The C H A P E-Newsletter Welcome to this issue of the CHAP E-Newsletter. Thank you for your kind response to this publication. If you have friends and acquaintances who like to subscribe, they can do so at our web page: www.CHAPboard.org. You can also read the previous issues there. ========================================================== Contents of this CHAP E-Newsletter: + What is CHAP? + A sample letter sent to Rep. Armstrong about a new law. ========================================================== What is CHAP? -------------------------------------------- CHAP is an acronym for Christian Homeschool Association of Pennsylvania, a nonprofit corporation founded to encourage and support families interested in home education. CHAP assists parents in understanding and fulfilling the law's requirements and is affiliated with two national organizations: Home School Legal Defense Association and The National Center for Home Education. CHAP provides leadership and direction on issues facing Christian homeschoolers on a national and statewide basis. In July we sent a letter to you asking you to write to the “three homeschooling dads” in the Pennsylvania House. Many of you responded. We thank you for that, and many more of you will need to respond before we are done. It is my belief (Bruce Eagleson) that your letters were highly effective and changed the direction that the drive for a new homeschool law is heading. The following is an example of one of the letters. We are publishing it with permission. Dear Representative Armstrong: We’re living in an incredible time in history, don’t you agree? We potentially stand at the threshold of a return to the values under which God intended this nation to flourish when it was originally established over 200 years ago. I particularly take pride in living in Pennsylvania, not only one of the original 13 pioneering colonies, but a bastion of liberty. As I write this letter to address the issue of rewriting the home school law in Pennsylvania, I feel the necessity to be true to the sacred honor upon which this nation was founded. Men gave up lives and fortunes, signing their lives away, branded as traitors to “mother” England, in birthing the United States of America with its constitutional freedoms. How can we take that lightly as we consider any law to be reviewed? I fear what has happened over the course of time, however, is that this newborn child lost its heritage in the perversion of its pursuit for happiness. We broke from the controlling influence of England, only to become as an adolescent nation, eunichized in spirit by the power we had obtained. We loved our identity as the golden door of refuge for “the tired, the poor, the huddled masses...tempest-tost” from other nations because it resonated our God-inspired purpose as America, the land of the free, a place of hopeful new beginnings. In our rugged individualism, however, we’ve evolved into a nation that espouses tolerance and individual rights, creating a self-destructing organism that is fighting against itself constantly with no unifying nucleus of values. God gave us an overcoming nature, which has moved from clearing impenetrable forests to go west, toward the industrialization-induced challenge of acquisition, where getting more is the measure of achievement, rather that victoriously getting by. Bigger and better originally seemed so honorable. After all, wasn’t it all a testament to our new god of progress and weren’t we so wonderful ourselves to have brought about such progress? Now here we stand in 2001, in Pennsylvania, with a group of pioneers called homeschoolers needing more liberties in the task of raising up a future generation strong enough to overcome the absence of absolute truth, coupled with the absence of heritage and purpose in this nation. A nation whose first President cherished such phrases as: “Praise be to God,” “Search the Scriptures,” “Holiness to the Lord,” and “In God we trust,” (All found on the Washington Monument in D.C.) yet for these homeschoolers to repeat these very phrases in the mainstream of culture today, they are branded as intolerant fanatics. Thomas Jefferson, one of the least ‘religious’ of the founding fathers said this: “God, who gave us life, gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed the conviction that these liberties are the gift of God? Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever.” Our children live in just such a time. They are a generation that needs strength of character to confront our culture with the truth that will set it free from the bondage it has put upon itself. I believe the homeschool movement is God’s answer to these critical times. I beseech you to look upon the rewriting of a homeschool law in light of the pattern I’ve written about here in American history: liberty turns to bondage apart from virtue. Inherent in the homeschool movement are all the virtues this nation was originally meant to carry throughout time: self-government; edification from within a person to application beyond self; purpose-driven goals; independent, critical thinking with a constant standard (the values of each home); developing self as a servant to a calling; acting with foresight; and living with vision, to name just a few. With a yoke of government control, the present homeschool law threatens to suffocate these virtues and the far-reaching impact they can yield through our children’s lives for the good of this nation for the world. Remembering that homeschool parents are voluntarily sacrificing years of time and money, even to the extent of paying twice(taxation plus homeschool operations), it is easy to agree that these parents are committed to the highest ideals for their own children. They are most intimate with God’s giftings upon each child, able to tenderly nurture weaknesses and grow together with each one, discerning the life direction for each according to those family values and ideals. The world desperately needs a generation of leaders such as these can be. With parents in their God-given place of sole charge over their children’s education, these children are spared the politically correct, cattle-prodding, peer-pressurized, humanistic(self-centered) approach of government schooling which has proven its weakness. In fact, government schooling is like the England from which the Pilgrims fled. They didn’t just flee, however, they fled with purpose. They left 12 years of peaceful living in Holland to pursue the higher calling of bringing their liberating beliefs to this new world. We owe a debt to these selfless men and women in staking a claim for righteousness in this land. Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord. (Psalm 33:12) So, too, we seek not just to be free from governmental control, but to go forth in the purpose of reestablishing righteousness in this land, to remind this nation of the depth of its roots and the content of the soil in which we are rooted, to bring forth years of fruitfulness in purpose again as we allow the Truth to saturate us. Please support the CHAP position on homeschool law reform. With America’s best at heart, knowing it’s(sic) heart is at stake in the upbringing of its youth, Carin Polczynski On behalf of the CHAP board I wish you a wonderful, blessed Christmas. We do what we do because of what He did for us. Thank you for your time. We hope that this mailing is helpful to you. If you would like to reply expressing your viewpoint, please do not use the reply button to reply to this message. This is a broadcast only address and your message will not be read. Please respond to: chap@chapboard.org. Staff Editor Bruce K. Eagleson Publisher Doug Rothgaber Christian Homeschool Association of Pennsylvania PO Box 115 Mount Joy, PA 17552-0115 717-661-2428 www.chapboard.org