Homeschool Hop #7

By Request Theme For The Week: State Requirements

I feel pretty fortunate to live in a State where our requirements are pretty liberal as far as homeschooling goes. I have researched a couple other States when we thought we might be moving and was surprised to discover how restrictive other States are. I am so glad we did not move for this reason.

Washington State

State requirements to be able to homeschool:

1. At least one parent must have 45 college credits or have taken the homeschool college course. There are two other options: you can be supervised by a teacher in the education field who meets with you once a week or the school superintendent can deem you as being qualified to home instruct your children.

Our Responsibilities as a homeschool family:

1. File an intent to homeschool every year with our school district beginning upon when the child would enter the 2nd grade or by age 8. This has to be done every year by the beginning of the school year.

2. Have the child tested yearly from 2nd grade on. These tests can be obtained from a certified provider, we can administer the tests ourselves then have the provider grade them. We can also choose to do a group testing with other homeschoolers as well. Test results are part of your private homeschool record, no one else receives a copy

We do  have an option to the annual testing, we can have a teacher in the field check our progress and write a comprehensive letter as to our child’s progress.

Records we must keep:

1. Our homeschool records should include the student’s annual test scores or assessment report and immunization records with any other records we keep pertaining to the educational activities we are doing.  These are our private records and do not need to be shared with any state agency. However should we choose to enroll our child in a traditional school setting we might have to share them for grade placement.

Other:

We can request that our child be allowed to take certain classes or participate in extra curriculum activities offered by our school district, the schools by law can not discriminate against our request.

We can also ask the school to furnish our materials such as text books. The schools do not have to furnish us with the newest text books being used, but at this point they do have to furnish us with text books.

We can use any curriculum we desire to use or homeschool in any fashion we desire to. HOWEVER it is our responsibility to see that our child is learning. How this is determined in this state is beyond me, and I have yet to figure out how they know this information without seeing our test results (I suppose this is on the books to cover the school system).

That is pretty much our laws in a nutshell. We can utilize the head start program for graduation or write our own diploma and furnish the needed information for college enrolment.

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