Report: I Went to the Massachusetts Homeschool Convention (and Interviewed a Fucking Creep)
I visited Massachusetts for the region's largest Homeschool convention. I felt sick the whole time, talked with the creeps who make these events possible, & interviewed an accused predator.
Now are you going to tell me why you’re really doing this interview?
It's Homeschool convention season. To kick it off this year, I decided to attend Massachusetts’ 2025 convention this past April. My trip was partly to see what Homeschooling looks like in its least popular state, but I mostly wanted to see someone from back home. Scheduled to speak at the 35th Annual MASSHope Convention was a former Homeschool leader from my home in Virginia. After allegations of grooming a minor in 2016, he disappeared from the movement he helped build. I’d never been to Massachusetts, so I figured “what the hell” and bought a plane ticket and convention pass.
As I wrote in an essay last week, the conference itself was a miserable time. I attended workshops by Homeschooling’s biggest creeps like the weekend’s keynote speaker, Heidi St. John (“Children have been given to you like arrows”). Mixing in with the attendees, I browsed the exhibit hall and vendor booths, where a woman from Turning Point USA told me about her friend arrested for harassing a transgender woman at a public restroom (“That’s a badge of honor. That’s what we need”). But I ended the convention by interviewing the former Home Educators Association of Virginia (HEAV) board member accused of grooming a minor, Rick Boyer.
Boyer was one of Homeschooling’s pioneers, but he virtually disappeared from the movement in 2016. In April that year, a woman posted on her website that as a minor, Boyer had made sexual advances in an attempt to groom her. He subsequently disappeared from the HEAV website a few months later, and the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) cut ties with him. Boyer then attempted to sue the woman in a series of lawsuits that lasted nearly eight years.
I ended up interviewing him right as the convention was nearing its close. After buttering him up for a few minutes about his glory days, I began to ask him why he stopped getting invitations to speak at Homeschool conventions. His body began to erupt in a series of what felt like micro-seizures as I pressed him to acknowledge any of his past. Even after realizing the nature of the interview, he never confirmed the allegations from 2016, ending in a tense standoff. As he made his exit, Boyer told me “No hard feelings” and offered to shake my hand. I found the gesture significant, as a few minutes prior he described attacks on Homeschool figures as the work of the Devil.
The Duggars are like I am. They’re sinners … I’m not surprised that when a failure appeared in their family that the media jumped on it. Because by and large, the secular media is an instrument of the devil. And ultimately, it’s a spiritual battle.”
Rick, incapable of self-reflection, is in practice a microcosm of the institution at large. HSLDA may have severed ties with Rick a decade ago, but that “line in the sand” wasn’t an impediment for their board member to share the top bill with him this weekend. This was also not his first convention back, as he headlined fellow Homeschool Alliance organizations North Dakota Homeschool Association (NDHSA) in 2024 as well as Oregon Christian Home Education Association Network (OCEANetwork) in 2023. He exists in a liminal world. Never formally removed, and never formally brought back in.
But my visit and interview have only led me to find more questions. In his first defamation suit that included Ryan Stollar and Homeschoolers Anonymous, he says that HSLDA rescinded their invite to their leadership conference after the April 2016 allegations. The Wayback Machine says otherwise; Boyer was removed from their speakers list between March 30, 2015 and July 2015. A full year before the allegations were published. Why that relationship was severed a year before Boyer claims is not an answer that will be given willingly.
As I concluded in my essay, the trip was notable for the way in which a dingy event held between a CVS and Yankee Liquor in a state ranked 50 out of 50 in homeschool enrollment is given legitimacy by a national network. The developed version of Homeschooling seen elsewhere in the U.S. is only able to come about through a local colony cultivating the soil for an institution to take root. An institution that exists to avoid confrontation with the reality of the world around it must in turn create fictions of itself. The manufactured realities only grow bolder as it avoids confrontation with its own nature.∎
I reached out for comment to MASSHope, NDHSA, OCEANetwork, ACHEL, and HSLDA. MASSHope returned only a read receipt. NDHSA, OCEANetwork, ACHEL, and HSLDA did not respond for comment.