A HARSH SPOTLIGHT ON HOME SCHOOLING

AUSTIN - Pamela Crouch home-schooled her children for more than a decade for many reasons, including to keep them safe and shield them from school bullies. But more than anything, she wanted to raise virtuous children who were kind, truthful and polite.

"Not only did I not want my children bullied, I didn't want them to bully anyone else," she said.

Her community of home-schoolers in Pflugerville was rocked recently, however, when police identified the Austin serial bomber as Mark Conditt, a 23-year-old who was home-schooled in the northeast suburb.

Home-schooling supporters dismiss any notion that Conditt's education had anything to do with his motives in the bombings that terrorized the Austin area for weeks, killing two and injuring four. Authorities say Conditt left three bombs on doorsteps in the city's black and Latino neighborhoods, rigged a tripwire to a bomb that injured two men on bikes, and then dropped off two package bombs at a FedEx, one of which exploded on a conveyer belt at a facility about an hour south of Austin.

But as the nation searches for answers as to what fueled the bomber's rage, some say Texas' lack of regulation and oversight on home schooling potentially prevented someone - such as a teacher or a doctor - from spotting potential warning signs in Conditt's behavior.

"With slightly increased oversight in a state-by-state, case-by-case basis, children might not slip through the cracks," said Hannah Ettinger, who studies incidents of violence against or perpetrated by home-schooled students for the Coalition for Responsible Home Education.

The group advocates for increased oversight of home-schooled students, such as requiring that each be registered and meet yearly with a certified teacher for annual testing and with a doctor for a physical checkup - both of whom would be required to report to authorities if they suspected a child's physical or mental health or welfare were in jeopardy.

Texas' regulations are "incredibly minimal," said Ettinger, noting that the state does not have those requirements.

No one keeping track

Texas is one of the easiest states for home-schooling children, with few rules and regulations for parents to follow. Hundreds of thousands of students learn at home here, but no one knows for sure how many because Texas doesn't keep track. Students have the freedom to work at their own pace, explore outside the classroom and avoid the pitfalls of traditional school life.

People who knew Conditt describe his upbringing as typical of thousands of home-schooled children in Texas. The Conditts, like many home-schooling families in the state, belonged to active community groups that provide support to children with tutoring, sports, clubs and other activities. The family was involved, people in the community said, and no one saw any indications that Conditt could turn violent.

There is little that any school system can do when someone is determined to cause destruction, said Jeremy Newman, director of public policy for the Texas Home School Coalition, who defended home-schoolers in the aftermath of the bombings.

"We obviously don't say that the public school system caused this problem or didn't prevent it," said Newman, referring to the Feb. 14 shooting in Parkland, Fla., in which 17 students and staff were fatally shot by accused gunman Nikolas Cruz, a former student. "The administrative process is not a guarantee that you can prevent something like that from happening."

In fact, safety is one of the chief reasons that parents in Texas and around the country opt to home-school children, according to a survey from the National Center for Education Statistics. Having a positive school environment that provides safety and discourages drug use and negative peer pressure tops the list of reasons that parents home-school, followed by dissatisfaction with instruction at traditional schools and a desire for religious instruction.

"The reason we have sacrificed time and income to home-school is that we are not satisfied with the ability of the schools to train our children to be virtuous," said Crouch, who knew the Conditt family from church and home-school organizations.

"All of us are concerned about the safety in the schools," she said. "Home schooling is our way of trying to protect our children."

'Welcome to Texas'

Home schooling is on the rise nationwide, but the lack of registration in Texas means no one knows how many students are taught at home.

The Texas Home School Coalition, a powerful lobbying group that began as a political action committee, estimates the state is home to more than 325,000 home-schoolers. In contrast, about 5.4 million students attend Texas public schools.

An estimated 1.7 million children - or about 3.4 percent of all students nationwide - were home-schooled in the U.S. during the 2015-16 school year, according to a federal survey. That's up from 1.7 percent of students in 1999. Most home-schooled students are white and Latino and live in smaller towns or rural communities - not major cities.

Some states require parents to become certified to teach their children or to get a curriculum approved. Not Texas.

Parents in the state must follow only three requirements: The instruction must not be a sham, the curriculum must be in visual form such as books or video monitors, and the curriculum must cover five basic subjects: reading, spelling, grammar, math and good citizenship.

If a child hasn't been in a public school, parents don't need to tell the school district that they intend to home-school their children. Parents are required to inform their school district only if they pull their child out of a public school in Texas to home-school.

The Texas Home School Coalition takes pride in Texas being one of the least-regulated states in the country. In an orientation video, coalition president Tim Lambert said people new to Texas often ask where they need to register.

"We always like to get those calls," he said. "We say, 'Ma'am, welcome to Texas, where people are free.'"

Rachel Coleman, executive director of the Massachusetts-based Coalition for Responsible Home Education, cringes when she gets questions from home-schoolers from Texas. The laws are so lax that adults who graduate from home school sometimes have problems producing transcripts for colleges.

'Suffer through it'

A home-schooled student herself, Coleman said children have many special opportunities when they are home-taught, but they are entirely dependent on the quality of instruction from their parents.

Coleman's group chronicles incidents when home-schoolers turn violent, such as when 20-year-old Adam Lanza, who was home-schooled for several years, opened fire at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut in 2012, killing 20 young children and six adults.

In the vast majority of cases in which home-school students struggle in the transition to adulthood, however, most work or "suffer through it" without turning to violence, she said.

alejandra.matos(at)

chron.com

andrea.zelinski(at)chron.com