The chairwoman of the state Senate’s school choice committee objects to suggestions that lawmakers should examine regulations surrounding homeschooling after the death of a 14-year-old Boone County girl.
“The recent tragedy of Kyneddi Miller in Boone County is a heartbreaking and grievous tragedy that should never have occurred. It is imperative to identify the true causes of this failure, rectify them if possible, and demand accountability,” Senator Patricia Rucker, R-Jefferson, wrote in an opinion piece distributed to West Virginia news organizations.
“Sadly, instead of taking responsibility for the failures that resulted in this death, leaders are resorting to blame-shifting and scapegoating homeschooling laws rather than addressing the real causes.”
This April, emergency responders were called to Kyneddi Miller’s home and found the 14-year-old girl dead on the bathroom floor, “emaciated to a skeletal state.”
Her mother and grandparents have been charged with felony child neglect causing death, prosecution that is ongoing in the Boone County courts system. Meanwhile, questions have focused on whether state agencies could have provided stronger oversight to intervene for the girl’s wellbeing.
Investigators say Kyneddi had not attended school since late 2019 or 2020 and hadn’t been outside the house more than a couple of times in the last four years. The girl’s family submitted homeschooling documentation in February 2021, with her mother writing “We think homeschooling is the best now with the COVID-19 in order to keep our family safe.”
Officials with Gov. Jim Justice’s administration last week confirmed that in March, 2023, troopers were called to check on the girl, concluded at the time that she was not in imminent danger but had enough concern about her isolation to drive to the local human services office to informally suggest continuing to check on her.
Rucker said the girl’s situation fell through too many cracks.
“In the case of Kyneddi Miller, we know that she had stopped attending public school for two years before a notice of intent to homeschool was submitted. Why didn’t this event trigger a truancy investigation?” Rucker wrote.
“It appears that informal referrals were made to CPS, but they were not followed up. The family had previous reports of abuse and neglect, so when these referrals were made, CPS should have intervened to prevent the tragedy. When mandatory assessments were not submitted, county officials had every tool they needed to follow up and intervene. Regrettably, this did not happen.”
As state officials have reflected on whether policies should change as an outcome of the girl’s death, much focus has fallen on academic assessments required for homeschooled students.
State code allows exemptions from school attendance policies if homeschoolers participate in an annual academic assessment, but school system leaders say too often that doesn’t occur. It is unclear in state code what happens if someone does not submit these assessments.
Brian Abraham, the governor’s chief of staff, last week pointed toward a conditional requirement to follow up on those assessments — noting that counties may reach out and issue a truancy petition.
“If you don’t do the assessment, you can be terminated from the home school,” he said. “If you’re terminated from the home school and you’re absent from public school, therefore, enough — they can issue a truancy.
“So there is an instance where if those things had been done, there’s a possibility that there might have been some court intervention that might at least have had contact with her in between 2023 when the trooper was there, and in 2024 when they found her.”
Senate President Craig Blair, R-Berkeley, has called for examining “ways that we, legislatively, can improve our regulations related to homeschooled children to ensure that no children suffer this same outcome.”
Delegate Amy Summers, chairwoman of the House Committee on Health and Human Resources, has said the state’s homeschool statute needs to be reviewed to determine what are the next steps if assessments are not submitted.
“We need to look at the homeschool statute and see if that word should be ‘shall’ instead of ‘may’ on the assessments,” Summers, R-Taylor, said last week, “because state law does say you need to turn in those assessments at 8th grade and they didn’t, so what is the next step? So I think that’s area to look at as well to make a change.”
Rucker pushed back on the connection to homeschooling.
“It is wholly inappropriate and unacceptable to attribute this tragic death to homeschooling, which unfairly maligns the thousands of West Virginia families who are responsibly and effectively educating their children. How can new laws work when government officials won’t even follow the ones that are on the books? Blaming homeschooling laws for this tragedy is misguided and unjust, casting unwarranted aspersions on a population that overwhelmingly performs well,” Rucker wrote.
Rucker instead pointed toward West Virginia’s “overworked and underfunded” child protective services system, vowing to sponsor legislation focusing on that issue.
“As we move forward, it is my earnest hope that the executive branch will engage in introspection and acknowledge where they failed this child. Resorting to blame-shifting and scapegoating only distracts from the real issues and fails all our children. We have a collective obligation to be better and to ensure such a tragedy never happens again,” she wrote.
Delegate Shawn Fluharty, D-Ohio, today also charged that the administration has engaged in blame shifting — although he is more inclined to advocate for stronger reporting requirements for families withdrawing their children from school buildings in favor of homeschooling.
“It sounds like it was an across-the-board failure,” Fluharty said today on MetroNews’ “Talkline.”
Fluharty has continually advocated for a policy known as “Raylee’s Law” that could pause or lead to denial of a parent’s request to homeschool if a teacher has reported suspected child abuse. The House passed the policy in the form of an amendment this past regular session, but it did not advance in the Senate.
The policy is named for Raylee Browning, an 8-year-old girl who died of abuse and neglect in 2018 after she was withdrawn from school, eliminating contact with educators under mandatory reporting requirements.
Raylee’s father and two other adults were sentenced to prison time in her death. The adults were accused of mistreating her and then ignoring her symptoms when she got sick before dying the day after Christmas in 2018. The cause of death was sepsis caused by a bacterial pneumonia infection.
“In the public schools we have reporting requirements; we do not have reporting requirements in the homeschool system,” Fluharty said.
“And we allow a system now, which I’d say has a clear loophole — we allow for child abusers to take children out of the public school system where they are seen and heard and put them in the darkness of night without any monitoring, without any reporting requirements. And it’s an incredible loophole if you’re a child abuser to say ‘Hey, I’m going to go homeschool this child, my child’ and there are no repercussions, there’s no monitoring, there’s nothing we do about it other than rubber stamp the fact that someone wants to go homeschool.”
