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Determining the Legal Requirements for Homeschool in Your Area

  • May 12, 2005
Looking to homeschool, but intimidated by the potential of legal oversight by government bureaucrats? This chapter explains to what extent, and in what ways, the government involves itself in homeschooling, including a rundown of the some states and their varying levels of regulation.
This chapter is from the book

This chapter is from the book

Absolute Beginner's Guide to Home SchoolingAbsolute Beginner's Guide to Home Schooling

Learn More Buy

This chapter is from the book

This chapter is from the book

Absolute Beginner's Guide to Home SchoolingAbsolute Beginner's Guide to Home Schooling

Learn More Buy

In this chapter

  • Understand why legal requirements are important to your homeschool

  • Determine the legal requirements for homeschool in your state

  • Find out what interaction will be required with local school officials, if any

  • Notify your state that you are homeschooling, if required

  • Document all the legal activity specifically related to your homeschool

  • Be aware of legislative and legal activity occurring that might have an impact on your homeschool

For sometimes better and oftentimes worse, government is involved in many of the activities we choose to undertake. Homeschooling is no exception to this statement. One of the first tasks you need to do after you have decided to homeschool your children is to find out to what extent your state and local governments are going to be involved in the operation of your homeschool. The level of involvement of these governments is determined by the regulations they have established regarding education, and more specifically, regulations related to the alternatives to public schools.

What Has Your State Government or Local School System Got to Do with Homeschool?

Although the general requirements regarding education are laid out at the federal level, public education is mostly the responsibility of state and local governments. Because of this, federal education regulations won't have any impact on your homeschool.

CAUTION

Public education policies are drastically different in different countries. Because I live in the United States, the information in this chapter is directed toward its education regulatory system. If you live in a different country, you will need to investigate the regulations and policies that your country enforces. This chapter will provide some general guidelines for you, but you will have to find specific information for your country and region.

However, any state or local government regulations that govern the area in which you live definitely do have an impact on your homeschool. Failure to comply with such regulations can result in less severe consequences to you, such as warnings or fines, to extremely severe consequences, such as you being unable to homeschool your kids or having child protection agencies investigate or interfere with your family. You should carefully consider and comply with regulations that govern your homeschool.

There are two areas of regulation that you need to consider: state and local guidelines.

Your state certainly has regulations that govern the operation of its public education system. It probably also has regulations that relate to "alternative" or "alternate" schools. These regulations are generally related to private schools, such as schools run by religious organizations. In most cases, these "alternate" regulations are the ones that govern homeschools. No matter which state you live in, you need to understand your state's education regulations that impact your homeschool. The good news is that it is relatively easy to determine your state's regulations. You'll learn how to do this in the next section.

NOTE

Strange as it seems, no amount of learning can cure stupidity, and formal education positively fortifies it.
—Stephen Vizinczey

NOTE

As homeschooling continues to explode in popularity, it will be interesting to see if states will start creating more regulations about homeschools. Hopefully not, because more regulation can only make homeschooling more difficult, but that remains to be seen.

Public schools are actually run by local governments at the city or county level. In some cases, these local governments also will have regulations about alternate schools, again with most of this regulation being directed toward private schools. In many cases, as long as you meet your state's regulations, you will also meet your local government's requirements. In reality, many of the specific regulations that are part of a state's education requirements are administered at the local school level. For example, some state governments require that the public school system have oversight over homeschoolers in their jurisdiction, such as submitting the results of standardized tests to the local school authorities. In the worst case, the local school overseers might attempt to dictate the curricula your homeschool uses, but that is very unlikely. In other cases, you might have to submit to some sort of supervision of your homeschool. Even in these more difficult circumstances, it is still possible to have a good homeschool experience. Dealing with your local school officials is explored in detail a bit later in this chapter.

Vouchers or Tax Credits for Homeschoolers

One area in which government could be a great help to homeschoolers is by the creation of vouchers or tax credits for homeschoolers. As a homeschooler, you are responsible for all the costs associated with educating your children. And, assuming you pay the taxes that support public education in your area, you also "pay" for public education services that you don't use.

Over the past several years, the concept of vouchers has been attempted in several areas. Basically, the idea of a voucher is that parents can choose to use the voucher to pay for a private education for their children instead of sending them to public school. The basic concept is to promote the improvement of public education by increasing the level of competition with private schools. (The idea is to provide vouchers to people who normally can't afford to both pay both taxes and to send their kids to private schools. These vouchers can be used to pay tuition—the schools to which the vouchers are submitted get reimbursed by the government.) Vouchers tend to be very controversial because they threaten the public education system's monopoly and all that that monopoly engenders.

Although vouchers aren't currently being contemplated for homeschoolers, they are still an important topic for us as well. That's because any effort to loosen the grip that government has over the mandatory direction of tax dollars to public education services that we don't use will eventually be beneficial to us as well. For example, it is conceivable that someday, should vouchers become an accepted tool, we might get vouchers for materials we use in our homeschools (we could transfer some of the tax dollars we spend on public education toward the costs of educating our kids at home).

A more realistic goal is to obtain tax credits for homeschooling. This idea has some precedent already in the childcare tax credit system that is currently in place. If you pay for childcare outside of your home, you can get tax credits for doing so. It doesn't seem unreasonable to me that those of us who take the responsibility of our children's education should somehow be able to recover some portion of our taxes that we pay to support public education. A tax credit system would enable us to do so. As a homeschooler, you need to be aware of such issues in your area and support those that would benefit you.

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