On on June 27, 2001, a homeschooling parent named Melissa posted the following question on the PA Homeschoolers Message Board:
A school district in my area is telling homeschoolers that their evaluators must participate in Act 48 which requires all PA educators to have ongoing professional education. Does anyone know if Act 48 is a requirement for evaluators. If not, is there something in writing (on the Internet or elsewhere) that states they do not need to comply with Act 48?
Homeschoolers may indeed hire evaluators who don't comply with the ongoing professional education requirements of Sections 1205.1 and 1205.2 of the school code. The exemption appears in Section 1205.1 (e) of the school code which states:
(e) The requirements of this section and section 1205.2 do not apply to a professional educator not employed by a school entity who serves as an evaluator of a home education program authorized under section 1327.1(e)(2) or who provides private tutoring services as part of a home education program under section 1327.1.
During the 1997-1998 legislative session I successfully worked with Russ Miller, a Republican staff person on the Pennsylvania House Education Committee (and through him with House Education Committee Chairman Representative Jess Stairs) to amend the professional development bill that would require that certified teachers take 2 college courses (or their equivalent) every 5 years in order to keep their certification "active". My amendment would have exempted homeschool evaluators so that homeschoolers could still use evaluators with "inactive" teaching certificates. I feared that five years down the road we would suddenly lose our best evaluators -- those homeschool parents with teaching certificates who retired from teaching in order to homeschool their own children.
I also discussed my concerns with Senator Rhoades (head of the Senate Education Committee) and with Greg White (head of the policy office at the PA Department of Education). However, the bill that was proposed in that session (which ended at the end of 1988) died without passing due to disagreements between the Ridge Administration and the teachers' unions.
Early in the 1999-2000 session it was re-introduced as House Bill 8. The amendment that I had worked out with the House Education Committee was part of it. However, while HB 8 was in the Senate Education Committee, Senator Rhoades took out the language that protected homeschoolers. (His aid told me that they did so intentionally because they thought that homeschool evaluators should keep current.) Without my amendment, HB 8 passed the Senate and got signed by the Governor.
In order to address this problem and others, Rep. Tom Armstrong (a state representative and a homeschool dad) and I called a meeting between homeschooling leaders and state representatives to look into the possibility of fixing this problem as well as other problems with the homeschool law. The meeting took place on February 14, 2000. At that meeting two homeschool dads who were state representatives (Rep. Tom Armstrong and Rep. Sam Rohrer) announced that they had just worked out a solution to the professional development problem as part of the 2000 budget negotiations. That solution was passed into law as the the first part of Section 1205.1(e).
Then during the 2001 budget negotiations, the same two representatives and Rep. Pat Fleagle got the House and Senate to pass the second part of Section 1205.1(e) which exempts private tutors.