Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont has signed Public Act 26-37, the state's first-ever set of homeschool rules. Until now, Connecticut was the only state in the country where a family could pull a child out of school with no notice and no follow-up of any kind.
Ostensibly: to close a child-safety gap — Connecticut had zero mechanism to know when a child left school for home, or what happened after.
Probably: one Waterbury captivity case made that gap politically impossible to ignore, giving lawmakers the momentum they had lacked for years.
The law phases in slowly. Starting fall 2027, withdrawing a child to homeschool must be done in person. Starting the 2028–29 year, families file an annual intent-to-educate form by October 1. Separately, a parent cannot begin homeschooling while an adult in the household is under an active DCF investigation or appears on the state's child-abuse and neglect registry.
One thing the final law does NOT include: an earlier draft's academic portfolio review was stripped out before signing. Stale summaries still circulating online claim CT now reviews homeschool work product — it does not.
Reaction has been sharp. The Home School Legal Defense Association condemned the law, and Connecticut advocates call it "targeted interference" — arguing it burdens the roughly 99% of families doing right by their kids to address what was, at root, a child-protective-services failure. Supporters counter that a state with no visibility at all had to do something.
The law traces to a case that drew international attention. In February 2025, a 32-year-old Waterbury man escaped a locked room by setting a fire; he weighed 68 pounds. He told police his stepmother had pulled him out of school in the fourth grade — around age 11 — and that he had not been seen by the outside world since. DCF had visited the home twice during that fourth-grade year and found nothing wrong. His stepmother was charged with kidnapping and cruelty. The withdrawal-during-investigation pause in PA 26-37 is aimed squarely at that pattern: a child removed from school precisely when oversight would matter most.