Hopefully it won’t take much time for a proposed bill by the West Virginia Association of School Administrators to find a sponsor. After all, state lawmakers have become acutely, sometimes tragically, aware in recent years of the cracks in our home- and micro-school monitoring through which some children can slip.

Tracking homeschool students and monitoring their academic growth is essential — both to ensure they are receiving the education they deserve and to also keep an eye on their safety.

“Regrettably, the level of reporting is an insufficient check and balance to ensure the safety and well-being of our homeschool students,” reads a letter from the WVASA to legislators.

If county superintendents are responsible for overseeing homeschool students, lawmakers surely will want to give them better tools for doing so.

“We have to have a way of contacting that family, and if a child does not turn in their assessment in those designated grade-level meetings, and they move, we would have no way to find out where they went,” said Ohio County Schools Superintendent Kim Miller, who is also president of the WVASA. “I know that (Ohio County Schools Attendance Director Amy) Minch has tracked down several people just to make sure that they’re safe when they have left West Virginia altogether.”

Required regular testing — as public school students already undergo — would help measure academic growth and give school officials a chance to have eyes on those students at least once a year. That’s important.

Surely lawmakers haven’t forgotten Kyneddi Miller so quickly. The 14-year-old Boone County homeschool student was found in a skeletal state and later died. Required documentation that would have tracked her homeschool progress was not filed with the board of education, and the public school district never took any action. At the time, some lawmakers said they understood the need to put more teeth in rules regarding homeschooling in West Virginia.

“I think that it would be helpful if we all were on the same playing field when it comes to the overall education of our kids in a way to keep our children safe,” Miller said, “especially as quickly as things are moving.”

She and the WVASA are right. At the very least, the academic growth and safety of our kids should be worth discussing in Charleston. Lawmakers should be jumping on the opportunity.