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The Tennessee Conservative [By David Seal] –
Public school districts are feeling the heat of a mass student exodus. Many of the 144 Tennessee school districts are starting to blame homeschoolers for their enrollment and financial woes.
Rather than create an educational environment conducive to luring students back to public schools, some districts are exploring truancy laws, regulations, and forceful tactics to bring students back to the public system.
As of 2024, Tennessee had a total of 154,425 students in various categories of home, private and other non-public school options; and the number is growing. To see a statewide spreadsheet of non-public enrollment for 2024, a link is provided here.
One of the school districts experiencing an explosion of homeschoolers is Greene County, Tennessee. WGRV Radio reported on December 5, 2025, that the Greene County Director of Schools provided a report to his board on the growing number of homeschoolers.
The news outlet stated in part,
“Dr. Chris Malone reported there are now around 1,400 students being home schooled in Greeneville and Greene County. That number he said has gone up about 300 since the beginning of the current school year.
Malone expressed concerns with the numbers, saying [in part] he had participated in the Niswonger Foundation Legislative Convening in November and presented on the need for legislation around ever-changing home school numbers.
He said last night he is hoping the legislature can create a bill that can help stem the tide of people avoiding truancy issues and DCS issues by escaping to home school…”
A link to the full WGRV news report is linked here.
If you ask a homeschool family why they homeschool their children, they will not cite the need to avoid truancy or DCS issues. They homeschool to have education freedom, quality of life, and to avoid the safety concerns and their ideological differences associated with public schools.
Homeschool families are concerned that legislation will regulate and punish parents that choose homeschooling.
The Tennessee Conservative News published a series of 4 reports in 2024 on public school exodus, all of which are linked within the article provided here.
The series focused on why certain parents were pushing for school vouchers but also serves as documentation of serious parent concerns about school safety and other issues that drive families away from public schools.
In Sevier County, a well known homeschool advocate weighed in on the situation, specifically on heavy-handed regulation.
“Homeschoolers are not avoiding truancy laws. Homeschoolers are choosing to leave a system that has progressively failed and left their children behind. If such regulatory legislation was enacted, who gets to decide which homeschool families “put a lot of effort in to teaching” their children and which ones don’t? The state is not doing such a great job at managing public schools, so I can imagine the results if they were to get into the homes of families who do not choose their government educational system. What happened at the beginning of this 2025 school year that parents of 300 children decided to leave the Greene County “educational” system? This is my biggest question. For 5% of the children to be pulled out in the last 4 months, I am more concerned about what is happening behind the doors of the school than in the homes of families.” – said Kelli O’Connor, Homeschool Parent and Activist
The Tennessee Conservative News will continue to follow and report on legislation that impacts the freedom of families to homeschool their children.
About the Author: David Seal is a retired Jefferson County educator, recognized artist, local businessman, 917 Society Volunteer, and past Chairman of the Jefferson County Republican Party. He has also served Jefferson County as a County Commissioner and is a citizen lobbyist for the people on issues such as eminent domain, property rights, education, and broadband accessibility on the state level. David is also a 2024 winner of The Tennessee Conservative Flame Award & has received an accolade from the Institute For Justice for successfully lobbing the TN legislature to protect property rights. David can be reached at david@tennesseeconservativenews.com.
4 Responses
Homeschooling our son through high school was one of the best things we ever did for him. Prepared him well for college and his current career as an engineer. It’s the job of public schools to create a learning environment that challenges and encourages the students… and most public schools don’t do that. They’re driving away the “customers” and not taking an introspective look into what they are doing wrong. Which is what any business must do if they’re losing clients.
Remember that the Niswonger Foundation was one of the orgs that endorsed the Common Core “State” Standards and provided a letter with the Race to the Trough federal application to commit to it – before the standards existed (thanks Bredesen, Frist and Woodson). See page 165 here: https://www.scribd.com/document/167739562/TN-Race-To-The-Trough-Appendix-A
15 years later, Tennessee is still reaping the rewards of those “rigorous” and “internationally benchmarked” standards – that didn’t exist yet. “Escape” indeed. Kudos to the families of those 300 students. They are saving their neighbors $12000 per student per year – $3.6 MILLION every year. And they will get nothing but accusations of abusing their children and “stealing” the funding from the public education welfare system. All 300 of them. The public education welfare system already holds every property owner hostage and threatens them with seizing and auctioning their property if they don’t fund them with the forced benevolence of property taxes. K-12 budgets in rural districts often take up 50% or more of the property taxes collected. Contrary to popular government employee belief, this system doesn’t exist to serve them or maintain/create jobs. It exists to educate children. Oh, they will whine about lack of parental involvement too, blaming the parents for the academic shortcomings…it’s just these folk are just getting too involved in the lives of their children. They have skin involved in seeing to their child’s success that no government employee has. They sacrifice a lot to offer 1 on 1 attention without taking money from their neighbors. Remember that no homeschool students are eligible for Lockdown Lee’s “universal” scholarships. They get nothing. They will get all the credit and all the blame. They can’t ask for more money every single year from their neighbors despite failing performance. Will some of them fail? Maybe. The data is overwhelmingly in their favor for success, at a huge cost savings to their neighbors.
Niswonger Foundation also took $1.5M of that sweet Bill Gates cash in 2010 just like Bill Frist and Jamie Woodson at TNScore:
https://www.gatesfoundation.org/about/committed-grants/2010/11/opp1025330
Pubic ejikashun is terminally infested with lucifer’s accursed dimmercraps and their integration disaster. They are DANGEROUS and untenable abject failures.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pFr0qvpxKI