CT Committee Strips Homeschool Oversight From Education Bill

The Connecticut General Assembly’s Appropriations Committee stripped a homeschooling oversight provision from a priority education bill Monday, removing it without debate while the family of 11-year-old Jacqueline “Mimi” Torres-Garcia is still waiting for answers about how the state lost track of her before her death.

The deletion wasn’t announced with any fanfare. Appropriations co-Chair Sen. Cathy Osten, D-Sprague, told committee members that “Section 5” of Senate Bill 6 had been removed. She didn’t say what Section 5 did. No one asked. Members voted and the bill moved to the Senate floor.

Section 5 was the homeschooling provision.

That matters because of what Connecticut law currently allows. Parents can withdraw a child from public school by mailing a written notice to their district. After that single step, the state has no legally mandated mechanism to confirm the child is safe, being educated, or even alive. Critics have called that gap a shield for abusive households for years. The Torres-Garcia case, where the 11-year-old’s body was found after she’d been removed from school, pushed that argument from the policy margins into the capitol with a force lawmakers can’t easily ignore.

What the stripped provision would have done is fairly narrow. It required the Connecticut State Department of Education to alert the Department of Children and Families whenever a parent filed homeschool intent paperwork. DCF would then check whether the child had any open cases on file. Supporters said it’s a targeted intervention, not a burden on the overwhelming majority of families who don’t have DCF histories.

Education Commissioner Charlene Russell-Tucker killed it anyway, at least for this vehicle. At a public hearing, she said the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, the federal student privacy law known as FERPA, bars her department from sharing student data the way Senate Bill 6 would require. If the state did it anyway, she warned, Connecticut could lose substantial federal education funding. The Office of Fiscal Analysis looked at the same question and came back with the same answer.

That’s the kind of liability that clears a room. No lawmaker wants to own a vote that cost the state millions in federal dollars, so the provision came out.

“We can’t move forward with something that puts federal funding at risk,” one committee member said, declining to be identified by name before the formal vote.

The story doesn’t end with Senate Bill 6, though. House Bill 5468 is still alive. It would create comparable homeschooling oversight through a different legal mechanism, one that apparently sidesteps the FERPA problem, since neither Russell-Tucker nor the OFA raised the same federal funding objection against it. The Education Committee passed H.B. 5468 on a 26-20 vote, with a small number of Democrats crossing to join every Republican in opposition. At least one member flipped from no to yes before the vote closed, according to initial reporting by CT Mirror.

Twenty-six to 20 is not a comfortable margin.

H.B. 5468 now heads toward its own Appropriations Committee review. Whether it survives that process intact, gets amended into something weaker, or dies there entirely is the central question for homeschool oversight advocates heading into the final weeks of the 2026 session. The opposition, a coalition of homeschooling families, parental rights advocates, and conservative lawmakers, isn’t pulling back. They’ve argued consistently that any DCF notification requirement treats law-abiding families as suspects and opens the door to government intrusion into private education decisions.

That’s a real constituency. It’s also one with an organized presence at the capitol, and they’ve already demonstrated they can peel off enough Democratic votes to make the math uncomfortable for leadership.

What proponents have on their side is harder to dismiss. Jacqueline Torres-Garcia was 11. She’s not a hypothetical. The case for at least a minimal check when a child disappears from the public school system doesn’t require much elaboration in the current climate.

H.B. 5468 goes to Appropriations next. Five votes separated passage from failure in committee.