Home-schooler ordered to attend public school

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By Julia Duin

A New Hampshire court ordered a home-schooled Christian girl to attend a public school this week after a judge criticized the "rigidity" of her mother's religious views and said the 10-year-old needed to consider other worldviews as she matures.

Ever since the judge's ruling came out in July, the case has aroused the interest of home-schooling groups nationwide, whohave asked why a court has the power to decide whether someone's religious views are too extreme.

The girl's mother, Brenda Voydatch, has engaged the Alliance Defense Fund, a Christian legal group based in Scottsdale, Ariz., to contest the ruling, in which the judge granted a request by the girl's father, Martin Kurowski, that the girl go to a public school.

On Tuesday, the girl, Amanda Kurowski, started fifth grade at an elementary school in Meredith, N.H., under court order. Amanda's "vigorous defense of her religious beliefs ... suggests strongly that she has not had the opportunity to seriously consider any other point of view," District Court Judge Lucinda V. Sadler said.

The case is the latest in a series of disputes this summer which have tested the limits of parents' right to raise their children in line with their religious beliefs.

• Two court cases saw parents who relied on prayer being tried for the deaths of their children. In Wisconsin, Dale and Leilani Neumann were found guilty of second-degree reckless homicide in the death of their 11-year-old diabetic daughter, Kara. In Oregon, Carl and Raylene Worthington were acquitted of manslaughter in the pneumonia death of their 15-month-old daughter, though the father was found guilty of a lesser count, criminal mistreatment.

• The case of Daniel Hauser, a 13-year-old Minnesota boy with Hodgkin's lymphoma, precipitated a national manhunt that dominated the news in May. Mother Colleen Hauser defied legal authorities that ordered the boy to be treated by oncologists and fled with her son, citing family beliefs in traditional American Indian medicine.

But those cases all involved physical danger and the state attempting to prove that parents were acting recklessly. In the New Hampshire case, the court ruled that extreme religiosity by itself constitutes grounds on which to rule against a parent's wishes.

According to court documents filed in Laconia, a small city in the central New Hampshire's Belknap County, Amanda is a well-adjusted childwhose parents were divorced in 1999.

The mother has primary physical custody of Amanda, whom she has home-schooled for several years in math, English, social studies, science, handwriting, spelling and the Bible.