Parents accused of abuse ask for kids to be home-schooled

Because parenting makes you a better person.

LONGVIEW, WA (KPTV) -
A Longview couple accused of starving their five adopted children has asked a judge not to send their kids to public school.

Jeffrey and Rebecca Trebilcock made the request Wednesday, asking the children be home-schooled by an aunt.

The children were taken into state custody in March after they were starved into eating toothpaste and dog food, authorities said. The couple is also accused of beating the children when they tried to get food from the kitchen.

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Oh fuck to the NO. Those kids need someone who will care for them, not another relative who probably was looking the other way the entire time.

They are trying to hide what they have done.

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From a bottle cap message on a Magic Hat #9 beer: Condoms Prevent Minivans
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I want to pick up a bus full of unruly kids and feed them gummi bears and crack, then turn them loose in Hobby Lobby to ransack the place. They will all be wearing T shirts that say "You Could Have Prevented This."

They look like a real high-class couple. Probably missing some teeth, too.

I also wonder which agency thought they were parent material. They started out as foster parents and adopted these kids from another country. They have three other biological children who were healthy and showed no apparent signs of abuse. The "parents" do not look like they missed a meal or two. Nice.

No judge in their right mind would hear and grant whatever these nutcases have to say regarding the five children.

The real kids rarely are lacking in cases like this...I was living in FL when a foster baby was scalded to death. She was also not fed particularly well, dirty and wearing rags.

Foster moo and her piglets were fat little fucks dressed in Polo and Hilfiger. I guess I know why they were fostering.

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From a bottle cap message on a Magic Hat #9 beer: Condoms Prevent Minivans
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I want to pick up a bus full of unruly kids and feed them gummi bears and crack, then turn them loose in Hobby Lobby to ransack the place. They will all be wearing T shirts that say "You Could Have Prevented This."

Cut the red tape. Pull the parental rights now.

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“There are three things all wise men fear: the sea in storm, a night with no moon, and the anger of a gentle man.”

These two should have absolutely no say in the care of these children. Adopted or biological, if you abuse your kids, you go to jail, and you never see those kids again. Case closed. Sounds like they were getting off on having power over these poor, defenseless creatures, and are still trying to keep their power from their jail cells.

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gymrat
These two should have absolutely no say in the care of these children. Adopted or biological, if you abuse your kids, you go to jail, and you never see those kids again. Case closed. Sounds like they were getting off on having power over these poor, defenseless creatures, and are still trying to keep their power from their jail cells.

My thoughts exactly, What they think or say should have NO WEIGHT at all and not even taken into consideration by the judge.

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If YOU are the "exception" to what I am saying, then why does my commentary bother you so much?
I don't hate your kids, I HATE YOU!

I think in many situations, especially ones like this, where you have a parents who is abuse or at minimum unstable, homeschooling is a bad idea.

My parents weren't like this, but I think they were, and still are, a little off their rocker, tried for one year to homeschool me and my older sister. Mom was going to do the teaching and did buy a homeschooling kit with curriculum, lessons, etc for us. It started out OK but when we hit material we needed extra help with, she got upset with us because she thought we were smart enough to understand and when we were having problems, it was because we weren't trying.

After a few months, she gave up trying to teach us and just left us to our own devices. She also lied to our father saying we were refusing to work, which wasn't the case, we just needed help. When he suggested enrolling us in the public school nearby we could walk to, she threw a fit. Basically, she said we'd probably be put in the lowest level classes, and would be associating with the low lifes that go to those places. That Christmas, she got us color TVs and gave us cable connections in our rooms so we'd stay out of her hair, yet would complain to Dad that all we wanted to do was watch TV.

Sis and I took the study materials and started working from them ourselves hoping we could learn enough to not have to repeat a year of school. We must have done something right, since we tested for Catholic school and got high scores and didn't have to repeat the year we were out of school.

During that year of homeschooling, we were socially isolated, we didn't see any other kids, few other people other than our parents, and it wasn't easy. I'm just glad worse things didn't happen and shudder to think what is happening in the homes of some homeschooled kids.

Atlanta Escapee

Some time back I noted that I had compiled a huge databook of anti-homeschooling data and commentary.

So many horrific cases have recently come to light in which pahrunts abused children who were allegedly homeskooled, not to mention other cases in which the kyds simply have not learned what they should have by their ages, that it appears the pendulum is just starting to swing back in favor of more regulation. The trend since about 1995 has been the other way, toward little or no regulation or oversight. Over the last few years a number of prestigious legal journals have published papers discussing the need and the proposed mechanisms to re-regulate homeschooling. If any of you are interested, I can post a few links, but be warned that many of these papers are pretty long.

One big problem has been the Home Schooling Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) headquartered in Virginia. It lobbied numerous states to drop laws prohibiting parents suspected or already convicted of abuse or neglect of children, or parents who are registered sex offenders, from homeschooling. The results of such lobbying have recently resulted in a child's death in Florida, which had had such laws—but eliminated them at the HSLDA's behest. This is how you end up with someone under investigation by authorities for child abuse due to public school staff reporting suspicion of it to CPS withdrawing their child from the school to "homeschool" him/her. This pattern has recently appeared in several states.

And the worst such cases almost invariably involve adopted children, as here. It's disgusting.

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gymrat
These two should have absolutely no say in the care of these children. Adopted or biological, if you abuse your kids, you go to jail, and you never see those kids again. Case closed. Sounds like they were getting off on having power over these poor, defenseless creatures, and are still trying to keep their power from their jail cells.

I think many parents get off on all the power they have over their children. They don't care about the kids, they only care about the power.

I think many of these parents who want to homeschool don't want to do it because the kids will get a better education, but because they want full control. They don't want them having access to any idea or any knowledge they don't agree with, don't want them to socialize with others, basically want physical and mental control over them.

As for those who defend homeschooled students, saying they have higher test scores, etc., I've heard that most states don't require standarized testing for homeschooled students, which means all of them aren't tested, while all public school students are. I wonder how much different the results would be if all homeschooled students had to take standardized tests like public school and private school students do.


JD

JohnDrake, you hit the nail on the head with your comment about homeschoolers testing. The vast majority of them are not required to test; nor in fundie families are the kyds likely to go to a regular university, so university-specific testing such as the SAT is out as well. Those who do test are self-selected and are much more likely to be the university-bound, better students anyway.

Many of the fundies have fought against any oversight or regulation of homeschooling, in part because they don't want to be tested.

We hear a lot about the homeschooled child who wins the National Spelling Bee (which is actually little more than a trivia contest anyway) or who gets into a prestigious university. What the public often will not realize is that these are the exceptions and these are just as anecdotal as the homeschooling failures—and there are many more of the failures. Note by comparison that we aren't hearing about homeschooled children winning real science and mathematics competitions. Fundie homeskoolers' rejection of modern scientific principles is a big reason why.

Concerning the better universities, the Akron Beacon-Journal (Ohio) ran a famous series on homeschooling in November 2004, and the reporters discovered a surprising thing: homeschooled students are grossly underrepresented in the Ivy League and other top colleges. The usual figure given is that 2% of school-aged children are being homeschooled. But only about 0.2% of the students at these prestigious universities had been homeschooled—one tenth of the proportion that you would have expected. More startling is that more recent figures seem to confirm that this underrepresentation continues.

I've always found the idea of homeschooling baffling and horrifying. How could you want to spend 24 hours a day with your kid(s) and how does any kid put up with years of that?

But I'm especially suspicious of it since I was living in DC a few years ago when Banita Jacks killed her four daughters.

Short version of the story: This woman who was/is about as mentally ill as a person can get took her four daughters out of school, telling the school system that she was going to "homeschool" them, even though she had no more than a 10th grade education herself. She eventually killed all four of them and lived in the house with their bodies for at least six months. They were only found because she'd quit paying her rent and got evicted.

Apparently, just anyone, no matter how unstable or poorly-educated, can just say they're going to homeschool their kids, with no qualifying criteria and no follow-up verification that the kids are being educated or even alive.