Mississippi: Homeschool Enrollment Change Prompts Verification Problems

Whenever a state homeschool law changes, HSLDA has to explain the law to local school districts. Even when the law change is extremely minimal. This last year in Mississippi, the state legislature changed the deadline for homeschool parents to file their certificate of enrollment from September 15 to August 15.

This change was made as a small provision of a bill to combat truancy, which was more concerned with public school students and charter school students than anything having to do with homeschooling. But that didn’t stop local school districts from misunderstanding the change.

As just one example, an HSLDA member family in northern Mississippi submitted their certificate of enrollment as usual. But when the family asked for verification of their submission, the attendance official said the family had to provide them with a reason for the verification other than just wanting to have it on file.

The family reached out to HSLDA. We immediately contacted the attendance official and pointed out that the law change did not require any particular reason before verification could be issued. The official checked with their supervisor and then let the family know they would send them a verification copy.

Confusing Guidelines

It appears that this difficulty is based on the “School Attendance Officer Procedures” that the Mississippi Department of Education adopted in response to the new law. The new procedures state that “Verification of compliance forms are to be submitted to homeschool parents upon request with appropriate justification.”

While it is very helpful to homeschool families that attendance officers are now supposed to issue verification forms (which has sometimes been a problem for families in the past), the phrase “with appropriate justification” is not found anywhere in the law.

HSLDA will be contacting the Mississippi Department of Education to contest their wording of “appropriate justification.” In the meantime, we are thankful that several Mississippi families we have advocated for have received their verification, so that if there are any questions raised about their students’ school status, they have a verification on file.