Hidden Torture: Powerful Lobby Opposes Homeschool Reform Efforts

KANSAS CITY, KS — Adrian Jones didn’t get a chance to ask a date to prom or go to college. He never stepped up to the plate to knock a home run out of a Little League ballpark or had the chance to tag a base runner. The Kansas City, Kansas, boy died before he reached his eighth birthday. He was starved to death by his father and stepmother and subjected to abuse so savage that it can rightfully be called torture.

Child-welfare workers in Kansas and neighboring Missouri filled thick files with reports detailing the horrible cruelty inflicted on Adrian. Then, his parents decided to homeschool him, hiding him from all adults outside of his home — most notably the teachers and others who are required by law to report child abuse when they see it.

This boy’s sad story isn’t nearly as isolated as he was.

In February, Patch ran a story about some of the unintended consequences of loose homeschool laws. Ostensibly, these laws got the government out of kids’ educations, but they also made it easier for some homeschooling parents to abuse and torture and sometimes kill their children without any adult outside the home knowing what was happening.

Adrian Jones’ brief, tragic life — he was little more than a skeleton when his fragile body gave up and his dad tossed his remains to a pen of hungry pigs — offers one of the strongest arguments yet to write more protections for kids into home education laws, said Rachel Coleman, one of the co-founders of the Coalition for Responsible Home Education.

Bills to strengthen homeschool oversight were introduced this year in three states, but were withdrawn in two of them almost as quickly as they were filed.

The reason: Well-intentioned lawmakers ran into a powerful blockade run by the Homeschool Legal Defense Association. The influential lobby not only routinely opposes bills that ramp up protections for kids in home education laws, but also unrelated legislation the organization’s leaders think could affect parents’ choice to teach their kids at home, Coleman said.

‘MINORITY HOLDS KIDS’ RIGHTS HOSTAGE’

The stories of homeschooled children who were tortured to death struck an emotional chord, indicating growing awareness that lax oversight can put kids in danger, Coleman said.

Getting bills introduced in three state legislatures was a significant accomplishment for the Responsible Home Education group, a national nonprofit run by homeschool graduates, Coleman said. But at the same time, the withdrawal of bills to fix problems in two states tells her and others they need to do a better job preparing lawmakers for the outsized influence wielded by the HSLDA.

“We need to make sure lawmakers know to expect this volume of backlash, and that it’s coming from a very specific place, and that place doesn’t represent the majority.” — Rachel Coleman, co-founder of the Coalition for Responsible Home Education

“People are talking about it,” Coleman said. “It’s unfortunate a small minority has been able to hold the rights of so many children hostage for so long. Those of us who were homeschooled want to see students have rights, too. Right now, parents have all the power.

“We need to make sure lawmakers know to expect this volume of backlash, and that it’s coming from a very specific place, and that place doesn’t represent the majority,” she continued. “Lawmakers see response on volume, and they don’t see anything else.”

Well funded with a staff stacked with lawyers, the HSLDA “plays fast and loose with legal arguments” and scare tactics to get lawmakers to back off, Coleman said, “but still looks very official.”

The HSLDA’s roots trace back to the homeschool movement of the early 1980s, when it offered free lawyers to member parents who had to jump through regulatory hoops or go to court to make a case for teaching their kids at home. In a sense, the HSLDA is on life support now that homeschooling is legal in all 50 states and it needs homeschooling parents’ membership fees to survive, Coleman said.

“It is not 1983 anymore,” she said. “Parents don’t need to buy legal memberships, but it’s in [the HSLDA’s] interest to keep people scared and convinced they’re about to have their rights removed.”

That’s happening in Kansas, where Adrian’s maternal grandmother, Judy Conway, said homeschool laws gave cover to the boy's dad and stepmother, Michael and Heather Jones, to abuse and starve him to death with no one noticing.

The formidable homeschool lobby not only thwarted homeschool reform efforts before legislation could even be introduced in Kansas, but also is lobbying against a child-welfare bill that is related only to the extent that it sprang from Adrian’s tragic circumstances.

“The immediate response to legislation is always that their right to homeschool is under threat,” even it touches home education only peripherally or not at all, Coleman said.

The story has been a little different — but not much — elsewhere around the country:

• The HSLDA beat back efforts in Hawaii and Maryland, where proposals would have protected kids by preventing homeschooling by convicted sex offenders and others with histories of child abuse or neglect.
• A bill still alive in California would end homeschooling parents’ exemption from the state’s fire inspection provision for private schools — which allowed the parents of the 13 Turpin children to escape detection for years — but getting it through both legislative chambers is an uphill battle, Coleman said.
• Lawmakers in New Hampshire are discussing several proposals, including one to prevent homeschooled kids from working full-time, that have been referred to a study panel.
• Lawmakers in Michigan may take up the issue yet this spring.
• In Iowa, where two 16-year-old girls profiled in Patch’s original story were starved to death by their homeschooling parents, Democratic Sen. Matt McCoy has had no success getting reform efforts through his state’s Republican-controlled legislature.

McCoy, who called the 2013 bill stripping homeschool oversight a “reckless, senseless, gutless bill that essentially requires no accountability,” thinks homeschooled students should be seen four times a year by officials in their home school districts.

READ: Hidden Torture: How Homeschool Laws Shield Most-Abusive Of Parents

The homeschool group lobbied against that bill, too.

“Shockingly, it also requires officials to enter the home of every homeschool family and question the children four times per year,” Scott Woodruff, the HSLDA’s lawyer serving members in Iowa, wrote in an issue briefing. “If a family refuses to submit to the official’s demands, [the legislation] empowers the school to go to court to seek an order forcing them to submit.”

The HSLDA did not respond to Patch’s emailed request for an interview on its opposition to bills to increase safety for homeschooled kids.

‘AN ATROCITY IT WENT THIS FAR’

Coleman has talked with many grief-torn family members across the country in the compilation of her organization’s Homeschooling’s Invisible Children database, but said the conversation with Conway was “one of the most difficult [she has] ever had” because of the horrific circumstances surrounding Adrian’s death.

The database includes the names of about 320 homeschooled children who were severely neglected and abused from 2000 to last year, often for years without detection. Of those kids, 116 died, including Adrian and two other Kansas kids.The database indicates homeschooled kids die from abuse at a greater rate than other children.

Conway doesn’t doubt “there are a lot of great homeschool parents out there who love and educate their children,” but said they shouldn’t fear more accountability.

“I have no desire to see the government go into the homes of those who homeschool, but I do believe that at least twice a year they should be required to take their children, in the district where they live, to public school parent teacher conferences, so other adults can set eyes on this children and see how they are doing physically and academically.” — Judy Conway, Adrian's grandmother

“If you are a homeschool parent, and you have nothing to hide, then why should this suggestion be a problem?” she said. “It shouldn’t be, unless you have something to hide.”

Kansas is a notification-only state that requires only that parents tell state education officials they’re taking charge of their kids’ educations. Fear of government intrusion was one of the arguments cited by those opposing Conway’s efforts.

“I have no desire to see the government go into the homes of those who homeschool, but I do believe that at least twice a year they should be required to take their children, in the district where they live, to public school parent teacher conferences, so other adults can set eyes on this children and see how they are doing physically and academically,” she said.

Rep. Louis Ruiz, a Kansas City, Kansas Democrat, also thinks home education laws should be strengthened to hold parents more accountable, but said “that has to be a debate for another day” in his state.

For now, Ruiz is focusing his efforts on Adrian’s Act, which would hold adults living in a home criminally responsible if they fail to report child abuse and neglect when they see it.

“It’s an atrocity it went this far,” Ruiz said of the torture inflicted on the boy. “People in social services who were supposed to be looking after young Adrian should be held accountable.”

Adrian’s Act faces opposition from multiple fronts, including those who say that it makes culpable some adults who may also be victims of abuse or dependent adults with diminished capacity — a concern Ruiz says is fair and easily addressed.

Not so easily resolved is the opposition from homeschool advocates, people he thinks should — philosophically at least — favor, not try to stop, more protections for kids. Ruiz figures their organized opposition lowers to about 30 percent the odds Adrian’s Act will pass before the legislature adjourns this spring.

‘GRANDMA, WHAT TOOK YOU SO LONG?’

Conway, 62, went through months of therapy to cope with post-traumatic stress disorder and survivor’s guilt after the discovery of what was left of Adrian’s body — a few bones and pieces of scalp — in a plastic tub stored near the pig pen.

The Emporia grandmother is still haunted by a recurring dream. It’s set before Adrian’s Sept. 28, 2015, death, and she arrives at the isolated house on the outskirts of Kansas City, Kansas, in time to answer the desperate plea of a little boy she last saw alive on Christmas Eve 2012:

“Grandma, what took you so long?”

She wakes up and it’s 2018, and the ordeal of the little boy’s heinous death is a real-life nightmare. Mike and Heather Jones are in a Kansas prison after pointing fingers at each other and taking plea deals, and Mike Jones has just been denied a new trial after claiming he wasn’t treated fairly.

Conway had wanted to raise all four of her daughter’s children when she lost custody of them, but Mike Jones was granted the right to raise his three biological children. At the time, Conway said, he seemed genuinely interested in his kids’ wellbeing, so she didn’t contest the custody arrangement.

But her worry mounted as Jones and his new wife gradually cut off contact with Conway and the children’s older half sister, who Conway raised.

Child protective workers told her to continue making reports, but when she was unable to give specific new information that Adrian was being abused, the Kansas Department of Children and Families didn’t investigate. The Joneses hopscotched between residences in Kansas and Missouri, and the Missouri Social Services Department closed its file, too.

And because homeschool laws dropped Adrian off the radar of child-welfare workers, he was left to a fate that defies standards of human decency.

‘FEED SOME PIGS A BODY’

Adrian’s death certificate says he died of “acute and chronic child abuse,” but the official cause of his death is a sanitized version of what actually happened to him.

A search warrant return unsealed in Wyandotte County, Kansas, District Court details some of it, describing posts on Heather Jones’ Facebook page, titled “F--- Everyone Else!” In those posts, she said Adrian was so hard to handle that he had to be confined 95 percent of the time.

“I can’t shoot him unfortunately but I can work the s--t outta him til I feel better,” she wrote. Other posts said the child “broke out,” that she was “giving him away for free” and that she had forced him to run laps around her swimming pool and do push-ups “till I’m tired unless someone wants him.”

Finally, Heather Jones wrote, she “might have to feed some pigs a body.”

As investigators dug deeper into the Joneses’ Facebook accounts, they found photos that showed a skin-and-bones Adrian standing naked in a shower stall with a fat lip; numerous photos of him handcuffed and shackled to an inversion table, including some with his eyes and mouth covered with duct tape; and many others investigators said showed prolonged abuse and torture.

Investigators might not have discovered Adrian’s remains at all if Heather Jones hadn’t made a 911 domestic violence call on Nov. 25, 2015. When officers with the Kansas City, Kansas, Police Department arrived, they found she had injuries consistent with being beaten and choked, according to the search warrant return.

Police also acted on a tip that they “needed to ask where the little boy who used to live there was,” Conway said.

Evidence presented at their separate sentencing hearings shed more light on the depths of the boy’s father and stepmother’s depravity.

Thirty-eight surveillance cameras trained in and around the house captured video footage of Adrian’s every move. The tapes showed the cold, hungry boy as he was forced to stand outside holding tiki torches. He dropped one long enough to pull a can out of the trash and eat the residual food inside.

A detective testified that Mike Jones, a bail bondsman, held a taser weapon to Adrian’s penis for 20 seconds, and that oozing sores covered areas of his body where he had been restrained.

“He had to have been petrified,” Conway said, weeping.

‘THE WHOLE SYSTEM FAILED’

For many months, Conway couldn’t bring herself to look at the raw photos retrieved from cloud accounts associated with Mike and Heather Jones’ social media accounts.

When she did, she “got so sick and angry and so mad” that she had to eject the DVD from her computer.

But looking away from photos didn’t help Adrian and other kids, so she forced herself to take in the photographic evidence of all her grandson had been through.

Conway’s mission now is to fight for justice for Adrian and others like him caught in a horrific cycle of abuse that no one stops.

“The whole system failed him,” she said.

Those lapses are spelled out in detail in a $25 million wrongful death lawsuit Conway, Adrian’s biological mother and his oldest sister have filed against the child-welfare agencies in Kansas and Missouri, multiple individuals and institutions that had contact with Adrian.

If her family’s lawsuit is successful, Conway plans to set aside any money recovered in a trust fund for Adrian’s sisters and “to make their lives easier,” she said.

Any excess money will be used to start a foundation that will give scholarships to other children who have survived abuse.

“Education is a very, very important” part of recovery from such terrible circumstances, Conway said.

All photos courtesy of Judy Conway