Diana E

Kolleen, I agree about the paperwork. That's why,
when we moved to the Cincinnati area, I chose the
Kentucky side. KY homeschool law is pretty much
hands-off but Ohio is invasive. There are a couple of
lawmakers who try repeatedly to introduce various new
compulsory education laws in KY, but I hope things
will remain as they are. We moved from Missouri last
year, where the law is similar to KY. There are
documentation and time requirements for homeschoolers,
but the homeschooler is not questioned unless the
individual child is reported as neglected in some
obvious way. I provide materials and activities in all
academic and non-academic areas and keep just about
every piece of paper my daughters have written or
doodled on. I keep lists of the books they read, the
films they watch, the websites they use, craft
projects, activities away from home. I've never
followed a schedule, but I do keep an outline of the
approximate hours she spends on each subject area. So
if we need it one day there is documentation.

If the state in which we reside does eventually
require paperwork I'd just bite the bullet, but the
trend I've seen over the eighteen years since my first
daughter was kindergarten age is toward easing of
restrictions. At that time homeschooling was illegal
in some states, in other states the parents were
required to be licensed teachers. Missouri was in the
process of making homeschooling legal the year my
first turned seven, so we were asked to report once to
the local superintendent just to show that we had a
plan and some form of textbooks. Previously, Family
Services and the local school district governed
homeschoolers and were actually putting people in jail
for keeping their kids out of school. The
superintendent was a manipulative and insulting jerk,
but with the old law off the books I knew he had no
power over me, so I listened for a few minutes and
then spread my books, workbooks, lists of books and
activities, etc., all over his desk, and enjoyed the
fact that he was at last speechless. I had material
from the conservation dept that was designed for
public schools, but he had never seen it and asked how
he could obtain it. The next year the new law went
into effect, requiring 1000 hrs per year, 600 of them
in academic areas and at home, the balance could be
non-academic and outside activities. Some kind of
plan or schedule had to be written each year, sample
work had to be kept, and this was to show a judge in
the case of a neglect report which was at that point
strongly discouraged. KY law is similar.

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