‘That Baby Is Going to Die’

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School had been in session at Mount Lookout Elementary for only a few weeks when Raylee Browning, a kindergartner with bright-blue eyes, arrived one morning in a wheelchair. Her family said she’d had a temper tantrum and kicked a wall, fracturing her femur. The explanation struck Carrie Ciliberti, Raylee’s gym teacher, as strange. Ciliberti knew that the femur is one of the strongest bones in the body, difficult to break. If you kick a wall hard enough to fracture your femur, wouldn’t you also break your foot? she wondered.

Ciliberti, who had been teaching for 34 years, knew Raylee to be a sweet child who loved to talk about becoming a princess. She never acted out, though she tended to vie for Ciliberti’s attention more than most other students did. Ciliberti noticed that Raylee didn’t play much with the other kids at school. And she often wore clothing that didn’t fit her well or that wasn’t right for the season, like long pants and long sleeves in the sticky August heat. At the end of the day, while waiting to be picked up, Raylee would “put her arms around my waist and lock her legs around my legs,” Ciliberti later testified in court. She “would say, ‘I love you. Could you be my mommy?’”

Mount Lookout Elementary is a school of only 100 students in a rural county in West Virginia where about 20 percent of children live below the poverty line. In 2015, when Raylee started kindergarten, the opioid epidemic was ravaging the state; it had the highest overdose mortality rate in the country. One day, as Ciliberti did yoga with the kindergartners, she remembers that Raylee asked, “Want to see my boo-boo?” Raylee pulled up her pants leg and showed Ciliberti what looked to her like a cigarette burn. “Oh, what happened?” Ciliberti asked. “I’m not allowed to talk about it,” Raylee told her. Ciliberti began to notice that Raylee routinely came to school with scratches and handprints on her body. Then, Raylee’s family informed the school that Raylee had a binge eating disorder and the school should not feed her breakfast. When administrators asked for documentation, they were given “something written on a prescription pad that said that she had an eating disorder. It was not professional,” Ciliberti told me. It looked to her like Raylee’s caregivers had swiped a pad from a doctor’s office and written on it themselves.

As a teacher, Ciliberti is a mandatory reporter, so she knew what to do. Over the next year and a half that Raylee attended Mount Lookout, she and other teachers reported concerns to Child Protective Services numerous times. By then, Raylee was already well known to CPS because her mother, Janice Wriston, had been calling in reports about her as well. Wriston and Raylee’s father, Marty Browning Jr., separated when Raylee was 2. The custody fight had been brutal and left Wriston only with weekends with her daughter. Most of the time, Raylee lived with her father; his partner, Julie Titchenell; and Titchenell’s children and sister, Sherie Titchenell.

Before elementary school, during the summer when Raylee turned 4, she was seen in the emergency room four times in two months for lesions on her legs, arms, and face; cuts and bruises; and a head injury. CPS interviewed Raylee but could not determine with certainty where maltreatment had occurred, so it didn’t move forward with an official finding. The next spring, when she was enrolled in preschool, Raylee told her mother that her bottom hurt and doctors found evidence that she’d been sexually abused. But after each ER visit, Raylee was discharged home — medical professionals noted her cheerful disposition — and Wriston says her custody arrangements weren’t changed, even when Wriston filed an emergency petition with the family court and sought help from a nonprofit that provides support to women who have suffered relationship abuse. That same year, Raylee’s attendance at school was intermittent — Marty told CPS he’d been keeping Raylee home as punishment for something — but one day she arrived with belt marks on her body. Another CPS report was filed, and the investigation again concluded that Raylee did not face “impending dangers.”

When Raylee returned from summer vacation to begin the first grade at Mount Lookout, “she looked like a skeleton,” Ciliberti told me, with “black circles under her eyes.” Her teachers were shocked. She would arrive at school shaky and pale; teachers brought her to the bathroom during breaks to give her food. Ciliberti called CPS again, and shortly after, she says Julie called the school, complaining that the faculty were harassing the family with CPS investigations. Soon, Marty, Sherie, and Julie took more significant action to keep Raylee out of sight.

In every state, even in the midst of an ongoing CPS investigation, parents or guardians can withdraw their child from school to homeschool them. In 48 states, a parent can do this even if they’ve been convicted of a crime against a child. Once they are homeschooling their child, there is no requirement that the child receive regular wellness checks and, in all but a single state, no requirement that the child is subject to yearly tests outside the home to make sure they’re learning anything at all.

Right before Christmas break in 2016, the district’s superintendent showed up at school and told Ciliberti that Raylee was being withdrawn into homeschooling and that there were no legal grounds for the school to further intervene. “She’s going to end up dead,” Ciliberti told the superintendent. “That baby is going to die.”

Ciliberti was right. Two years after Raylee was withdrawn from Mount Lookout, on December 26, 2018, Sherie called an ambulance. When EMTs arrived, they found Sherie standing outside, “calmly” holding Raylee, who she said was not breathing. The EMTs asked Sherie to show them any medications Raylee was taking, and Sherie disappeared into the house; when, after 12 minutes, she had not returned, EMTs realized they could wait no longer. By the time the ambulance reached the ER, Raylee was unresponsive and in cardiac arrest. She died soon after. Doctors discovered her entire body was covered in bruises, cuts, and second-degree burns. They noted signs of recent sexual abuse. Later, a medical examiner determined that Raylee had died from sepsis caused by bacterial pneumonia. She had undoubtedly been very sick for days or even weeks before her death. “A lay person,” a doctor later wrote, would have known she needed medical attention.

It took a year for Marty, Julie, and Sherie to be arrested and charged with child abuse and neglect. A police report submitted before their arrest noted that Raylee’s teenage stepsister recalled Sherie saying that the children were pulled into homeschool “because she couldn’t come up with any more lies for us to tell CPS when they will ask us questions about things at home.” After withdrawing Raylee from school, the family moved to a new home in a different county without sharing their whereabouts with Wriston, who lost contact with Raylee for many months. Just one additional CPS report — from a concerned neighbor — was filed during that time. But after interviewing Raylee, CPS determined that the maltreatment finding was “not sustained.”

Marty, Julie, and Sherie were all found guilty of negligence leading to the death of a child. At their sentencing, the judge noted that in addition to holding the three of them responsible for Raylee’s death, he considered the State of West Virginia responsible as well. It had allowed a child to be “home schooled without any real measures to ensure the child’s continued education and safety.”

The vast majority of parents who homeschool their children don’t abuse them. But for those who are intent on inflicting harm, homeschooling provides a highly effective guise. Child abuse and neglect are crimes of isolation; when children are kept home, they are far more difficult for social workers to interview away from the influence of their caregivers and far fewer people are able to lay eyes on them.

Because child-protection agencies often don’t report on the school status of children who experience maltreatment, it’s impossible to know how much harm homeschooled children experience. The Coalition for Responsible Home Education, an organization founded by former homeschool students, has combed through news stories and publicly available data to compile a database of child abuse and fatality among the homeschool population. To date, it has logged 500 cases of abuse and 200 fatalities. The database is “not comprehensive and very likely undercounts the deaths of homeschooled children,” the organization notes, because it relies solely on media reports, which don’t reliably mention whether a child was homeschooled. Among the fatality cases, half involved children who were recently pulled out of school.

The findings dovetail with a report from Connecticut’s Office of the Child Advocate that was drafted in response to the 2017 death of a boy who had been withdrawn from school and placed in homeschool after his teachers filed multiple reports with the Department of Children and Families. The Connecticut report found that in a three-year period, more than a third of children withdrawn into homeschool “lived in families that were the subject of at least one prior accepted report to DCF for suspected abuse or neglect. The majority of these families had a history of multiple prior reports to DCF.”

In the past year, cases like these have increasingly made national news. In February, first responders were called to a house fire in Waterbury, Connecticut. Inside, they found a man in his early 30s who weighed 68 pounds. The man had used hand sanitizer and a lighter to set the fire as a means of escape; he told police officers he had been confined at home since the fourth grade, when his stepmother pulled him from public school. Before that, his teachers had called DCF at least 20 times to report signs of abuse and starvation. In May, a similar case made headlines in New Jersey: An 18-year-old girl ran away from home and a neighbor brought her to the hospital. She later told police she had been trapped at home and subject to physical and sexual assault since the sixth grade, when she was withdrawn into homeschooling. The case against her parents is ongoing.

When Ciliberti learned that Raylee had died, she kept repeating to herself, Damn, damn it, I was right. She couldn’t stop thinking about it. “I guess I got in my own head because I had told my superintendent, ‘She’s going to die.’ And when she died, I was like, This cannot happen to another child.” She decided to call Shawn Fluharty, an attorney and a delegate in the West Virginia house of representatives. The house has 100 members; at the time, 41 were Democrats, and Fluharty was one of them. When Ciliberti told him what had happened, his first thought was that it was horrific. His second was that there was a “clear loophole” in the law allowing children to be pulled from school while a CPS investigation was open. Closing it surely wouldn’t be a heavy lift politically. “I thought, There are still a few things left in this country that are not politically motivated, and protecting children should be at the top of that list,” he told me.

In early 2020, he drafted legislation that would prevent parents who were being investigated by CPS from withdrawing their children into home school until CPS had cleared them. He called the bill Raylee’s Law. From his initial conversations with colleagues, he got the feeling that the bill would be well supported. Eight other delegates signed on as co-sponsors, five of whom were Republicans.

Fluharty didn’t know it at the time, but Raylee’s Law was one of the first attempts in the U.S. to close the loophole that allows children to be pulled from traditional school in the middle of a CPS investigation. He introduced the bill in January 2020. The next day, Fluharty and the rest of the bill’s co-sponsors received an email from Mike Donnelly, a senior counsel for the Home School Legal Defense Association. In his message, Donnelly called Raylee’s Law “Unconstitutional, Un-American and Unnecessary.” He urged them to withdraw their support for the bill.

Within days, across local and national Facebook groups for homeschooling parents, administrators began posting messages about a new bill that undermined “foundational principles of freedom.” Pro-homeschool groups sent out legislative alerts about Raylee’s Law, directing parents to call their legislators and tell them not to vote for it. “It was all over social media, it was all over the legislative updates. I mean, it was everywhere,” Elaina Fox Atkinson, a homeschooling parent in West Virginia, told me. The Home School Legal Defense Association’s Facebook page warned that the bill “places children of law-abiding home-school families at risk by allowing a single call to CPS to have them pulled from their routine and placed into a school without any proof of abuse or neglect.” This was a misrepresentation of Raylee’s Law. But immediately, the comments section under the statement filled with outraged parents. “Any law passed as a knee jerk reaction to some tragedy and named after a child or a dog is probably unnecessary, and will likely cause more problems than it solves,” one person wrote.

Pro-homeschool groups framed Raylee’s Law as an existential threat to their way of life and a misguided attempt to encroach on parents’ rights to educate their children. Christian Home Educators of West Virginia, a group aligned with HSLDA, wrote in a memo to members that “this bill takes away educational freedom before conviction or even formal charges, in stark contrast to the constitutional presumption of innocence … If CPS wasn’t able to adequately investigate or follow up due to lack of personnel, over-worked case workers, or inadequate laws governing abuse, then those problems need to be addressed.” Two weeks after Raylee’s Law was introduced, more than 600 people flooded the West Virginia capitol to “put a positive face on homeschooling,” according to CHEWV.

Fluharty had unknowingly stumbled on one of the most underestimated lobbying groups in the country. That year, Raylee’s Law didn’t even make it onto the calendar of the house education committee.

When HSLDA was founded in 1983, it was illegal in most states for parents who weren’t trained teachers to educate their children at home. In the years since, HSLDA has persistently dismantled existing homeschool regulations and prevented the passage of new ones. It has been extraordinarily successful. Four decades later, as many as 2.7 million children across the country are homeschooled, and homeschool regulation is effectively nonexistent.

In most states there’s little oversight of educational quality. Parents can homeschool their children even if they themselves haven’t graduated high school; they don’t have to submit yearly assessments. Nearly half of states don’t require students to receive instruction in any specific subjects. And because fewer than ten states have strong testing protocols for homeschool students, parents have a huge leeway in what they teach.

The founding president of HSLDA, Michael Farris, a lawyer and father to ten homeschooled children, was raised in the most conservative branches of Christianity. He started the Washington chapter of Moral Majority and hewed to its perspective on education: Public school pushes children toward dangerous secular views, and parents’ rights to raise and punish their children as they see fit should be absolute. He believed that homeschoolers would benefit from forming “what amounts to a union, where we all join together, we pay a little bit, and if they come attack one of us, we all come to the fight,” he once said.

Since its founding, HSLDA has lobbied against regulating what students learn in homeschool environments and against the push to bring home education into line with public-school curricula. In fact, in the past, the organization sold homeschooling materials that contradict the theory of evolution, and it currently sells resources that teach a Christian nationalist perspective on family and politics — in support of traditional families and against abortion, among other issues.

HSLDA has been tied to far-right groups throughout its history. In the early ’90s, when Congress tried to pass legislation requiring homeschool parents to be licensed in the subjects they taught their children, Farris went on the “Focus on the Family” radio show and told listeners to urge their representatives to vote against it. Members of Congress received hundreds of thousands of calls, and the legislation was ultimately killed. In 2000, Farris founded Patrick Henry College to provide biblically focused higher education. Within five years, the college was placing as many students in White House internships as Georgetown was. When Farris finally left HSLDA in 2017, it was to run the Alliance Defending Freedom through the period when it was ramping up to help overturn Roe v. Wade.

In 2023, an Ohio couple made national news for running a 2,400-person network of white-supremacist homeschoolers. The couple distributed lesson plans that included the words of Adolf Hitler. Though the Ohio Department of Education investigated the situation, it ultimately concluded that there was nothing to be done: There is no law in Ohio preventing a homeschooling parent from teaching their child Nazi ideology. The HSLDA roundly supported this finding. “It would be a mistake to regulate the extraordinarily diverse home-schooling community … based on the bad acts of a tiny fringe,” the group said in a statement.

From the beginning, HSLDA played on the distinctly American belief that if children are required to be educated, their parents should have control over what they learn. The last time the Supreme Court weighed in on the issue of parents’ rights over children’s education was more than 100 years ago in Meyer v. Nebraska. “The court, in very powerful language, talked about how this was not Plato’s Republic, we weren’t the kind of country in which the state had the right to raise children; parents had a right to raise their children,” Harvard Law professor emeritus Elizabeth Bartholet told me. “The court also said the state has the right to make reasonable regulations, but they can’t go too far.” But who gets to determine what’s reasonable — parents or the government? That question has never been resolved.

Nearly 50 million children are enrolled in U.S. public schools, and most of their parents have a list of idiosyncratic worries and complaints about what transpires there. To send a child to spend half their waking hours being shaped and influenced by adults whose inclinations may be different from the parents’ own has always required some degree of blind faith, even for the most ardent supporters of public education. In the past few decades, as questions about how schools handle everything from prayer to multiculturalism to personal pronouns have transformed into bitter national political fights, public education has come to exist in a climate of distrust — ideal conditions for HSLDA to seed its argument that parents’ rights should outweigh their children’s, says Bartholet. The HSLDA, Bartholet has written, claims “that parents who are committed to beliefs and values counter to those of the larger society are entitled to bring their children up in isolation, so as to help ensure that they will replicate the parents’ views and lifestyle choices.” This prioritization, she says, is “inconsistent with the child’s right to what has been called an ‘open future’ — the right to exposure to alternative views and experiences essential for children to grow up to exercise meaningful choices about their own future views, religions, lifestyles, and work.”

Bartholet goes on to argue that given the absence of meaningful regulation of homeschooling curricula, a child’s right to an education is effectively nonexistent. “The current homeschooling regime exists not because our society through its elected representatives has decided it should,” she has written. “It exists because homeschooling advocacy groups have become an overwhelming political force … like the gun lobby, [homeschool advocates] wield political power vastly disproportionate to their numbers.”

In its pitch to members, the HSLDA has cultivated a fear of public institutions, chief among them Child Protective Services. It frames CPS as a tool of government snooping, liable to be deployed by retaliatory neighbors with petty grievances. Early on, the HSLDA established a 24-hour legal hotline and told member-parents that if social workers showed up at their door, they should call it to be immediately connected with a lawyer. Samantha Field, a writer and advocate, was homeschooled from the first grade onward as her family moved from Iceland to New Mexico to Florida. She remembers a little piece of paper that she and every other homeschooled child she knew had taped to the refrigerator that the organization had mailed them. “It was like, ‘What do you do if CPS comes knocking? Here’s the number to call,’” she told me. Some kids had the phone number memorized, Field recalls. Stoking fear to drive membership has proved to be good business. Last year, HSLDA raised around $12 million in membership dues, much of which it funneled back into its lobbying work. (In a statement, a representative of HSLDA wrote, “We don’t encourage fear. We help parents to understand their rights.”)

HSLDA’s unyielding commitment to defending homeschooling parents from CPS intervention has included advocating for parents whose children died in their care. In 1992, the organization became involved with the case of Timothy and Kathleen Carroll. HSLDA’s Court Report newsletter described them as “a loving Christian couple who have faced criminal prosecution and children’s services intervention for the last three years.” Five of the Carrolls’ adopted children had died in a nine-month period, including one who was burned with bleach. Courts barred the couple from homeschooling their remaining children, and HSLDA appealed the ruling. Its newsletter assured members that the court’s decision was an “abuse of discretion and violation of the parent’s fundamental rights to give their children a Christian education.” HSLDA won the couple the right to continue to homeschool their surviving children.

The pandemic was a critical turning point for the homeschool movement. The question of how (and whether) to try to quell the spread of COVID-19 divided parents like few issues ever have, and remote schooling brought parents’ doubts about both curricula and school administrators’ judgment to the surface in an unprecedented way. Some parents felt virtual school was an unacceptable risk to their children’s development and mental health; others saw unreasonable threats to their children’s physical well-being when mask and vaccination requirements were dropped. In unseen numbers, parents on both sides of the divide pulled their kids into homeschooling. It’s hard to tally the exact number of homeschooled kids because in several states, parents are not required to inform their district if they decide to homeschool, blurring the line between truancy and home education. One Washington Post analysis found that between 2017 and 2023, the number of kids being educated at home grew 51 percent with most of that increase in the school year following the start of the pandemic. In New York City, the rate of homeschooling almost doubled between 2020 and 2022. Today, the practice is no longer confined mainly to conservative religious families.

It is clear to child-welfare advocates that existing regulations are nowhere near up to the task of protecting these children. “The whole system of mandated reporting was developed with a society in mind where children would be outside the home being cared for by adults other than their parents,” Blake Warenik, director of communications at the National Children’s Alliance, told me. That society is disappearing. He cited the rise of telehealth and the COVID-era homeschool boom alongside the disappearance of civic groups, like neighborhood associations and Scouting clubs, that might expose children to adults other than their parents. “It’s becoming increasingly easy for your kid to live off the radar in a variety of ways.”

After COVID, “the tailwinds moved even further to the side of deregulation,” Jonah Stewart, director of programs at the Coalition for Responsible Home Education, told me. The initial response to Raylee’s Law followed the HSLDA playbook. “Somebody who wants to file a bill, they should expect to hear from every homeschooler in their state,” Farris has said. “We will do everything we can do to make sure every homeschooler knows what is going on.” Although HSLDA pays lobbyists, it relies heavily on a highly motivated and connected network of parent-activists who take the organization’s talking points and run with them. HSLDA sends its members regular issues of Court Report — which include lengthy memos on legislation from across the country that the group believes will encroach on parents’ right to homeschool. Staffers post updates in HSLDA and affiliated Facebook groups, along with instructions for how members can call representatives or get involved in local campaigns. The organization also maintains a massive database of local homeschooling pods, whose messaging is often explicitly religious and political. “Their strategy is to position any measure of oversight as an incursion into the right to homeschooling, the rights of families,” said Stewart. “And that’s a very powerful discourse, especially right now.”

After the initial onslaught of anti–Raylee’s Law lobbying in West Virginia, Shawn Fluharty was mad. He didn’t think the bill was especially controversial, nor did he think that it would change the experience of the vast majority of homeschooling parents in the state. “How many individuals would this even impact? It would not impact current homeschoolers at all, only prospective homeschoolers, and only those in the most dire situations,” he told me. “You mean to tell me that thwarts your ability to homeschool? All those people can go fly a kite.”

Since he initially proposed Raylee’s Law, Fluharty has reintroduced the legislation three times — in 2021, 2022, and 2023. In all three cases, it went nowhere. Several members of the West Virginia house are homeschool advocates, including Kathie Hess Crouse; another delegate told me that Crouse has often used a Facebook Group called the Unsocialized Homeschoolers of West Virginia to whip up discord and rally parents against Raylee’s Law and rallied parents to call their representatives. She has often been carbon-copied on emails from HSLDA to legislators who support Raylee’s Law.

In early 2024, Fluharty introduced it again; after an extraordinary fight, he finally got the bill past the house on a voice vote so that members wouldn’t have to be on the record supporting it. When State Senator Amy Grady heard the news, she immediately added the legislation to the senate education committee’s calendar. “I was really excited to run it,” she told me. But soon leaders in the house and senate told her to slow down. “It was overwhelming, the number of people who weren’t comfortable with how it was written because they were receiving so many phone calls and complaints from homeschoolers about that bill,” Grady told me.

In the midst of all this debate, Janice Wriston, Raylee’s mom, emailed the entire West Virginia legislature. “I think it’s important to keep an open mind when you are making decisions for many others and most importantly your children and our children,” she wrote. “Children who can’t make the decisions on their own, who are crying out from behind a locked door awaiting their next beating! … They have nothing but time, time to sit in hopes that someone will save them. You have that power to save those children … and for the past few years you have pushed them aside because all the healthy children’s parents, who are being raised happily with their families are sending you emails to vote against the bill!”

Even after it passed the house, Raylee’s Law never made it out of committee in the state senate. While the bill was stalled in April 2024, Kyneddi Miller, a West Virginia girl whose family had been reported to CPS, and who was subsequently taken out of public school and placed in homeschool, was found dead. She was in a nearly skeletal state.

I asked Kevin Boden, HSLDA’s legal director, to explain the organization’s continued opposition to Raylee’s Law and other measures championed by child-welfare advocates, like requiring a yearly wellness check for homeschooled children. “We have a presumption of liberty in this country,” Boden said, rather than “a system that presumes that the government is a nanny state and is supposed to police every citizen regardless of whether there are any facts that that citizen is doing anything incorrect.” Raylee Browning’s death was “simply a tragic case,” he said.

Stewart views the legislation differently. “Even five deaths that can easily be prevented by provisions that would not in any way infringe on the routines of responsible homeschooling parents — that seems like a pretty easy choice for me,” she said. By anti-regulation logic, Bartholet adds, “you could say, with respect to murder laws, ‘Well, we really don’t need murder laws because most people don’t murder other people.’”

Elaina Fox Atkinson is a homeschooling parent who called her legislators to advocate against Raylee’s Law. She homeschools her two children — “We’re almost through high school,” she said — and is a member of HSLDA and Christian Home Educators of West Virginia. She closely follows both groups’ legislative updates. “A lot of people will retaliate against people who homeschool, and the next thing you know, CPS shows up at my door,” she told me to explain her interest. I asked her if she had seen this happen in her own community. “Absolutely,” she said, though she didn’t add specifics. “You appreciate the fact that there’s a government process to protect children,” she went on, “but then sometimes you get somebody who isn’t well trained, and next thing, you have a problem where there had been no problem previously.” When asked why she thought it was so important for her and other homeschool parents to call their representatives about Raylee’s Law, she responded, “Have you ever seen, in wildlife, what a mother will do to protect her baby? It’s just the basic component of being able to protect our freedom.”

Fluharty told me he’s not giving up on Raylee’s Law; over the years, his outrage over the situation has only grown. Wriston has also continued to advocate for the passage of the bill. “I blame myself every day because I wasn’t able to find my baby in time or I wasn’t loud enough,” she wrote in her message to legislators. “Now there is something you can do about it! Realize that homeschool isn’t always out of love and that children may be homeschooled just out of revenge and pure hate! Please hear me!! I’M TRYING NOW TO BE LOUD ENOUGH.”