From the early 1980s, when modern homeschooling was in its infancy, Treon Goossen worked endless hours as a volunteer, advocating changes to Colorado homeschooling law. Her efforts resulted in one of the model homeschooling laws in America, a contribution the HSLDA recognized by honoring her with a Liberty Award at their 2006 national conference. She has seven children, all of whom have been homeschooled. Today, she continues her work as a volunteer home education legislative liaison in Colorado, standing watch over the law for which she and others fought so hard. It’s our privilege to introduce Mrs. Treon Goossen.

The Making of a Homeschool Mom

TOS: What first drove you to homeschooling in the first place?

TREON: Well, that goes back to my experiences with the public school system. I was raised … in Arkansas, and I went to mostly a country school. Some things never change. Bullies pick on you. Everything is geared to how well you do on a test. It doesn’t matter if you’re learning or not; it’s how you reflect for that teacher [on] the test scores. So I learned very quickly how to please teachers, doing very well in school. That way, you aren’t hassled, but it didn’t stop a lot of the bullying and … the horrendous things that went on in that little school. So I always thought to myself, even back then, that if I ever have kids, I don’t want them to go through this. I couldn’t bear the thought that my children would have to do what I did to survive.

And so I graduated from school, and I married Dean when I was 21. Homeschooling was still not really around in 1975. My first daughter was born in 1979, and it was from that time on that I was praying that God would send me something. We were in no position at that time to pay for private school, and even private school wasn’t much better. … A friend of mine handed me Dr. Moore’s book, Home-Spun Schools. I read that, and I thought, “Oh that’s really nice.” Like every other person, it’s like, “Can I do that? Would I ruin her?”

So I was tossing that around. At that time, there wasn’t anyone saying that you don’t have to put your kids in school. So I thought, “We’ll just put her in the local kindergarten, just to see. It won’t hurt until I decide for sure what we want to do.” Well, that’s what made up my mind that I could do this. First off, she went into the school and there’s like 40-something kids in this class—in a kindergarten class—

TOS: 40 kids?

TREON: —one teacher, 40-something kids, off and on. There was no helper on a regular basis. There were all kinds of things. They were made to sit at a table and they were given a paper and they couldn’t do anything else with that paper. If you wanted to do more, you couldn’t do more. You just had to sit and wait for everybody else.

[Petra] had already been working with me a lot. So, she was so far advanced in that kindergarten class. Even the school nurse had told me that they had never seen a child as advanced as Petra was when she came into the school. We were about five weeks into it, and I was just ready to bring her home. There was a substitute teacher they brought in off the street. Back then, that was basically all they did, no qualifications, no background checks, nothing. And this—this lady—she told this class, she said, “You will sit there. Keep your hands in your lap. You won’t look to the right or left. You will not talk, because something bad will come out of me and get you if you do not do exactly what I tell you.” Petra told me that, and I verified that with the school. I made an appointment at the principal’s office, and I said, “Where do you get these people, off the street?” He said, “Basically, yeah, that’s where we do. We have to.”

TOS: Because they’re volunteers?

TREON: Yeah, you know, they were substitute teachers. Back then, they didn’t check anything. So I said, “Okay, my daughter’s coming home.” And he said, “Well, she’ll be a social misfit, a dependant on welfare for the rest of her life. She would be a burden to society … would never be a success.” He just went on and on and on, and I just let him ramble. I looked at him and said, “Thank you very much, but I think I can do better than you.” I brought her home, and we’ve been home ever since. I have seven children, and Petra was my first. Basically, that’s what cemented in me that I could do better than what they had to offer.

TOS: I’m just going over this. “Something evil will come out of me and get you …”?

TREON: Mm-hmm. That’s what a substitute teacher said.

TOS: That’s holding your kids hostage.

TREON: Exactly … I verified that. Petra was never one to make up stories. There were several other moms whose children told them the same thing, so I know it wasn’t just one child imagining it. And I said, “That’s it.” I asked the principal of this elementary school if he was doing anything about it. He said no. I said, “Well, too bad. You’re not getting any more money out of my student.”

… I also found that there was a support group in the Springs. These three moms, they came together and formed it, and that was basically the first year, it was them. When I came in, it was the second year, and we grew to ten families. Boy, we thought we were just busting up. We had ten families that were homeschooling.

TOS: Homeschooling before homeschooling was cool.

TREON: Boy, I tell you what. But I was never one of those that were afraid to take my kids anywhere. I was proud to do it. I felt it was a God thing because I didn’t feel like I had to hide. I didn’t feel like I had anything to be ashamed of or anything to be afraid of. So I was always out and about, and then you had the people, they would always ask the kids, they would always ask Petra, or even the boys when they got older—they wouldn’t ask me—but they would look at the children and say, “Why aren’t you in school?” And you’re standing there like, “Well, what am I? Chopped liver? Why don’t you talk to me?” I would always speak up and say, “Excuse me; you know, they are in school. It’s called homeschool.” “Well, is that legal?” “Well, yes. If it wasn’t, I wouldn’t be doing it.” “Well, I don’t know about that.” “Well, maybe you should find out about it.” We had so many conversations.

The concept of not being in a building for school is so foreign to most of these people. They immediately assume that you’re doing something illegal, not wanting to believe you when you say, “No, it’s legal.” [They would say,] “It’s a mistake. You’re going to ruin your kids.” A lot of people would just say that to your face, and in front of the kids. And you’re like, “No, I’m not.” But that was the mentality we were dealing with as far as the general public goes. I mean, you can imagine the mentality in the schools, among the Colorado Education Association, the teachers unions … oh, they were just dead set against it.

TOS: Were the CEA [Colorado Education Association] and the NEA [National Education Association] even aware of homeschooling around 1984?

TREON: Oh, absolutely! As a matter of fact, they were the ones who pressured the state board for the types of regulations and also to crack down on them instead of backing off of them. … By the time the children were old enough, we had lived in the school district and they recognized private schools, and my family wished to private school as Freedom Christian Academy. … There were other districts in the state that took families to court that challenged them, that got social services involved because they were trying to do the same thing I was doing.

TOS: Were the districts searching these people out?

TREON: Some of them had disenrolled from the public schools. Some of them were reported by neighbors, even by family.

TOS: Because the family thought, “You’re going to ruin your kids.”

TREON: Exactly. There was a lot of that at the time. Disgruntled relatives … there’s some now, but back then, it was horrible. Anonymous calls were the given, anonymous calls to social services, anonymous calls to the school district saying that they’re not in school. See, if a call is made, the school has to check it out. They’re required by law to do so. So they would find these families who had established private schools on that basis and they would challenge them. They wouldn’t accept it, like the district I was in.

The Making of a Homeschool Advocate

TOS: So you were dealing with a hodgepodge all across the state of different school districts that were making the rules as they saw fit?

system of rules and regulations under the state Board of Education. Now that was supposed to be a system of rules and regulations that everyone complied with. Some of the districts interpreted those differently, and they would say this means this and that means that, when it really didn’t. But also, like I said earlier, we had several districts that would deny every homeschool application that came through, and forced all of these families—some of [the parents] were even certified teachers at the time— to go through the appeals process with the state Board of Education.

TOS: They were denying everybody?

TREON: Every person, every family. … It didn’t matter. Their policy was, “We don’t want you [to homeschool]. This isn’t going to happen. You’re going to be in our system, no matter what, so we will not even recognize you,” even though the state board had put up these rules and regulations. As bad as they were, there was still the opportunity to have your children at home. And so school districts denied them all.

What happened to me was that I started getting involved as these support groups started growing. I realized that there were people around the state that were hurting. There were people that said they were threatened, saying they were going to come and take their kids away. They were under these kinds of things that they didn’t enroll their kids in school, even though they had been approved in the system. … Social services would get involved and would come in and say, “This is educational neglect. We don’t care what the state said. Obviously, you’re not doing what you should be doing.” Each district around the state almost always had a different take. So [it depended] on which district you lived in [whether] you could do it peacefully or if you had to hide your children.

As a matter of fact, when we did our 20-year anniversary with CHEC, at the conference, they brought me in as one of the “old-timers.” We’re sitting there talking, and I had several families I hadn’t seen in a while that came up to me. We were talking about what it was like to homeschool back then. And they came to me and said, “We’re one of those families.” They basically had a drill. Every week, they would practice a drill of what they would do when social services came to the door. If anybody even knocked on the door and they didn’t recognize them, they had places to hide. The kids would go all through the house and hide. Then the mom would go to the door if she needed to. But if, at night, if they were reported, or there was an officer or a social worker at their door, they had a plan, an escape plan. The older ones would grab the younger ones and they would slip out and they knew where to go and they had a place to meet. … That’s what they lived. These people lived that life.

TOS: So, just as a family would have a fire drill, they would have a child welfare drill?

TREON: Yes, that’s exactly right.

TOS: Were there any situations where that actually did happen? Did they ever have children taken away?

TREON: I don’t know if any were actually removed, but I know one family that fled the state. They packed their kids up—it’s because they were coming to get them. They packed their kids up and left the state. And I believe that dad was a professional. He had a job, an occupation that most people would just love to have. I mean, this isn’t a poor, decrepit family. But they left. They packed their kids up because they knew they were coming to get them.

I know there were cases where there were a lot of threats and a lot of dads were threatened with jail. There’s one dad in particular … he was really thinking he was going to go to jail because he kept insisting he had the right to keep his kids at home. I believe it was under the private school option with all the rules and regulations, and the judge had ruled against him, saying no. Even if the district was challenged, it had to go to each district or a municipal court. So you would have a judge rule it this way, and a judge who would rule it this way.

I know even families that lived in the more favorable districts. Like I said, they kept their curtains pulled during the day. During school hours, they would not leave the house. It’s like their kids were invisible inside the house.

TOS: From 8 AM to 3 PM —

TREON: —those kids were never seen.

TOS: Because they were afraid their neighbors would report them?

TREON: Exactly. If someone would see them, then they would report and say, “They’re not in school.” That would force the truant officer to come. Even though they could be covered, it was just that fear, because it’s unpredictable. You never knew if a school district would pursue you or if you would be okay. You just didn’t know. It was uncertainty, I think, that ruled during those years from 1984 to 1987.

During those years, I can’t tell you how many times I heard the words “child abuser” as far as information on homeschooling. It was everywhere. When we started getting involved with the state board and the legislative process, I just got angry. I started going to the hearings of the state board. This is back when parents had to apply with their local school districts in order to homeschool. My friend Rory Schneeburger and I would go sit and listen in on the arguments. I would get up and testify several times, so I was on a first-name basis with the chairman of the state board. He would say, “Okay, Treon, come up and say what you want to say.” So I would get up there and say, “You know, this is wrong. These parents have the right to do this. If you’re refusing them the right to homeschool when they’ve done everything they’re supposed to …” and on and on and on.

I remember distinctly one meeting, I was sitting there, and they had a stack, I’d say, of at least 20 or 30 applications from separate families from the districts in Denver that were denied out of hand. They let them accumulate and then they would have their once-a-month meeting. For some reason, there was more that time than others. I remember sitting there and they put it off towards the end—they made us sit through everything—and then the chairman of the state board of education just started laughing. And they were laughing and saying, “Okay, let’s see what we can do about these applications,” sort of like, “here we go again.” And I guess it was God doing something inside of me. It was this feeling of, “All right, this is it. How dare you laugh at these families who complied with every jot and tittle of your regulations? Your districts denied them.”

But they were making light of it. “Oh well, look at these districts. Ha-ha-ha. They’re just rejecting these parents out of hand.” They were laughing at them, “Oh gosh, look at Jefferson. Look at what they’re doing now.” There was no reprimand. Every one of those applications, they were probably the finest of the finest, yet the school districts denied them. There was never a reprimand to the school districts, or a slap on the wrist, or anything. It was like, “Oh well, let’s just deal with it. We know how they feel about these parents doing this.”

Eventually, they approved them, but they had to go through that appeals process. They had to go through that board meeting, to have to be there, being in limbo for that time, wondering if they’re going to be approved or denied by the state board—“maybe I didn’t fill it out right, or maybe I didn’t do this,” or whatever. It’s just anxiety on behalf of the parents. It took so long to be able to decide what you want to do with your own child, and then to be approved or denied. That whole system was wrong. You were still under the thumb of the state. They monitored you. You had to send in lesson plans. You were required to submit all this information. With the new regulations some districts even hinted at home visits coming in.

TOS: And once you let somebody into your home …

TREON: There go your Fourth Amendment rights, out the door. You let them in your home; you’ve violated, basically, the protections that you have.

TOS: So they could say, “Oh, that looks like a bruise.”

TREON: Mm-hmm. “And Johnny fell where?” There was one mom that called me in a panic one day. They were out playing in a park and a child was on the swings. There were other families there. He fell off and he cut his head. So they went to the doctor and they didn’t act like they believed him. They were homeschooling during that time and they ended up with a social services visit from the doctor because the doctor didn’t believe that the child fell off the swings.

She was in an absolute panic. At that time there wasn’t a lot of information, but I told her, just talk to them outside. You have witnesses. Get the witnesses’ information saying this is really what happened. So finally they cleared it up. But I don’t know if the doctor was reporting them because of the bruise or if it was because they were homeschooling. That hung over people’s heads too.

TOS: How long were these applications, by the way?

TREON: I think the actual written application was two pages. Then there was the exemption certificate that you had for your year at home. If they showed up at your door, you had to show them your exemption certificate from the state attendance officer.

TOS: And you would hold that up and say, “My kids can be home with me.”

TREON: Yeah. That gave you permission to have your children at home for that school year. If you didn’t have your exemption certificate, then you were in trouble, because it wasn’t like they had a tracking system back then.

But the applications had to say they were using one of the ten or eleven approved curriculums at the time, and that they agreed to all this information. They put down all these different requirements.

TOS: So they had to have approved curriculum?

TREON: Yeah. There was a list. It was ten, and then it went up to eleven because they added Colorado Springs Christian School toward the end. Even that curriculum geared toward the Christian classroom. It wasn’t geared toward the homeschool. You used what they would use in a Christian classroom.

TOS: It was whatever Colorado Springs Christian was using for that year?

TREON: Exactly. You used it. That was your choice. That was it. You had no other choice. So you had to choose from that list of approved curriculum or study programs, whatever they called them.

TOS: Could you mix and match at all?

TREON: No.

TOS: It didn’t matter if your kid is more tactile or auditory?

TREON: No. I think one program was from a university, but it was all geared towards a classroom situation. The parent had to take that and individualize it and break it down. You talk about working! You had to basically re-do the whole curriculum. We were hamstrung.

TOS: I just picture these poor kids. There is no alleviating the boredom or the problem, and if you selected the wrong curriculum, you were committed.

TREON: There was no changing it. That was your approved system of home study, and anything else would be unapproved. That was your choice. So from that point on, Rory and I decided it was time to do something. We started thinking legislatively about what we [could] do, because at least they couldn’t, at their whim, change a law.

TREON: When I was attending the state education board meetings, I served on a committee with the Colorado Department of Education. It was called the Colorado Homeschool Advisory Committee to the Department of Education. Basically, it was just a committee that made the homeschoolers feel like they were doing something. CDE was offering it as a carrot to say, “Okay, we’re going to let you be involved on this process.” Nothing was accomplished during that time.

TOS: They could reject, out of hand, any recommendations from the committee.

TREON: All you would do was just sit around and talk. It was really frustrating because we’d say, “We’ve got these concerns,” and they would say, “Well, we’ll see what we can do,” and they never did. They never checked into anything. They never alleviated any of the situations that were going on. Some of the parents on the committee felt we needed to build bridges. And I felt the bridges they wanted to build weren’t the kind I wanted to cross.

TOS: Bridges that would say, for example, “We’ll let you homeschool—”

TREON: “—As long as you don’t write a law for homeschoolers.” At the time, we were already talking about writing a law. They were saying, “You don’t want to go down that route. You’ll never get that anyway.” The parents were willing to compromise, saying, “Well, those rules aren’t so bad. Let’s just deal with these.” They were appeased. In meeting with them, I felt so bad. I felt sorry for a lot of them. I wanted to say, “Can’t you really see what’s happening here? Can’t you see that they’re just doing this as a diversion?”

In the meantime, the Department of Education was writing rules and regulations that would have tightened it up. The whole time that they were dealing with these parents, they were on their own agenda. They were writing down all these suggestions and then when they came out with the proposed emergency rules and regulations, the parents on the committee said, “They didn’t take any of our suggestions.” I said, “Yeah? You really thought they would?” … They had no intent of doing anything for these families.

So Rory and I decided to get together and write a law. Rory was the one who inspired me to get involved, and I think she was shocked when I really decided to do something about it.

TOS: So you started working with a lot of different homeschooling groups and tried to get a law written. When you did get it submitted, it failed. Why?

TREON: The sponsor of the next year’s bill, the successful one, felt it was because the bill’s sponsors had no one who would give them a quick and decisive answer. They always wanted a committee decision. You can’t work with a committee decision. You have to have someone with the authority to say, “Yes, this is all right,” or “No, it is not.” That’s basically what killed us that first year.

So Rory and I formed Concerned Parents of Colorado, a not-for-profit organization, the summer of 1987, for the sole purpose of passing homeschool legislation. We had a number of people help us over the years, including Attorney Bill Moritz. He helped us tremendously. The second year’s draft is the one Rory and I personally agreed to and included some of the previous year’s language. Then we sent letters to everyone around the state and said, “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do: We’re going to present this again. If you have any input, anything you want to say, anything, now’s the time, because these people have got to have someone that they can speak to.” We got one response, and it was such a mild response. So we thought, “Okay, we’re going on. They can’t say we didn’t ask people.”

Around October, Rory got a call from this state senator who said, “Can I meet with you and Treon?” He said, “It’s the oddest thing, but I really have not been able to sleep well over the summer. I couldn’t get the testimony out of my mind. I need to meet with you. I want to carry your bill.”

Now, you have to understand who this man was. He was the leading senator at that time, the leading Republican. He was one of the leading advocates for public schools. We said, “Sure, we’ll meet with you.” He said, “By the way, I want to bring along my representative friend,” who was the leading Democrat in the house at that time. He was an advocate as well for public schools.

We met on Veterans Day, 1987, at a little French restaurant in Denver. Senator Mickeljohn said, “I believe I’m supposed to carry your bill, and I want to bring my friend along as the House sponsor.” He said, “I will do it on the condition that you and Rory are at every hearing, every meeting, everything we do.” In effect, we became citizen sponsors. He said, “You will be there. If I need something, I want to look up and see you there. I want you to give me ‘yes’ or ‘no’ if there’s a decision on the floor. I want to have someone who can give me the authority to move ahead and agree.” So we said yes we will.

From that moment on, we knew that God was going to see us through. There was no doubt in my mind. From that moment on, I knew that we were going to get that law done that year. It’s just something that rises up inside of you, that knowing that it’s going to be all right, even though everything looks like you’re going to fail. It looked like we were up against a wall that was not going to give. We had all the people in the legislature from the years before screaming, “child abusers, child abusers, closet child abusers.”

TOS: Why were they saying that?

TREON: It was just a common fear, and it came from the NEA and the CEA. This is what they would tell us, that we’re closet child abusers, that we weren’t really teaching our kids, we were using it to babysit our kids so that we could go play, that we could do what we wanted as moms. We were forcing our kids to stay home and do all the housework and do everything so that we could go and do what we wanted to do. They actually said these things. And it was “child abuse, child abuse, child abuse,” to the point where you got so tired of hearing it. There was no justification. They didn’t have even a single proven case of homeschool child abuse. But that was what we heard.

That was the main argument besides “The only people that can teach your kids are licensed and certified teachers.” We were already starting to prove them wrong with the minimal test results we had at the time. We were showing them the results. Senator Mickeljohn had done some research and he knew. He said, “This is an option I would never choose for myself, but I believe you should have the right to choose it. You should be able to do it in freedom and not have to be under the thumb of the schools. From what I’ve seen, you’re doing a good job. I believe this is a choice you should have. I’d never do it myself, but you should use it.”

TOS: So you run into a bunch of resistance from the CEA. Was [accusing you of] child abuse their only tactic?

TREON: Well, child abuse was one of the main [things] they would scream because that was the one that got attention from the press. It gets attention from parenting. It makes people wonder, “What are they really doing behind those doors?” So they knew that that was their refrain. “Educational neglect” was their big term too. “How can you possibly think you can homeschool? You’re not educated professionals. … What makes you think that you as the parent could do a better job than these people over here?”

Well, let’s look at this for a minute. My child can read. She can write. She can spell. She can do things. Even at that time, the reports were getting pretty abysmal from the school system. Most importantly, Dr. Raymond Moore stressed so much that it’s the one-on-one with a child, that mentoring, that security that they get, the individual attention. This has been proven in the research. If you’ll look at Dr. Brian Ray’s research, it shows that there is no difference in test scores from parents that have only a high school diploma as to one who actually has a PhD. Actually, in some cases they score better, because it’s harder for parents who have PhDs and teaching degrees to homeschool. … Some of the people I’ve helped the most to dispel their fears of homeschooling [their kids] are teachers.

TOS: Really? You would think that someone from such a high level of education would be able to say, “Well, I’ve had training. I should be able to handle this.”

TREON: Well, you know, some of them—what they’ve told me is that they’re taught more crowd control than anything. They’re taught how to manage a classroom. They’re not taught how to individually teach their students. And that frightens them.

TOS: So really the CEA and NEA’s line that you have to be a professional to teach isn’t very credible.

TREON: The mindset of how it works in the public schools doesn’t work at home. These people have been brainwashed, some of them, when they go through that system as to how they’re supposed to be, what they’re supposed to know at a certain age. There’s no freedom they’ll give. It’s structure. … And every child has to perform the same, just like they are taught.

Confronting Money and Power

TOS: Why is the NEA so against homeschooling?

TREON: Well, I believe, even more than the money—and it is a lot of money—the schools believe that the kids are theirs, first off. Then they want the money that the kids bring through the government funding. But I think it’s really the control, the mindset. The NEA is an organization that has goals and has plans. They know what they want to accomplish, an agenda.

TOS: So it’s not just the money; it’s something darker and more sinister.

TREON: Exactly. There is an agenda, and it is not a good one. You can see in the schools where it’s gone. You see the disrespect. You see the violence.

TOS: A lot of parents today expect that, when their children reach a certain age, they will rebel against them. They just accept that.

TREON: It’s a belief system that they’ve incorporated into the families. They start in on the parents in preschool, or kindergarten if they choose to wait. They tell the parents, “When Johnny gets to this age or this age, you’re not going to be able to handle him. So let us do it for you. We know. We’re the educational professionals. We know how to do this. We’ve got childcare and all these things that we can do. We can do it better than you could ever dream, so let us have your child.”

They’re looking at these kids as future voters on the issues. We’re talking about every issue: more money for the schools [and] the social agenda, such as homosexuality and the abortion issue. … As long as they can start programming them at ages 3 and 4, then at 18, [they] will turn out these programmed liberal Democrats who will be voting to keep them in their jobs.

TOS: You mentioned that at one point during your work to get the law through, your phones were tapped.

TREON: This was in ’88. Rory and I had people walk up to us and hand us folders and turn around and walk away. It was just like these things fell into our laps.

TOS: Literally coming out of the sky …

TREON: Literally! We had four file folders that this gentleman walked up and handed to Rory and said, “You need to read these.” Then he turned and walked off. Rory takes them, reads them, and realizes what she had. We had actual documentation from the attorneys of the CDE that said, “These homeschool people are right; you’re wrong. If they sue, you will lose.”

TOS: … basically tipping the hand and telling you that they will not be able to resist you in court.

TREON: That’s right, and there were other kinds of confidential information. So, she copied them and gave me a copy. … A few days later, she called me up and said, “Sis, Sis, where are those files?” I said, “They’re right here.” She said, “You take them, and you hide them.” I asked her, “What’s going on?” She said, “Mine are stolen.”

They were in her file cabinet in her house. She kept her door unlocked, because she had a food pantry for her neighbors. Anybody who needed food could go in and get it. And law enforcement was seen on the premises of her house.

TOS: Law enforcement?

TREON: Law enforcement. Those four files were taken … those four files only. They knew exactly what they were going after. … So, I had my copy. She said, “You take them and you hide them. You don’t let anybody know you’ve got them.” And so I did.

In the course of some of our hearings and the talk that was coming from certain individuals—who shall remain nameless— we began to suspect our conversations were being recorded. We discussed everything on the phone. We talked nearly every night on strategies, planning what we were going to do with the legislation. Some of the things that we were going to say were being spouted out verbatim in committee or in the media. We’re sitting there thinking, Oh, this is bizarre. Rory began to suspect something. Because she lived in a more rural area and I was down in town, we thought that maybe her phones were tapped. We had the phone company run a trace on her phones, and there was nothing there. But the phone company said there was the possibility of a listening device that could be parked somewhere in the vicinity. So she began to call me from pay phones. We developed a code on certain things that we would talk about. … We had to be careful.

We got the bill through … in May. Sometime after that, but before the law took effect on July 1, we were home one day, and my husband, Dean, calls me upstairs. He said, “Come up here, now!” He never talked to me like that before, so I went racing up the stairs … He was investigating why the phones in our house had been reversed. Every time a person would call us on our personal line, it went to our fax machine. Every time our phone would ring, it would be a fax machine. The answering machine line was all discombobulated. … Well, my husband just happens to work for the phone company. He knows all about wiring phones. He got his belt out and started looking around, and that’s when he called me upstairs.

He said, “I want you to look at this.” In our room, we had a little table. On the table, we had our homeschool support group computer to manage the updates and everything we had on there. Under the table, on the carpet, there was plaster all from the wall from where the phone was plugged in. There was this box thing. He said, “I want you to see this. This was here before I came.” He pulled it out and said, “Look at these wires.” It meant Greek to me. “Look at these yellow and black wires. They’ve been reversed. Someone has been in this house. They reversed these wires. That’s how we know. That’s why everything is wrong. Someone has been in here.” I just sat there and looked at him. He looked at me and I said, “There’s the tap.” He said, “Yep. We can’t prove it now, but it was here.” He showed me the wires and said, “Look, it’s all backwards.”

TOS: So somebody who didn’t know how to wire it all back up after the tap—

TREON: … We never dreamt it was our phone because we were in town. We thought there was no way that they’d do this. We thought maybe up there it wouldn’t be noticed.

TOS: Has anything happened since then?

TREON: Not that I’m aware of, though I’ve learned to be more careful. I’ve learned to be careful at the capitol where I talk and who is around me. I’ve noticed people kind of elbowing their way in. You know how it is up there with the granite walls and how your voice booms.

TOS: Oh, yeah.

TREON: So I have to be very careful when I’m discussing things with people. I’m careful what I say over the phone, because you just don’t know with the technology that they have now. … These people will go to any length. There’s nothing that they will stop at against those who would try to put a halt to their control over our children. That really impacted me, and that’s why I stayed in the fight. Over the years, we got the laws passed, which is a miracle story. … After some issues we encountered, we decided to improve the law in ’94 and open the law back up. In the meantime, we had beaten down several attempts to restrict the law. We decided that it was time to go in and, number one, get the age equivalencies removed, to get the evaluation option in there for parents of children who weren’t able to test or didn’t pass twelfth—it didn’t matter. So we wrote amendments and basically asked for the moon. That’s how you do it; you ask for it all. That way you can allow a little to be trimmed away here and there. We went in and we walked out with everything we asked for. Nothing was trimmed away. It was just a miracle. God is in control. … That’s why we have even more improvements to the law. That’s why an evaluation is for all students. You can have them evaluated at whatever age it takes them to reach that odd-year requirement. It doesn’t matter. It’s just beautiful, the freedom that we have.

Since then, the negative attempts at homeschool law have all been defeated. God has blessed us. He has blessed this lobby. He’s blessed this effort, because it’s His desire that parents are able to homeschool, to do it in freedom and not be restricted.

TOS: So we’re not out of the woods yet.

TREON: We’re never out of the woods. We just have a God that’s greater than all of this. But you have to stay vigilant. You cannot balk. It’s just like ancient Israel. “I’ve given you this land, but you need to take it.”

You see the hand of God all through this. That’s what you have to focus on. We have to know our enemy. We have to know what we’re up against. We have to be aware. Yet, at the same time, I’m not going to focus on that enemy. I’m going to focus on the God who is greater. He’s got We’re never out of the woods. We just have a God that’s greater than all of this. us through 22 years. He’s going to keep us going. There’s no doubt.

Raised in Arkansas and living in the mountains of Colorado, Treon Goossen is the mother of seven children and the wife of Dean. She made Jesus the Lord of her life at 16. Today, she is a volunteer homeschool legislation liaison in Colorado. Treon is a frequent conference and support group speaker. She is the recipient of the Ruth Beechick Award (2002) from Christian Home Educators of Colorado and the Homeschool Liberty Award (2006) from the Home School Legal Defense Association. You can reach her at her new website at www.ro828.com.

Steve Walden lives in Colorado and, together with his wife, homeschools their three children, ages 10, 7, and 3. He is a freelance writer and editor. When he’s not blogging at www.HomeschoolBlogger.com/SteveWalden, he’s searching for new opportunities to write about homeschooling, parenting, coping with disability, and connecting with God. His dream is, with his wife, to operate a retreat center in Colorado that promotes the concept of rediscovering God as our first love and the source of our strength.