“There is a difference between the persecution of a discrete group and the prosecution of those who violate a generally applicable law. As the Board of Immigration Appeals permissibly found, the German authorities have not singled out the Romeikes in particular or homeschoolers in general for persecution. As a result, we must deny the Romeikes’ petition for review and, with it, their applications for asylum.”

The Romeike family counsel made a promise to appeal the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals decision.  Two opinions were presented.  One represented the entire three-judge panel’s opinion, while Judge Rogers offered a separate, concurring opinion.  President Bush nominated two judges – Rogers and Sutton – to the appeals court. President Clinton nominated Judge Gilman in 1997. (more…)

In Cincinnati, three judges in the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals asked hard questions and heard the Romeike family bid for United States asylum from their home country of Germany.The Obama administration’s Department of Justice opposes the asylum claim that was originally granted in 2010 by Judge Berman in Memphis’ Immigration Court.

Here’s a review of yesterday’s court hearing from a couple of sources.  (more…)

Religion News Service reports on the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals Romeike Hearing regarding the German family’s political asylum request to stay here in the United States.

(RNS) When Uwe and Hannelore Romeike’s asylum case is argued Tuesday (April 23) before a panel of federal judges, their lawyers won’t talk about poverty, war, or any of the reasons most immigrants cite in their bid to stay in the U.S.

Instead, they’ll focus on a parent’s right to teach their children at home, which isn’t allowed in the Romeikes’ native Germany. There, home-schooling families face fines, jail time and even loss of custody if their children are not enrolled in a traditional school.

The major question seems to be whether homeschoolers are considered a “particular social group“,  as proposed by the original judge ruling for the family’s political asylum request.  Judge Berman stated he “did find that the homeschoolers are a particular social group for the purpose of asylum law.”

The RNS article pointed out another German homeschooling family’s stand in regard to their country’s government policies.

“There are new cases cropping up all the time,” said Jurgen Dudek, a Christian home-schooling father of eight. His family, one of just a few that is open about home schooling, faces a near-constant cycle of fines and court appearances.

Dudek spoke last week at a homeschooling conference in Minnesota, and plans to attend the Romeikes’ hearing. Even if the Romeikes win, he said, his family will remain in Germany.

“We wouldn’t want (the German government) to be triumphant in ousting the Dudek family,” he said.

Kudos to the Dudek family staying in their home country, a federal republic, and dealing with the oppressive rules inflicted on home educating citizens.  Good wishes for the Romeike family and their quest to educate their children as they wish.

The petition drive on the White House site calling for an Obama administration response has passed the required 100,000 threshold level.  Here’s what the petition requests:

We, the undersigned, respectfully request that the Obama Administration grant full and permanent legal status to Uwe and Hannelore Romeike and their children. The Romeikes, a homeschooling family represented by HSLDA, were granted asylum in 2010 because Germany persecutes homeschoolers with fines, criminal prosecution, and forcible removal of children from their families. Every state in the United States of America recognizes the right to homeschool, and the U.S. has the world’s largest and most vibrant homeschool community. Regrettably, this family faces deportation in spite of the persecution they will suffer in Germany. The Romeikes hope for the same freedom our forefathers sought. Please grant the privilege of liberty to the Romeike family.

The Department of Justice contests the Romeike family’s request for asylum and the granting thereof by the Memphis Immigration Court’s original decision allowing asylum.  The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals will hear their appeal April 23.  There has been much attention in the media about this case.  There has also been some homeschooling community dissension related to complicated political concerns created over the years.  With the Home School Legal Defense Association‘s involvement in this case, some have automatic distrust due to HSLDA’s negative involvement with several invasive state homeschooling regulations over the years.  Others feel camaraderie and solidarity with the family against oppressive homeschool  clamps by any government towards family choice.  In the diverse homeschool alliance, the extra wedge relates to the Obama administration’s attitude and policies pertaining to homeschoolers. His strong teacher union support has been perplexing to many since President Obama hit the national political scene. (more…)

Music teachers, Uwe and Hannelore Romeike, want to homeschool their children.  In the United States, potential homeschoolers  seek out our state homeschooling rights and responsibilities and follow them in order to homeschool.  Romeikes would prefer their children were educated in their home country of Germany.  But, unlike the United States, homeschooling isn’t possible in Germany, so they moved to Tennessee to continue educating their children as they wished.  Political asylum was sought in the United States to protect the family from being fined, having their children forced from their home and taken to public school, along with the potential they could lose their children for homeschooling them.  Trying to wade past the emotion within the homeschool community, this post will share some of the details of an asylum case that will be heard in April in the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals.

From the New York Times in 2010 – by Campbell Robertson, regarding Uwe and Hannelore discovering homeschooling and their start in Germany educating their two oldest children:

“She knew a family, but she didn’t want to mention their name because it wasn’t legal,” Mr. Romeike said.

Months of research followed: the Romeikes read articles, sat in on court cases and talked to other home-schoolers in Germany. Eventually they decided to give it a try. Working with a curriculum from a private Christian correspondence school — one not recognized by the German government — they expected to be punished with moderate fines and otherwise left alone.

Before I started homeschooling, I researched, read articles and talked to other homeschoolers.  Fortunately, I did not have to sit in a court room weighing the cons of homeschooling.  My neighbors did not have to block the police from removing my children from our home because we homeschooled.  The Global Post reports this 2006 incident in Krista Kapralos’ 2010 article:

Romeike’s heart stopped. He didn’t know what to do. He prayed the officers would go away if he didn’t answer the door. Instead, Romeike said, the officers left a voice message threatening to break in. (more…)

In an article title The Homeschool Movement’s German Lesson Joy Pavelski reports in The American, the Journal of the American Enterprise Institute, on the German homeschooling family which moved to the U.S.:

On January 26, a Tennessee judge granted political asylum to Uwe and Hannelore Romeike and their five children, three years after German police forcibly transferred the three eldest children—then aged 9, 8, and 6—from their home in Bissingen to state school. The U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) appealed the Tennessee ruling a month later, placing the case in limbo. If the appeal is rejected, more foreign homeschoolers may seek asylum in the United States, where roughly 2 million children homeschool.

“The United States granted roughly 1 in 5 of its more than 47,000 political asylum requests in 2008. This was the first reported such case predominantly linked with foreign restrictions against homeschooling.”

Read the entire article at the link above.

A very interesting article titled Homeschooling way to go? by Monica Cheru-Mpambawashe, appears in in the October 9 edition of The Herald:

In Zimbabwe most homescholars use a syllabus designed in South Africa. A pro-homeschooling blogger claims that as of May 1, 2010 South Africa had more than 100 000 students on homeschooling. SA has developed its own syllabus which is closely aligned to the one followed in formal institutions in that country but with the methodology basically borrowed from the American system.

Another excerpt:

A parent who is homeschooling her children in Harare says that her son is learning Afrikaans and doing very well on the written tests.

“When we went to SA and spoke in Afrikaans, it was hilarious as everyone looked at us in obvious bewilderment and we could not understand a single word they said.

“Homeschooling works for some subjects but maybe for a foreign language, you really want to have a group and live experience with a competent speaker,” she said.

Of the more than 20 parents homeschooling their children in Harare interviewed for this article all felt that it was much better than formal learning and they would only take their children to proper schools if they were forced.

Writer Monica Cheru-Mpambawashe includes information about homeschooling elsewhere in the world:

Internationally, homeschooling is most prevalent in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the US while Germany and Brazil, have outlawed it. China allows it for foreigners. Kenya is the only other African country beyond Zimbabwe and SA to carry out homeschooling in appreciable numbers.

Read the entire article at the link above.

Susan Ryan blogs about educational freedom at Corn and Oil:

“Some Americans are disturbed that Swedish homeschooling families are losing their right to educate their children at home. What a depressing notion turning into a reality, that children can and will be taken from their homes because they’re learning at home with their families.

“In Sweden – a country oft considered a progressive’s dream- and Germany, families were torn apart when their homeschooled children were forced from their homes. But here in the US, states such as Pennsylvania and New York bear down on homeschoolers with oppressive rules, regulations and bureaucratic paperwork having little and nothing to do with learning.”

It’s a good post, worthy reading for anyone interested in educational freedoms – and, of course, we all should be.

Alexandra Frean, visits the Romeike family in Morristown, TN and writes about it in The Times - Exiled: the parents who dared to teach at home

It was just after 7am in a chilly October day in 2006 when the police came knocking. Uwe and Hannalore Romeike and their three children remained quiet, scarcely daring to breath and hoping the cops would leave if they got no answer.

~~~
The Romeikes’ crime? Educating their children at home in a country where such activity is not only illegal, but regarded as highly suspect and even antisocial. A German court recently suggested that home schooling fosters the creation of “parallel societies”. And the police were called in to take the Romeike children to school.

My concern with this situation has been two fold – the bigger concern is HSLDA’s conforntational tactics and the lesser is the Romeike family itself. Frean takes us to Morristown and gives us a look at homeschooling at the Roeike’s US residence.

Settled on their sofa in a tiny duplex, near Knoxville, Tennessee, the couple appear bemused by their notoriety, which they say they never actively sought. The children have perfect manners and study quietly at a dining table in the same room, occasionally getting up to fetch a book. Even Damaris, 4, occupies herself and never once bothers her parents. Lydia, 11, asks about my shorthand and how it works. Joshua, 10, the most lively of the five, is intrigued too. “I shall always sign my name like that,” he says after I spell it out in a few shorthand squiggles.

The family is aware that they have become the object of intense scrutiny in Germany, but are taking it in their stride. “If I have to fight this battle, then I will,” Hannalore, 37, says. “I really hope that one day this will lead to a change in the law in Germany.” (more…)

The editorial, “Home school – The Europeans don’t like it,” on the Las Vegas Review-Journal nudges the Romeike family’s asylum into immigration reform territory.

Immigration has long been a wedge issue and the any reform effort is assured to be hotly debated, with rounds and rounds of emotional pleas by those on all sides. And, now homeschooling is being tied to it on the side of this position:

So long as they do it by the book, let’s reiterate: Send us your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free.

Homeschooling and immigration – I sense it is only a winning issue mix for HSLDA.

Read the editorial here.