“I’ve read posts and comments on social media which suggest WHPA has changed after some founding members retired and new people stepped into leadership roles, and I’m not sure what to think. I mean, WHPA is still around, and we still have our homeschooling law and freedoms, right? What’s different?”
As the old adage goes, “change is inevitable.”
Change is a part of life and not only a fact, but a necessity for all organizations – the world changes, environments change, technologies change, people leave or retire, and others step up to fill those positions in order to keep the organization going. It’s no different for WHPA.
It is important not to confuse mission and principles with the things we do to accomplish them.
We are eternally grateful to our founding members, who, in 1984, worked to get the reasonable homeschooling law in place that we all still enjoy over four decades after it was enacted. We are thankful for everyone who has served on the WHPA Board of Directors and as Regional Contact / Question Answering Committee members over the years.
We are also thankful for the sound principles and strong institutional memory instilled in WHPA from the beginning, which guides our Board of Directors; principles and an institutional memory which guide us today and going forward.
We regularly hear from founding and long time members, including former WHPA Board of Directors members, who give us encouragement and positive feedback for the work we do, including for the public-facing work we have done in recent years to protect our rights and freedoms.
While our homeschooling law has remained largely unchanged, the homeschooling landscape has changed. Homeschoolers have gone from being a relatively unknown minority of the overall student population to becoming a target market for educational businesses of many kinds.
Legislation has been introduced over the years, which WHPA, working through its membership, was able to get defeated. However, several pieces of legislation have been enacted since 2009 which affects the homeschoolers who partake in these taxpayer funded benefits, such as public school classes, sports, and extracurricular activities.
The educational landscape has changed, and WHPA has strengthened and clarified our positions to more clearly differentiate home-based private educational programs (the legal name for “homeschooling” in Wisconsin) from a quickly growing number of public and private school at home options.
Technology has changed, and WHPA has responded to those changes by embracing and implementing technologies which makes it easier for the Board of Directors to operate and to more effectively communicate to our membership, legislators, DPI, school districts, and other members of the public. WHPA has also responded to technological changes which affect homeschoolers to make sure our rights and freedoms are protected.
WHPA must be able to continue to meet present and future challenges in order to protect our law, our rights, and our freedoms.
WHPA does have different leadership in 2026 than it had in 2016, which is different from the leadership in 2015, which is different from the leadership at any point going back through the years to 1984. WHPA will continue to have different leadership moving forward, as we raise up new leaders who bring their individual strengths and talents to the WHPA Board, and other leaders move on to different chapters in their lives. Leadership positions in WHPA were never meant or intended to be lifetime commitments, and as with any other nonprofit organization, people step up and serve in order to keep the organization going.
The one thing that has not changed is our mission: Wisconsin Homeschooling Parents Association remains a state-wide, inclusive, non-partisan, nonprofit grassroots organization dedicated to protecting the right and freedom of parents to provide an education to their children according to their own principles and beliefs.
As always, our strength is in our membership, who, for over four decades, have been vigilant and diligent in defending and protecting not only their own homeschooling rights and freedoms, but homeschooling rights and freedoms for future homeschooling families. As WHPA stated in our August 1985 newsletter:
“W[H]PA is not the final answer to the challenges to home schooling [sic] that will inevitably arise. We inform our membership of these challenges, but members themselves must act.”
WHPA has responded to meet new landscapes, new challenges, and new technologies, but the core of WHPA remains, because beginning in 1984 our founding members put sound principles in place and instilled a strong institutional memory so WHPA as an organization can carry on into the future.