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Last updated: Saturday, November 18, 2006 6:49 PM EST

By Tatiana Zarnowski, November 19, 2006

A Silver Spring Township mother sentenced to jail for her son's truancy says the Cumberland Valley School District did not adequately prepare her son for middle school and left her with no choice but to pull him out of school last year.

“The first week of school, my son was totally lost,” Maggie Winters says, adding that her son Kyle in eighth grade did not even use capitalization when writing sentences at the time, and was learning “very basic” math. And he was afraid to ask teachers for help because he didn't want to look stupid in front of his peers, Winters says.

Kyle, 14, was in learning support classes since second grade before a discipline issue in sixth grade sent him to an in-house alternative education program for the rest of that year and seventh grade. Those small classes with a relaxed atmosphere required little homework, few study skills and didn't prepare Kyle to return to the middle school, Winters says.

District officials put Kyle in Good Hope Middle School at the beginning of eighth grade, with no transition beforehand to prepare him for reading a schedule and switching classes, Winters says. And since the district decided he wasn't eligible for special education any more, Kyle was placed in classes where he was expected to do pre-algebra, write 500-word essays and memorize state capitals, his mother says.

So Kyle got Fs on his assignments, after getting As and Bs in alternative education classes.

But school district officials have a different take on alternative education. They say that curriculum parallels the core subject areas children in regular classrooms take, although there is less homework. Rather, the district says this is simply a matter of Winters' not keeping up with with state-mandated homeschooling requirements. The district filed truancy papers in district court this fall after Winters failed to submit required paperwork showing she did homeschool her son, Kyle Winters, after she pulled him out of Good Hope Middle School in Hampden Township in October 2005. Those charges followed earlier truancy violations.

Superintendent Jean Walker says Winters' case is unusual. Parents of homeschooled children must turn in paperwork at the end of the school year showing the child's progress and an expert's approval of the homeschool program, she says. In eight years of enforcing student enrollment as a school administrator at two school districts, Walker says this is the first time she has filed truancy papers against a parent. Reminders and certified letters to Winters went unanswered, she says.

“The vast majority of homeschool parents do a very fine job of complying with the law,” Walker says. “This is a very rare occurrence.”

And the judge who sentenced Winters to 30 days in county prison says the case is a matter of Winters' meeting her court-ordered responsibilities.

Winters owes $3,989.50 in fines and court costs related to truancy charges, and court records show her payments had been overdue, so District Judge Thomas Placey hauled her back into court Nov. 8 and added 30 days in jail to her sentence.

Winters says she will appeal the sentence. She says in addition to Kyle's school issues, his migraine headaches also kept him out of school in 2003 and 2004.

But Winters says she is worried about having the adequate evidence to show school and court officials. Winters says turmoil in her personal life resulted in her moving without giving a forwarding address, and all of her belongings, including her son's computer, time logs and his homeschool work, were sold or disposed of last spring after she couldn't pay a self-storage unit bill.

“Physically, I don't have a lot to give to them,” she says.

Unless the county court grants her appeal, Winters is slated to go to jail Dec. 14. The county court also possibly could require Kyle to return to school, where he would be in ninth grade and in the same trouble again, Walker says.

Lynnette Snyder, the district's director of secondary education, says it is true that it can be more difficult to transition alternative education students back to middle school than to the high school because the alternative education program is housed in the high school. But a staff team of teachers, the school counselor, building administrators and specialists help students come back to the regular school, she said.

“We've had a lot of success, but we're not successful in every single case.”

Winters says it would be very difficult for Kyle to go back into school now, so he should be at home where he is showing progress. “At least now he capitalizes and dots his i's and crosses his t's and uses punctuation.”