Unless you are hoping your school district will send your child a birthday card, most parents would be on solid ground politely saying “no” if they demand a birth certificate or birth date.
Under Pennsylvania homeschool law, the annual affidavit or declaration must include the child’s age. But the law does not require the child’s birth date. That is an important difference! A person’s date of birth is confidential. A person who designs to steal someone’s identity for underhanded purposes first needs to collect information about them. If they already have the person’s birth date, they are one step closer to successfully victimizing the person by taking out a loan in their name, getting a credit card in their name, or other predation.
If you give your child’s birth date to the school, and the school’s data storage is hacked, your child’s birth date may be used for criminal activity.
So yes, it matters, and yes, you are better off having your child’s birth date stored in the fewest databases as may be possible.
Several school districts have aggressively sought the birth date or even birth certificate (which contains even MORE confidential information!) of homeschooled students this year. When I have challenged these school districts, I have heard three arguments.
The first is: “We need the birth date to confirm that the child is properly immunized.” What the school “needs” is determined by the Pennsylvania legislature, not by the individual school district. By not writing the homeschool law so as to require birth date, the legislature has said, in effect, that school districts do NOT need the birth date. A local school’s belief that they “need” it does not trump state law.
The second is: “We need it for a school census.” In a case I worked on recently, that argument was just a fig leaf to cover an attempt to get homeschool parents to divulge birth dates. How could I tell? When I asked them to substantiate that they were conducting a bona fide, district-wide census in compliance with state law, they could not or would not!
The third is: “We need to know if the parents are telling the truth about the child’s age.” This is just another variation on the argument that that what the school “needs” trumps state law. When the legislature crafted the homeschool law, it decided, in effect, to accept at face value the parent’s assertion of the child’s age. School staff don’t have the privilege re-writing state law to suit their own idiosyncratic preferences.
There will be situations where parents are legally required to disclose a child’s birth date. But homeschool paperwork is not one of them.
Scott Woodruff, a follower of Christ since 1971, earned his law degree from the University of Virginia. After working for John Ashcroft as an Assistant Attorney General for the state of Missouri, and later for a major regional insurance company, Scott joined the HSLDA team in 1998. He is a member of the United States Supreme Court bar.
Over the last 23 years, he has assisted thousands of families in conflicts with social workers, police officers, truant officers, principals, superintendents, judges, and prosecuting attorneys. He has testified before state legislatures to advance and protect homeschool freedom in Maine, Virginia, Arkansas, Maryland, West Virginia, New Hampshire, Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, South Dakota, Nevada, Idaho, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. He has helped write portions of the homeschool laws and parental rights laws of several states.
Scott and his wife, Jane, married in 1983. They have three adult children whom they homeschooled, one child still at home—a very special eight-year old, and four grandchildren.
