One year ago today, I was in my office, juggling action alerts warning Illinois families about H.B. 2827, sending emails to our state allies, talking with legislators and media contacts, and in a nut-shell feverishly working to ensure that H.B. 2827 (a terrible bill introduced and defeated last year) would not pass in Illinois.
Suddenly, my assistant, Emma, poked her head in my office. “Will, did H.B. 2827 pass?” she asked me.
“No!” I emphatically responded. “It’s still pending in the Illinois House.”
“Well,” Emma responded, “several homeschool families in Illinois received a text message from the Illinois Department of Education this morning saying that due to recent legislation, families now need to contact the government to receive an approved curriculum.”
I was dumbfounded. I knew H.B. 2827 had not passed, but was the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) jumping the gun? I asked Emma for the text message, and she sent it over to me. Here it is (with the phone numbers listed redacted).
The text message raised more questions than it answered. A text message from a government entity was highly irregular, but not impossible. School districts in other states have sent random text messages to homeschool families about issues, and it crossed my mind this could be what we were seeing.
I decided I needed more information. So I did what I did so often during the battle to defeat H.B. 2827—I called Kirk Smith, Executive Director of Illinois Christian Home Educators (ICHE).
“Captain Kirk!” I exclaimed as Kirk picked up the phone on the first ring (I had previously told him I would start calling him “Admiral Kirk” if H.B. 2827 was defeated, but since the bill’s prognosis was still very much up in the air, he was still just ordinary “Captain Kirk” at this point). “Have you heard of families receiving text messages from ISBE this morning saying that they now need to have an approved curriculum?”
Kirk responded judiciously and cautiously that no, he had not heard of any families receiving a text message like this, but he would check with his team. I confirmed that we would run this text message to ground on our end and get back in touch with him.
Emma and I put our heads together and analyzed the text. It was most certainly incorrect, but, as we have so often pointed out, high degrees of regulation inexorably lead to overbroad and extra-legal requests from local and state governments. We decided to see if other families had received other text messages, and we reached back out to the families who had contacted us.
Just after lunch, we received the answer. One of the families emailed us back. Apparently, a couple homeschool high school teens had been following the H.B. 2827 battle, and thought this would make a great April Fool’s Day joke.
Well, they succeeded. They fooled me, a lawyer (yes, queue the lawyer jokes). I had to call Kirk Smith back and sheepishly explain that this had just been an elaborate April Fool’s Day joke. Kirk, of course, was hugely amused, although, to this day, I don’t know if the good Admiral was laughing with me or laughing at me.
I made a note of this story that very day, and vowed that if H.B. 2827 was defeated, it would be a great story to share and laugh over—about the stress we were all under during the H.B. 2827 battle, how homeschool teens will prank their families, and how God was good and merciful to Illinois homeschooling families. So there it is!