Dear Friend --

See that photo above? Her name is Charlotte Ann, and she's my 9 year old daughter. Along with her 7, 5, and 3 year old siblings (two older girls, two younger boys), she attends a very prestigious institution called "The Bard Academy."

The school is so prestigious, you literally have to be born into it! 

Their teacher—my beloved wife Kitty—does an incredible job teaching them. Not only does she prep and labor all day outside the classroom to enable the endeavor, but she also has the advantage of sculpting lessons in a manner that intimately corresponds with the particular child's heart, mind, emotions, interests, and soul. The heart-lifting, cognitive-mapping, conviction-honoring power of homeschool is evident in not only the love she puts into educating our children, but also how much fun our kids seem to have doing it!

Take that aforementioned photo from earlier this week as an example.

Pictured behind Charlotte Ann are her spelling words. Ever on mission to make their education more immersive and playful, my wife constructed a performative spelling bee, where upon winning, one receives an ensemble of medals, certificates, and even headwear to announce to the family she had passed her exam. All throughout the day, she could be heard proudly telling anyone who would listen about her brand new medal.

Perhaps the most beautiful thing about the entire experience of homeschool—an experience that is both incredibly demanding, but indescribably fulfilling and self-edifying—is the continued and protected innocence of my children. They have had the blessing of being guarded from the sad realities of postmodern education.

Parents know their children best. 

This is not to say homeschool is for everyone. It's not. But that's in part exactly why we fight so ferociously for protecting liberty when it comes to schooling. Whether it's sending them to private, public, charter, or homeschool, a parent is uniquely ordained by God, and temporally equipped by nature, to oversee the holistic cultivation of their children's entire being.

This is something worth defending.

Especially within our culture—with its promotion of CRT on one hand and the politicization of the classroom on the other—the home is the last bastion of the defense of the family and childhood innocence. At the NC Values Coalition, our entire team has lived that homeschool life in one form or another. From my wife and I's experience homeschooling our four kids, to our Executive Director's years spent homeschooling, to our Legal Director's youth spent as one of 7 children homeschooled by her parents, we are fighting something we preach and practice. 

While you have yet to meet her, even our new Communications Director—the talented Laura Macklem—is an passionate homeschooling mom and advocate. So much so, that within her first week of being hired, she was compelled to write this amazing opinion piece in the Carolina Journal detailing her objections to comments by Democrats stating a desire to regulate homeschool! 

All that to say, we know you agree with us that the last thing our homes and homeschools need are the hands of big government, CRT-pushing, regulation-fermenting bureaucrats who are too busy politicizing and perverting classrooms to even bother fixing the massive challenges facing many failing public schools. 

Friend, whether it is life, family, or religious liberty, when we at NC Values choose our battles, we fight them with the tenacity of a mama and papa bear defending their young. With Democrats like State Senator Ernestine Bazemore floating ideas of regulating homeschools, would you consider making a much needed gift of $10, $25, $50, or more towards our work vigorously defending the over 100,000 homeschool families like ours across the state?