Dave and Aline Stasiewich began home schooling in Edmonton in 1983. That same year they began hosting informal meetings at their house with a small number of other home educating families. The numbers of people attending continued to grow, so the meetings were moved to the Mill Woods Recreation Centre. This group became known as the Christian Home Educators (Edm) Association. It would later adopt the name Home School Christian Fellowship and it continues to thrive.
Back in the mid-1980s many home educators lived in fear due to the hostile climate for people who didn’t send their children to public school. Some home schooling parents were visited by truancy officers, while others had to deal with social disapproval. These were not good times for home education (van der Ahé 2013, 4-5).
Dave and Aline Stasiewich met with the Minister of Education to advocate for home education, but it became apparent that a provincial association for home educators would be helpful in negotiating with the Minister and his Department.
Together with some other parents, Dave and Aline Stasiewich formed the Alberta Home Education Association (AHEA) in 1986. Pioneering home educator Merv Tuplin told this author that Dave and Aline basically initiated the whole thing.
AHEA was officially incorporated on November 26, 1986. The five signers of the request to register the organization under the Societies Act were Gordon Schiffner of Edmonton, Marie Erdmann of Calgary, Nora Harder of Medicine Hat, Carolyn Dykstra of Edmonton, and Stockwell Day of Red Deer. At the time, Stockwell Day was a rookie MLA in the Progressive Conservative government of Premier Don Getty. It is noteworthy that the signers represented many areas of the province.
Willing Non-Resident Boards
After its formation in 1986, AHEA was immediately busy with pressing the government to include provisions for home education in the new School Act. With the passage of Bill 27 (the new School Act) in 1988, the next item on the agenda for AHEA was the home education regulations. The directors of the association urged all members to write and call their MLAs, the Minister of Education, and the director of the Legislature’s education caucus, Halvar Jonson. Many members did call and write, clearly indicating to the government that home educators were concerned. As a result, AHEA representatives were invited to speak to the education caucus. After the AHEA presentation, the minister assured the AHEA directors that they would get some input into the forthcoming regulations (Stasiewich 1988, 1).
AHEA received a draft of the proposed home education regulations on November 4, 1988. The Deputy Minister of Education, Reno Bosetti, then called a meeting for November 15, 1988 for all home educators and their organizations to attend. AHEA urged every member to attend and indicated that the outcome of this meeting was crucial because the proposed regulations were not acceptable:
For all intent and purposes, there is NO PROTECTION for home education parents. The bottom line is that, yes, you the parents have the legal right to educate your children at home, but we, the state, have the legal right to virtually tie your hands if we wish to do so, with time and curriculum requirements. And if you don’t do exactly as we say, we the state, will force your children into an institution of our choice, teaching them the philosophical curriculum of our choice. Alberta Education wants CONTROL of the PROCESS!
AHEA Newsletter 1988, 3
Many home educators did show up for the meeting. Ray Strom writes, “To the surprise of the department officials, the room was jammed with home educators. It was soon determined by those officials that home educators were a determined and serious group” (Strom 2003, 5).
The Home Education Regulation was released on February 28, 1989. AHEA immediately began trying to identify willing non-resident boards. Dave Stasiewich wrote to the members:
Please let me know of any board that is very reasonable towards home schooling and wants to co-operate. We want to publish all the boards that we know of that are interested in home schoolers and want to co-operate with us in our next newsletter. The directors of the Association will also be contacting school boards and discussing home school arrangements with them.
Stasiewich 1989, 1
The search for willing non-resident boards turned out to be a very difficult task. Apparently, there was a kind of peer pressure among the boards not to accept students from other jurisdictions. A board that did accept students from other jurisdictions would be considered a “skunk in the chicken coop,” as Ray Strom put it. Thus home educators were stuck with their resident boards, many of which were unfavourable.
It wasn’t until 1991 that a breakthrough occurred. In September of that year AHEA discovered that the Assumption Roman Catholic School District #50 in Oyen was open to being a willing non-resident board. Harold Elias and Ray Strom from AHEA spent a considerable amount of time negotiating an agreement with that board. AHEA then prepared a notification form to be filled out and faxed to Assumption. With only three days remaining before the deadline for notifications to be received, over 100 students notified with that board (Strom 2003, 6).
This was the turning point. Notifying with a willing non-resident board was no longer just a legal possibility but a genuine reality. But entrenched interests were not pleased by this breach in the dyke. As Ray Strom related,
The repercussions were stupendous, with school boards crying with outrage, and the Department immediately jumping all over the Assumption district, trying to find loopholes to shut them down. None were found, thankfully. The dye had been cast, and there was no turning back.
Strom 2003, 6