All homeschoolers in Ontario should know what the Education Act says about homeschooling. In section 21[2], the Act says that a child is excused from compulsory attendance at (public) school if he or she is receiving “satisfactory instruction at home or elsewhere.” Section 24[2] states: “Where the parent or guardian of a child considers that the child is excused from attendance at school under subsection 2 of section 21, and the appropriate school attendance counsellor or the Provincial School Attendance Counsellor is of the opinion that the child should not be excused from attendance, the Provincial School Attendance Counsellor shall direct that an inquiry be made as to the validity of the reason or excuse for non-attendance and the other relevant circumstances, and for such purpose shall appoint one or more persons who are not employees of the board that operates the school that the child has the right to attend to conduct a hearing and to report to him the result of the inquiry and may, by order in writing signed by him, direct that the child, (a) be excused from attendance at school; or (b)attend school…” This, unfortunately, is not a lot of help in negotiating the legal, political minefield that homeschooling in Ontario seems to have become. This article will address the reasons for Ontario’s complicated home-based education legal landscape, and suggest some short-term and long-term solutions. If the Law Protects Our Right to Homeschool–What’s the Big Deal? As you can see from the sections quoted from the Education Act, home-educated students are not required to attend school, assuming they are receiving satisfactory instruction. The Act does not attempt to define satisfactory instruction, but obviously, no more can be expected of homeschooling families than that which is deemed satisfactory in the public school system. Should a board form the opinion that a child is not receiving satisfactory instruction, then the Act provides that the Ministry (not the school board) may conduct an inquiry to determine whether the instruction is satisfactory. Unfortunately, the Ministry of Education and school board officials are under the impression that the state, in the form of the school boards, must excuse the child from school attendance. In fact, under the law, children are excused from school attendance by virtue of the fact that they are receiving satisfactory instruction at home, just as they are excused when they attend a private school. 2013 Web Editor’s Note: the current policy (PPM131) has somewhat changed the stance of the Ministry and school boards as described in the above paragraph. The government now directs school boards to accept the parents’ letter of intent to homeschool as sufficient evidence that they are providing satisfactory instruction, unless there are “reasonable grounds” to suspect otherwise. The school board’s only responsibility, according to the Act, is to report to the Ministry the number of school-age children in its jurisdiction not attending public school, and the reasons therefore. Hence it is legitimate for a school board to contact a family and ask them why their school-age children are not attending school, but to go any further is beyond the requirements of the Act (and in fact, they can fulfill this obligation by using the census). If contacted, a family need answer only that they are providing instruction at home. (This same procedure holds true for families whose children attend private schools, although, for some mysterious reason, they are rarely, if ever, contacted.) School officials also sometimes maintain that “someone,” (read, a school official) must determine whether or not the instruction the child is receiving is satisfactory. Nowhere does the law require this. In Canada, the courts presume one to be innocent until proven guilty. Case law has made it clear that with regard to Ontario law and homeschooling, parents must be presumed to be providing satisfactory instruction. Parents cannot be presumed to be providing unsatisfactory instruction. This is tantamount to a presumption of guilt. Therefore there are no legal grounds, except in cases in which there is reason to believe otherwise, for the state to question whether satisfactory instruction is being provided. Where there is such reason, the law provides for the procedure of an inquiry. Because of these false presumptions on the part of Ministry and school board officials, a number of families have been forced to go through the inquiry process outlined in the Act. The problem is not the inquiry process in itself. It is, rather, that school boards have presumed that the instruction families were providing was not satisfactory, and with no evidence to support this presumption, have demanded an inquiry. We will examine the inquiry process, but first, to go further in determining the limits of Ministry and school board officials’ power, we must turn to the case law. Case Law and Homeschooling In Lambton County Board of Education vs. Mireille Beauchamp (1979) Judge Kent put the onus clearly on the school officials to prove that satisfactory instruction was not taking place. In other words, the school board had to produce clear evidence that the home-educating family was not providing satisfactory instruction. This decision was consistent with the basic principle of North American and British legal systems that one is innocent until proven guilty, and in addition, clearly respected that the parent has primary and ultimate responsibility for the education of the child. As Wendy Priesnitz, founder of the Canadian Alliance of Home Schoolers, has noted, it is ironic that “this case was the justification the Ministry gave when circulating the ‘Johnson memorandum’ (see below) in the early 1980s encouraging school boards to “monitor” home-based education…i.e. if they were going to charge families with not providing satisfactory instruction, they needed to have evidence!” In Jones v. Her Majesty the Queen (1986), the Supreme Court upheld the conviction under an Alberta law of Pastor Jones, a minister who ran a private school in his church’s basement, on three counts of truancy, and ruled that: “a requirement [as per the Alberta School Act] that a person who gives