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Dear verga,

The ostensible reason, as reported by the parents upon inquiry was that the administration of these children's schools admitted that their schools just weren't meeting the needs of these little tykes, and that it seemed that some people were having some success with this new-fangled homeschooling business, and perhaps they could try it out.

I was a little surprised, as I thought that violated the spirit, if not the letter of federal education law. But I'm not an expert in federal education law, so I could be wrong, and I don't know precisely how it was phrased, and when talking about the law, violations of the the actual intent of the law are often legal, if phrased properly.

This, by the way, isn't the exclusive province of public schools. Someone who used to work for me sent her children to a local Catholic school, and when troubles arose, and the parents protested that the local public school to which the oldest would be assigned was a hell-hole, it was suggested that perhaps the oldest could be homeschooled.

Real reasons. A little harder to discern, but here goes. The kids were bad apples, not specifically a danger to anyone, not specifically doing anything to warrant getting expelled, but nonetheless, they were disruptive and likely were corrupting others (they certainly tried to corrupt other children in our homeschool community), and the schools probably figured that everything would be much better without the little rugrats. And, you know, I don't much blame them.

I also speculate that, like most public school workers, they had a dislike of homeschoolers and were engaging in a little prospective schadenfreude at the thought of dumping their rejects on us. Obviously, I didn't personally talk to the public school folks involved, but I've gotten that sort of thing off public school teachers I've known personally.

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