As school plans and the pandemic restrictions continue to evolve, more families are considering homeschool. If you are, there’s a few steps to follow to keep it legal.
While each and every home school experience is unique, they all have the same basic forms that need to be submitted to the Department of Education.
“Come the beginning of the school year, every child needs to be enrolled in a school somewhere,” said Kathryn Dillow, president and executive director of Nebraska Homeschool.
For some families, like the Lyons, that means homeschool.
“We can specialize the education to each child and also the thing that I love about it is because we’re active in the education, when the homeschool, quote unquote, stops and we go out on a drive or go to the zoo or wherever; because I know what we’re learning about, I can bring that back up in our normal everyday life,” said homeschool parent and teacher, Samuel Lyon. “I think that really promotes that love for learning because it gets it off of the page and into real life.”
Nebraska has the compulsory attendance law. According to Nebraska Homeschool, that means if a child is not enrolled in a public or private school, they need to be enrolled in homeschool, which falls under Exempt School Rule 13.
“In rule 13 there’s three essential parts,” said Dillow. “There’s what we call the Form A and that is the election or the choice of the parents that they’re going to home school their children and each parent does need to fill one out.”
The second document, Form B, designates a parent representative.
“[The Department Of Education] choose to designate one person in each of these homeschools that they can communicate with,” said Dillow. “A simple way of calling it is, this is your homeschool administrator, the person who is going to be the point of contact, fill out your paperwork, answer questions if there are any. “
Finally, there’s the information summary that details what each family’s home school experience will be.
“We name our homeschool,” said Dillow. “We specify our school calendar, when school is in session is open and when the year ends. We also designated who will be what we call the instructional monitors. So, basically who will be teaching. Then we also specify the curriculum we will use for each child at each grade level. So, if I have two children I will specify a curriculum for the five required subject areas which are: language, arts, social studies, science, mathematics and health.”
Homeschooling is not funded in any way by the state, but many families including the Lyons, said it is worth it.
“Just keep it simple, do what works for your family, for your child and just pass on that love for learning,” said homeschool parent and teacher, Nicole Lyon.