A bill filed in the New Jersey Senate on June 5 calls for every homeschooled child and parent to meet annually with a school official for a “general health and wellness check.”

S. 4589 is not merely an affront to homeschooling families. It raises privacy concerns and undermines the fundamental principle of American jurisprudence that individuals are presumed innocent unless there is proof they have committed a crime.

ACTION REQUESTED
Please call, email, or visit Senator John Burzichelli (District 3, Cumberland, Gloucester, and Salem), Senator Paul Moriarty (District 4, Atlantic, Camden, and Gloucester), or Senator Benjie Wimberly (District 35, Bergen County and Passaic County) if any one of them is your own senator. These three are the sponsors and cosponsors of the bill. If you are not in these senators’ districts, please refrain from calling. We believe that calls from the senators’ own constituents will be the most impactful right now.

Remember to be courteous. Your message can be as simple as: “Please withdraw S. 4589. It presumes that homeschooling parents are failing to properly care for children.” Or you can use information in the “background” section below to form your own message.

BACKGROUND
The Barna Group anonymously questioned a nationally representative sample of adults in detail about their experiences with child abuse and neglect while growing up. The study, as published in the Journal of School Choice, 2023, concluded that the type of school attended—home school or public school—was not a significant factor in the frequency of childhood abuse.

This bill can only encourage discrimination, prejudice, and suspicion toward parents merely because they exercise their constitutional right to homeschool their children.

The details of the bill are astonishingly problematic as well. The bill does not define what a general health and wellness check is. Nor does any New Jersey statute or regulation define it.

So what is a health and wellness check? An independent source describes it like this:
“A wellness check, often known as a wellness exam, is a preventive service that focuses on maintaining your current state of health and preventing future health issues. It's different from a regular medical appointment with your primary care doctor, which typically addresses specific health concerns or symptoms. During a wellness check, a healthcare provider, usually a primary care physician (PCP), reviews your general health status. This includes a physical exam, discussions about lifestyle and behavioral factors, family history, and potential risk factors for diseases.”

With such troubling vagueness in the bill, we would expect a massive variation in how the “general health and wellness check” is administered locally. The law gives no guidance on how it should be done, so officials will flounder around, make up their own policies and rules, and essentially do what they feel like. We would also expect them to want to question homeschooled children separately from their parents.

This is simply outrageous, not to mention a massive invasion of privacy. Health information is confidential. School officials do not have a free pass to feast their eyes on your family’s private health information.

Finally, if this bill becomes law, there likely would follow a demand that homeschoolers register annually, and we would expect additional laws to be enacted setting up punishment for those who don’t comply.

Thank you for standing with us for freedom!