Disturbing Discovery: New evidence raises chilling questions about what the Siders family was really doing inside a 12-by-12 room for years
COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) — Following the removal of 16 children from the Siders family home in Hamden, Ohio, last week, one relative said he was under the impression that some, if not all, of the victims were homeschooled, but it is not clear that was the case.
By law, Vinton County Local Schools cannot offer specific educational records, but it has said it has no records of the Siders’ children attending school or receiving at-home education. Investigators have also said they’re not sure that the victims received any education of any sort, saying some of them can’t even speak.
State Sen. Shane Wilkin (R-Hillsboro), who represents Vinton County, said, “To say these kids were homeschooled is a stretch at best. I think to insinuate that these kids were being homeschooled in any manner is a totally false narrative.”
The question is an important one as lawmakers struggle to understand how 16 children could be hidden in squalid conditions for so long.
Teachers in traditional school settings are mandatory reporters: if a teacher noticed evidence that the Siders children were maltreated, they would have had to alert the authorities.
Likewise, Ohio once had many more verification requirements for homeschooling. Parents who wanted to homeschool their children had to notify school districts of what exactly they would be teaching them. They also had to prove to the district that they were qualified or properly educated to teach their children at home.
Those regulations and others were eliminated by the General Assembly in 2023. Sen. Catherine Ingram (D-Cincinnati) was the top Democrat on the Senate Education Committee at the time and fought against those changes.
“All you had to do was say, ‘Hey, I’m going to homeschool my kid,’ and the superintendent had to take it immediately,” Ingram said.
If the changes hadn’t been passed, said Ingram, “There would have been a lot of paperwork that would have been required to their home district.”
Sen. Louis Blessing III (R-Colerain Twp.) voted in favor of the homeschooling changes in 2023. Now, in the wake of what’s happened in Vinton County, he said those changes might need to be revisited.
“There’s got to be more oversight in this,” Blessing said. “If that means repealing part or all of some of those changes that were made in ‘23, I’m happy to say, ‘Yeah, we should do that.’”
Any reform effort would have to contend with the apparent lack of records regarding the Siders children. Ingram acknowledged there’s only so much state regulations can accomplish when homeschooling parents refuse to notify districts about what education they are providing, if at all.
“Who notified them that they were required to have those children registered for school, and if they weren’t registered for school, when did you notify the district that you were going to homeschool them?” Ingram said. “It’s not the school’s responsibility to go find kids, but it is somebody’s responsibility to know if there are children that exist.”
The Siders family also appears to have moved more than once, across counties and occasionally across state lines. That, too, can hamper the effectiveness of mandatory reporting, as Senate Minority Leader Nickie Antonio (D-Lakewood) saw firsthand when she was an educator.
“I reported some concerns that I had with the school that I was teaching in about a student,” Antonio said. “Inquiries were made and the family moved in the dead of night and we never saw them again, and we also never knew where they went.”
At this stage, the many intricacies and unknowns of the Siders case make it difficult to pinpoint what an effective legislative reform would look like, though Blessing insists the tragedy in Vinton County “is going to lead to a number of changes.”
“I don’t want to say necessarily the state’s really going to get into this with a heavy hand because there is some degree of local control here,” Blessing said. “I think we can have a happy medium on this.”
Reflecting on the arguments made in favor of homeschool deregulation in 2023, Ingram pushed back on the notion that parents always know what’s best for their kids.
“Therein lies part of the problem, too, for some of our kids,” Ingram said. “The parents don’t want people to know that their children are being abused or that they’re not getting a good education.”
“Some kids shouldn’t be homeschooled,” Ingram said. “Some parents should not be educating their children.”
