U. S. Senate hopeful Sharron Angle’s journey to homeschooling is a familiar one. In 1981, her son “failed kindergarten,” she tells Robert Costa in his National Review Online article titled, “All about Sharron Angle: The Background of the Woman Who’s Taking on Harry Reid.”

“After he failed kindergarten, I put him back in for that second year and he was completely demoralized,” Angle explains. “What I had was a six-year-old dropout. I knew that I needed to do something different for this kid, to kind of put hm back on his wheels and get him started again. I decided to homeschool him.”

The trained teacher, glad to remove her son from an environment where he was called “flunker” and “too slow” by classmates, started an exempt Christian school to include other homeschoolers. While Nevada law appeared to allow homeschooling – no problem – some friends of Angle’s also decided to homeschool. “The local school district caused a fuss, saying the children were truant and that they must enroll or be placed in foster homes.”

“A judge said, ‘I know it’s the law that you can homeschool in Nevada, but the law should be that you can’t, unless you live more than 50 miles away from the nearest school…At that point, I realized that the government had interfered with my family. It was kind of like a mother bear and her cubs: Don’t get between me and my cubs, or you’ve got trouble.”

Angle got her first taste of dealing with the state legislature when she and 500 other homeschoolers visited Carson City, attempting to strengthen the homeschooling law. “The assembly’s education committee heard testimony from what Angle calls a ‘who’s who’ of homeschooling, including Dr. Raymond Moore.”

The bill died in the Senate, but due to continued pressure of “homeschool moms,” new regulations more favorable to homeschooling were adopted by the stated education board.

During the time Angle was raising two sons, in 1992 she won a Nye County school board seat, and became an elected assemblywoman in 1998, spending most of her time on the education committee, “gaining notice for tendency to vote ‘no’ on, well, most everything.” She served four terms before losing  a run for a U.S. House seat.’

Angle didn’t leave before submitting “various drafts of homeschool-freedom laws. Out of office, she paid a small fee to be a citizen lobbyist and helped shepherd one to passage.

“For her, it was a crowning career achievement, making it easier for parents to choose to homeschool while eliminating the requirement for homeschoolers to provide ‘equivalent instruction’ to that in the public schools. It also boosted the privacy rights of homeschooling parents.”

Fellow homeschool mama bears, the following is quoted word for word, just for you.

“I’ve seen government from many sides,” Angle says, smiling. “Legislator, school board, citizen in the initiative process. I have a multifaceted background in education. I’ve done public-school teaching, private school, homeschooling, and tutoring for juvenile justice. I’ve taught adults at community college.” So when she says that she wants to dump the entire Department of Education, she comes across as a warm grandma who’s fought the beast, knows it, and detests it, not as some anti-government demagogue.

“Look, the Department of Education is a policy machine that sends down one-size-fits-all rules that fit no one,” Angle says. “Education works best when you have all of the stakeholders involved and working toward the same commitment. That happens best at the local level. Anything bureaucratically, administratively, these layers and layers — that just diminishes the involvement of the stakeholder. They feel like their voice isn’t being heard because there is too much of a loud clamor from the top.”

As a fellow grandma bear I have to admit, this is the first time I’ve ever thought it might be cool to be living in the “dry heat” of Nevada.

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