The mother, Sara Harold, 40, who lives in Escondido, California, shared with the Register a letter she wrote to the cardinal, responding to an announcement last month from the diocese. She told the Register she has eight children ages 2 to 17. She home-schools the oldest six.
As she lives in one of the most expensive areas of the country, she said, her family cannot afford to send their children to Catholic school, even if with a significant discount.
One example: The nearest Catholic secondary, she said, is Cathedral Catholic High School in San Diego, where tuition for the 2024-2024 school year is $20,910 if paid in a lump sum. (The school also offers tuition assistance based on financial need and 10 full scholarships a year, according to its website.)
Another factor: She noted that many Catholic schools have “consistently struggled with providing accommodations for students with special needs, learning disabilities, and unconventional or challenging learning styles.”
“In-classroom education is a beautiful thing and works very well for many students — but not for all,” Harold wrote. “It is incredibly important that parents feel supported when they decide that a classroom-based education is not best for their children, and so they switch to home-based education. Whatever the reasons, parents ought to be able to decide what is best for their children, and we ought to have the support of our faith communities in making those decisions.”
In mid-September, the diocese announced that, going forward, home-schoolers will not be allowed to use parish property for cooperatives of home-schooling families and other gatherings.
Religious education appears to be one flashpoint.
Following up on the initial mid-September announcement of the ban, Cardinal McElroy issued a statement last week suggesting home schooling is providing “a parallel educational model” with Catholic schools that the diocese can’t and shouldn’t endorse. He expressed concern about home-school cooperatives “seeking to establish programs on parish sites” that include “religious formation or sacramental preparation programs within the parish setting that are dedicated specifically for home-school students.” According to the cardinal, this “has become a source of tension within the diocese.”
But the new policy goes beyond religious education, barring all home-school programs from parish property.
Cardinal McElroy said the diocese’s presbyteral council (which includes the bishops and several priests of the diocese) voted 13-1 in favor of the new policy banning home-schoolers around mid-September and that he approved it.
“The Diocese supports the decision of a growing number of parents to choose home schooling for their children. At the same time this support does not include a right for basing integral elements of home-schooling programs in parish settings. Home schooling is not inherently a ministry of the parish,” Cardinal McElroy said his statement. “As a consequence, home-school programs will not be provided designated special access to the parish facilities of the Diocese of San Diego.”
The new statement from Cardinal McElroy follows on the earlier announcement from the diocese that home-school programs are barred from using parish facilities “both because such usage can undermine the stability of nearby Catholic schools and lead people to think that the Church is approving and advancing particular alternative schools and programs.”
But Harold said in her letter that using parish facilities for home-schooling cooperatives has been valuable to help her “in connecting with other women, and connecting my children with other children, to form Catholic communities based around our parishes where we can supplement our home-based education with social events and extracurricular classes.”
She told Cardinal McElroy that she offered him her letter in the spirit of what she described as the cardinal’s “many words you have spoken in support of a listening, synodal Church.”
“I know that you are committed to listening to those on the margins, whose voices are not often heard by the leaders of the institutional Church, and that you value the opinions of the women who too often sit silently in the pews,” she wrote. “I feel confident that you will read this message graciously and respond with the loving heart of a good shepherd.”
Harold told the Register that her letter has gotten about 250 co-signers, most of them women.
The Register asked a spokesman for the diocese for comment on the letter Thursday morning, but did not hear back by publication. The Register has also asked for an interview with a diocesan official about the new home-schooling policy but has not yet heard back.
Other Home-Schoolers React
The Diocese of San Diego’s new policy has gotten the attention of home-schoolers elsewhere.
“It’s heartbreaking to read this. These are parents who want to raise their children in the faith,” said Maureen Wittman, a Michigan resident who home-schooled her children and is co-founder and co-director of Homeschool Connections, a family-owned business that provides curriculums and specialized courses for elementary and secondary students.
Wittmann said that even though she is a longtime home-schooler, she served a few years on the Diocese of Lansing’s school board for Catholic schools.
“It doesn’t have to be adversarial. We can work together,” Wittman told the Register.
One parish near where she lives, St. Joseph’s in Howell, Michigan, offers as a parish ministry a home-schooling study group for grades 6 through 12, including meeting space in a former parish preschool building “to complete the course materials, have discussions, do science labs, and attend art classes,” according to the parish’s website.
The founder of that ministry, Lindsay Carpenter, a former public-school teacher in early elementary grades, told the Register she was “kind of a reluctant home-schooler,” but she came to see the benefits of it when she was asked by home-schooling moms some years ago to teach English language arts one day a week in their homes.
Nowadays, she home-schools her four daughters, ages 16, 15, 12 and 8, and also leads the parish’s home-schooling study group, which is now in its second year. Participants — 30 kids from 19 families — often attend the church’s 8:15 a.m. Mass and then head to the former preschool building from 9 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. to work with other kids.
She said the Diocese of Lansing and St. Joseph’s parish have welcomed the home-schoolers. She also said the home-schooling group is respectful of the parish’s kindergarten-through-eighth-grade Catholic school and gets along with it, adding that the home-schooling group has a different mission.
She said her family could never afford Catholic school. She also noted that many Catholic home-schoolers want to offer intensely individualized learning in a Catholic atmosphere while spending most or all of the day with their kids.
“This idea that home-schoolers are competing with Catholic schools, it’s nonsensical to me,” Carpenter said. “They’re just choosing another way to educate their kids.”
She said she sympathizes with home-schoolers in the Diocese of San Diego.
“I can’t imagine what California home-schoolers are going through,” Carpenter said. “If this happened to us tomorrow, we would have no group.”
Home Schooling on the Rise
Home schooling was a fringe activity a couple of generations ago, but nowadays it has become much more common.
A story published by The Washington Post in October 2023 described what it called “a dramatic rise in home schooling” when many public schools closed during the coronavirus shutdowns of 2020 that “largely sustained itself” afterward, suggesting what it called home schooling’s “arrival as a mainstay of the American educational system.”
About 5.2% of students in the United States ages 5 to 17 received instruction at home during the 2022-2023 school year, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, which is part of the U.S. Department of Education. (Most of those were home-schooled, though the figure from the report also includes receiving virtual instruction online at home.)
Home schooling is popular in California. A study published by Johns Hopkins School of Education reported that the home-schooling rate in California was twice as high as the national average during the coronavirus shutdowns in 2020, citing data compiled by The Washington Post. Some 46,814 students were home-schooled in California during the 2022-2023 school year, according to the study.
Local Bishop’s Authority
Cardinal McElroy is within his rights under the Church’s canon law to prohibit home-schoolers from using parish property because he has followed the Church’s process, a canon law expert told the Register.
The pastor is the administrator of parish property. But a bishop working with the priests of the diocese’s presbyteral council has some authority over it.
“The diocesan bishop, in conjunction with the presbyteral council, can moderate how parish property is used in exercising pastoral ministry,” said David Long, a canon lawyer and dean of the School of Professional Studies at The Catholic University of America, by email, adding that a bishop “cannot take over the administration of that property” unless following guidelines set out in canon law.
Under canon law, Long said, a diocesan bishop “is best understood as the moderator of Catholic education in his diocese” — he can establish Catholic schools and determine whether schools in his diocese are Catholic, among other things. But he can’t order parents to send their kids to Catholic schools because the Church teaches that parents are the primary educators of their children and “must possess true freedom of choice in educating their children” (Canon 797).
Cardinal McElroy specifically acknowledged this parental authority in his statement explaining the new policy, stating, “Catholic teaching makes clear that parents are the first teachers of their children in faith and in choosing the educational setting for their children.”
“I believe Cardinal McElroy is within his rights canonically as the moderator of Catholic education within the Diocese of San Diego to define what home schooling means. By approving the policy passed by the diocesan presbyteral council, the cardinal is setting the parameters of where home schooling is appropriate (in the home) and inappropriate (in the parish or the parish school), and does not remove any choice from parents as to whether they should home school their children,” Long told the Register.
“He is also exercising his spiritual and sacramental authority as diocesan bishop to remove what he saw as sources of tension between parish and home-school settings in religious formation and sacramental preparation, which is again provided within canon law,” Long said.
Harold, in her letter to Cardinal McElroy, did not dispute his authority, but made an appeal based on her experience as one part of a multifaceted Church.
“Please don’t look at home-school programs as a competition for the Church’s scarce resources, but see them instead as an expression of God’s abundance, and an opportunity to accompany those who choose to approach God via a different path [from] the ones we’re used to,” Harold wrote.
She noted that Pope Francis during a talk Sept. 5 at a mosque in Indonesia encouraged listeners from various faiths to help each other “walk in search of God and contribute to building open societies, founded on reciprocal respect in mutual love.”
“Diversity in our approaches to God is one of the most striking aspects of our global faith,” Harold wrote. “… Home schooling in a Catholic context and with Catholic parish support is simply another manifestation of the beauty of Catholic education, moving toward decentralization and the empowerment of laypeople in the Church.”