years of college before they even turn 18.” Rep. Kathy Kennedy, R-Milford, thanked homeschool parents who testified against the bill, saying they spoke “so eloquently, with incredible composure.”
Rep. Tina Courpas, R-Greenwich, argued that families remove children from public school because they do not feel their children are safe, saying, “People are withdrawing their kids, they’re quitting their jobs, because they don’t feel their kids are safe in public school.” She said the bill “doesn’t address that problem” and instead “cuts off people’s options to solve a problem that this state has created for them.”
Courpas’s concerns echoed those expressed by Rep. Anne Dauphinais, R-Killingly, who said public schools already face staff shortages and that the bill could add costs to districts. Dauphinais said, “We know that there’s a shortage of teachers … We know there’s a shortage of staff and paraprofessionals. We can’t even address that in the public schools, and now we’re gonna put an extra financial cost on our towns and on our state if this bill should pass.”
During the hearing, Education Commissioner Charlene Russell-Tucker provided written testimony on Mar. 11 that the bill would require districts to follow up with parents who do not provide documentation of their intent to homeschool, and she said that would create a new administrative burden at a time when districts are already facing rising costs. Leeper said the latest version of the bill would provide additional funding for districts through Connecticut’s Education Cost Sharing grant, and she said a separate bipartisan legislative effort is underway to increase ECS funding.
Opponents also questioned whether the bill would have prevented the high-profile cases that brought more attention to the oversight gap in the first place. Zupkus said, “It literally makes my blood boil that people are so evil that could do that to their child. This (bill) has nothing to do with that. And nothing in this bill would ever make a difference.” Dauphinais said some recent cases were not about homeschooling, adding that one child was dismissed by a judge and died weeks later after never being homeschooled.
A key point of dispute centered on what information state officials already had in those cases and when they lost contact with the state. Leeper said the bill’s changes—including requiring in-person notification and flagging the Department of Children and Families—would have increased follow-up. Opponents argued the better path is to fix what they described as failures at DCF itself, including scrutiny over the Torres-García case, which has drawn intense attention from lawmakers.
Sen. Eric Berthel, R-Watertown, said in remarks that the Education Committee should not rely on DCF for monitoring homeschoolers, saying, “The child advocate … stated publicly yesterday to me in a hearing that she agrees the real cause of these tragic events is a catastrophic failure of the Department of Children and Families.” Welander, who said she supports changes at the agency level, argued that education and child welfare agencies would need to work together, saying, “They have to work together. We have to create a system where if you’re not doing the right thing by your kid and no matter what, that we are creating more follow-up.”
Break from the party line and final vote discussion
Several Democrats who opposed the bill cited concerns about the state agencies implementing the requirements. Rep. Trenee McGee, D-West Haven, joined Republican colleagues in voting against the bill, saying she was concerned about whether SDE and DCF “these agencies of cognizance are telling us that they don’t have the equipping and financial background for this.” McGee said she wished forms used when students are withdrawn from public school were mandatory, but she said she ultimately opposed the bill because “the weight of the opposition was just far too great for me.”
Rep. Antonio Felipe, D-Bridgeport, also voted against the measure. Felipe said he chairs the Black and Puerto Rican Caucus and described concerns from “homeschoolers of color” who said the changes were moving quickly and that families did not fully understand the bill. Felipe said those families agreed there should be “some sort of registry, some sort of point-in-time measurement of the fact that these children exist, and where they, I guess, hypothetically could be.”
In closing comments before the vote was called, Leeper said the law was not meant to target homeschool families but to differentiate them from bad actors. She said, “We know these tragedies, those are not people homeschooling their children. We know that. Our law just does not differentiate,” and she added that Connecticut’s child welfare system was built on the assumption that children are seen daily.
This story was originally published by The Connecticut Mirror and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.