Pg 116: San Diego school system

 

In 1991, I was a featured speaker at the homeschool convention in Washington State.  At that event, two men approached me and said, “Mr. Moitozo, we wondered if you knew about our program?"

 

They told me they were recruiters for the San Diego school district. Recruiters?  Yes, they recruited families to encourage them to begin homeschooling. They did the work to set up families as homeschoolers, part of their “dropout prevention” program.

 

I was confused, so I asked point-blank, “Who issues your paycheck?”  They said the San Diego school district.

 

They told me the district is given an education subsidy of $3,000 per student in that program.  As an incentive, for each family that signed on, the district set up a $1,000-per-homeschooled-student account for the family with the district’s purchasing agent.  It could be used to buy software, computers, textbooks, or other materials as long as they contained no religious content.

 

This sounded too good to be true.  It was -- once I learned about the “strings attached.”