FLDOE Cuts Bureaucracy and Gives Tools Directly to Parents

First off, thank you to our new Commissioner of Education, Anastasios Kamoutsas, for your support and focus on empowering parents. We thank you and Governor Ron DeSantis for your support of Senate Bill 248, which clarified the Craig Dickinson Act (s.1006.15), making it clear that home education families can participate in interscholastic athletic teams at any public school in their district. We cheer you on, and look forward to working with you as we seek to return to normalcy--that parents are responsible for their children's education, and in a firm position of authority over it.

We truly stand on the shoulders of the pioneers who paved the way before us, like Brenda and Craig Dickinson and Representative Daniel Webster, and we are thankful to see that their early momentum has not been dampened by bureaucratic challenges.

To all of our home education families, we encourage you to share this memo as the dedicated email and corresponding tools on the Florida DOE website will be useful to all.

We also encourage you to join the HEF Discord community, where you will find support from home education families with years of experience, channels that help you find support locally by county, and special announcement channels that will help you keep up with legislative updates or important memos like this.

We find it vital that parents know their rights and responsibilities, so that they may stand firm when they are challenged. In our experience, many parents give up very early when their rights are challenged by those in power in the districts or other positions of authority who may have good intentions, but aren't familiar with the history of home education or the statutes in Florida. We urge families to become familiar with the history of their educational freedoms in the Free State of Florida. We revisit this discussion often in our weekly podcasts and our Discord.

A Memo from our new Commissioner of Education:

If you'd like to access the PDF of this letter (where you can see it in larger print), the full letter document is in our Discord under the main Announcement channel and also the Home Education>>Help channel!

For ease of use, here are the direct resources mentioned in the above memo:

• homeed@fldoe.org

• fldoe.org/schools/school-choice/home-edu

Thank you again to Governor Ron DeSantis and our new Commissioner of Education, Anastasios Kamoutsas, for continuing to put parents first and continuing to make the Free State of Florida the best state for education.