(CNSNews.com) - The California Court of Appeals agreed to reconsider a Feb. 28 decision making most home-schooling a crime in the state.

At the center of the case is a Southern California couple, Phillip and Mary Long of Lynwood, who home-schooled their children through a program at the Sunland Christian School in Sylmar. The family came to the attention of Los Angeles County social workers when one of the children claimed the father was physically abusive.

The workers then learned that all eight children in the family were home-schooled, and an attorney representing the two youngest children asked the Juvenile Dependency Court to order that they be enrolled in public or private school to protect their well-being.

The court ruled that parents who educate their children at home could be criminally liable under California law, as parents "do not have a constitutional right to home-school their children."

According to the court's decision, "the home schooling the children were receiving was lousy, meager, and bad," and "keeping the children at home deprived them of situations where they could interact with people outside the family, there are people who could provide help if something is amiss in the children's lives, and they could develop emotionally in a broader world than the parents' 'cloistered' setting."

"Well, obviously we're very pleased that this decision is going top be revisited by the court, and it's one that is deeply entrenched in the rights of parents ... to control the education of their own children," said Gary McCaleb, senior counsel for the Alliance Defense Fund, who is representing the father of the home-schooled child.

McCaleb told Cybercast News Service , the case is not political.

"This whole thing spun out of one family's troubles," he said. "It wasn't part of a larger political trouble as such. This is strictly a state agency (Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services) action that started it all."

He noted that the court will likely hear the case in June.

The California Teachers Association did not respond to requests for comment for this article.

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