Happy August! I know that I will not be winning any popularity contests by reminding you that it’s time to start getting prepared for the upcoming academic year. I’m sorry. Just take a few minutes now to do this next piece of your administrative tasks, and you’ll have a whole month to enjoy with your families. It really won’t take that long to pull everything together, honest.

There are a few steps that are really critical to take care of right now so that you can begin to feel more comfortable with the process of educating your children at home. We’ve already reviewed several; the first was to be sure to alert your district to the fact that you are homeschooling by sending in your Letter Of Intent and revisiting the NYS DOE guidelines for homeschoolers, specifically the regulations. (If you live in another state, you can usually find where your regulations live by going through your state department of education.) New York’s can be found here: 100.10 Home Instruction | New York State Education Department (nysed.gov)  Next, I drafted a plan for you to follow as you went about creating your Intentional Home Instruction Plan and advised you to at least look over the Susan Wise Bauer series, The Well Trained Mind as a tool for getting started. Trust me on this resource. You don’t have to follow it but it is so helpful when you are getting started, I think you’ll be happy you did!

If you have completed these steps up to now, you are well on your way to having all of the administrative responsibilities for homeschooling in New York state under your control.

The next thing is to develop a reporting schedule that you will follow. Create it with your family’s needs in mind and put it on 52 different calendars with alerts so you never forget when they are due. Yep, the binging and bonging of the alerts are annoying but not as annoying as waking up in the middle of the night in a panic because you didn’t file your quarterlies and the district left a message on your machine or vmail yesterday…

Make copies for the binders that you have created to track all of the paperwork that you are about to accumulate for your children and send it off to your district offices. Each district has a different department that handles their homeschoolers; ours was the Office of Curriculum Development and had a seemingly rotating cast of characters, none of whom I ever met, but all of whom were lovely in print. If you aren’t sure where to send yours, just address it to the main administrative office and they will ensure that the proper person receives it. The nice thing about this process is that they are required to respond to you and then you will know who it is that you will be communicating with in the future. When I first started sending in these documents, I always sent them Return Receipt Requested so I would know that it had, in fact, been delivered. It alleviated some of the early anxiety I had as we defined our place as homeschoolers and our relationship with the district.

A word on the binder. This really is necessary. Get a giant, three ring binder with pockets in the front and back. You will use this to track all of the years that your children are homeschooled and, if you decide to keep them home all through high school, will serve as the paper historical record that you will submit to your district at the end when you want them to give your child an equivalency diploma. (This diploma is the same thing as a high school diploma from the district, it is not the same thing as a NYS Diploma which comes from the Department of Education. I will cover more on this in a future essay.) Buy or create a set of dividing pages with tabs that identify what is in each section. What goes into the sections is entirely up to you; dates for the quarterlies and a copy of every report sent, subject matter such as history, math, English or science, test scores or other year-end reporting materials, other resources like field trips, conferences or resources for materials that you use each year, whatever you want to have at hand.

This is not a difficult process so, I beg of you, do not over think it. Just pick some dates that fall in a quarterly schedule and stick to them to the best of your circumstances.

Here’s a sample:

Quarterly Report Schedule for STUDENT’S NAME

2022/2023 Academic Year

First Grade

We will be following a 12 month year and will provide the school with reports as follows:

October 30 2021

January 30 2022

April 30 2022

July 30 2022

Okay, I hear you and the answer is yes! We did follow a 12 month academic calendar. Did this mean that we were doing math worksheets in July at the beach?? Absolutely not. It meant that we were taking beach hikes and counting the numbers of critters in the tidal pools, going back to the house and identifying them and it was science. It also meant that we were taking side-trips to the local Farmer’s Museum on the way to visit relatives and it was history. We went to the ballet or a free classical music concert and it was music. We went to the Norman Rockwell museum on a sweltering day and the kids participated in an art project and it was, well, art. I’m sure you understand where I’m going with this and are beginning to understand that school, as we are currently doing it, is not where the real learning is happening. Education is *life*.

The reason for this extended academic year is that by following such an elongated schedule, we had much more time to accomplish the goals we set. We could have the children take their year-end tests or I could write up our narrative in July or even August. We could take month long cross-country camping trips in June and send in the quarterly reports for the experiences we had in July. The flexibility is one of the amazing benefits to home educating your children, and is really only limited by what your circumstances are and even then, with an open mind and heart you can usually find your way around whatever obstacles you think are holding you back. I strongly encourage you to take advantage of this aspect of the home education experience. It is incredibly rich and provides your family with memories that far exceed in quality those of whatever goes on in the classroom.

Now that you’ve sent in your Letter Of Intent, familiarized yourselves with the NYS regulations (or your state), have at least gotten started on your Intentional Home Instruction Plan (IHIP) and devised a workable academic schedule for your family in the form of a Quarterly Report schedule you are free to start scouting around for co-ops, conferences and other resources. Remember! The library is your very best friend during these years. The resources are nearly endless and they are FREE! You can even photocopy what you need if you want consumables right there at the library.

Enjoy the rest of your summer; the upcoming year will be full of adventure!

Heidi Liscomb |August 6, 2022