WeSchool founder continues campaign against criminalizing homeschool families

Aziza Butler, founder of WeSchool Academy, a support community for parent-educators, follows up her statehouse testimony against HB 2827 with a full-court press in the media.

Apr 02, 2025

Transcript

Editor’s note: This week’s video comes to us from WVON’s Morning Show with Rufus Williams. Williams interviewed Aziza Butler, wife of our own Pastor

Chris Butler

, who is a homeschooling mother of six and founder of WeSchool Academy. We covered her testimony against the homeschool bill at the statehouse two weeks ago.

The full show is available on the WVON Morning Show’s Facebook page. Aziza Butler’s interview runs from 1:29:58 to 1:53:15.

Below, you’ll find a portion of an op-ed she wrote regarding homeschooling, printed originally and in full in the Chicago Tribune on March 30.

More Black families are choosing to homeschool. A new bill undermines their choices.

By Aziza Butler

As a former Chicago Public Schools teacher, a homeschooling mother and a community leader who engages daily with families from diverse educational backgrounds, I can confidently say that Illinois House Bill 2827, the Homeschool Act, is harmful — not just for homeschoolers but also for every student in Illinois.

Proponents of the bill argue that additional oversight will protect vulnerable children. But from my firsthand experience as an educator and homeschooler, I know this bill would do the opposite — it would burden an already overwhelmed public system, potentially criminalize parents seeking educational freedom and ultimately make no meaningful impact on child safety.

During my years teaching in CPS, I witnessed the daily struggles of a district stretched beyond its limits. Administrators, teachers and school personnel were consistently overwhelmed by staff shortages, behavioral concerns and funding that never seemed to reach the classroom. This bill would exacerbate these pressures by creating unnecessary paperwork, compliance monitoring and truancy enforcement demands at the local school level — without providing new resources. It diverts precious time, money and energy away from the critical needs of public schools that already fail far too many children.

But perhaps even more troubling is the bill’s potential impact on Black families. Homeschooling has become the fastest-growing educational choice among Black parents nationwide, driven by the courageous desire to give their children a safer, more nurturing and academically enriching environment than what they’ve experienced in traditional schools. Black homeschool students nationally score as much as 42 percentile points higher than their public school counterparts, clearly demonstrating homeschooling’s effectiveness. Yet the bill places these successful families under suspicion, threatening legal action for missing a filing deadline or misunderstanding bureaucratic regulations. In a society already disproportionately surveilling and policing Black lives, this bill introduces another dangerous pathway to criminalize loving Black parents.

To read the rest, head to the Chicago Tribune.