Georgia Homeschool Record-Keeping: What Documents You Must Keep and for How Long

Georgia is frequently described as a "low regulation" homeschool state. That description is accurate but incomplete in a way that misleads families into thinking record-keeping is optional. The state does not collect most of your records. It does not audit portfolios on a routine basis. What it does do is require you to maintain specific documents at home and be prepared to produce them when circumstances demand it.

Those circumstances happen more often than most families expect: a move to a new district, a student re-entering public school, a custody proceeding, an inquiry from the Division of Family and Children Services, a college admissions process, or a scholarship application to the Georgia Student Finance Commission. In every one of these situations, the absence of proper documentation creates problems. The presence of it resolves them.

Here is exactly what Georgia law requires you to keep.

The Declaration of Intent (DOI): Your Foundation Document

The DOI is the only document in Georgia homeschooling that gets submitted to an external authority — specifically, the Georgia Department of Education — rather than simply retained at home. It must be filed:

• Within 30 days of establishing a home study program
• Annually by September 1 each subsequent year

The GaDOE processes DOI submissions through an online portal. When you submit, the system generates a printable confirmation containing a unique 36-character digital signature. Print this confirmation immediately and keep it. This confirmation code is your official proof of legal homeschooling status in Georgia.

This code is what you produce when a school district questions your child's enrollment status, when your student applies for a Georgia learner's permit, when they need a work permit, or when they apply for the state's Dual Enrollment program. Without it, you have no documentary proof that your home study program exists in the state's records.

The DOI contains: the names and ages of all enrolled students, the physical address of the home study program, the local school system jurisdiction, and the dates of the 12-month period you're treating as your academic year. Verify all of this information is accurate before submitting. If you move, update accordingly.

Keep a copy of every year's DOI confirmation. These are not large files. There is no reason to discard them.

Annual Written Progress Assessment Reports: Three-Year Minimum Retention

O.C.G.A. § 20-2-690(c)(8) requires the parent-instructor to write an annual progress assessment report evaluating the student's academic progress in each of the five required subjects: reading, language arts, mathematics, social studies, and science.

The state does not collect these reports. There is no submission deadline. But the statute explicitly requires that these reports be retained by the parent for a minimum of three years.

Three years means the report from your student's third-grade year must still be accessible until at least the end of sixth grade. The report from seventh grade must be kept until at least tenth grade. If you're in the middle of a three-year retention window and you've already discarded a report, you have a compliance gap.

This is the record-keeping failure that catches Georgia families off-guard most often. Because the state never asks to see the reports, families treat them as unnecessary and either don't write them or discard them after the school year ends. Then something happens — a custody dispute, a school re-enrollment, a CPS inquiry — and the absence of documentation becomes a serious problem.

Write the reports on schedule. Retain them systematically. If you've lapsed, write the current year's report thoroughly and maintain it going forward.

Attendance Records: 180 Days at 4.5 Hours Per Day

Georgia law requires home study programs to operate for 180 days per 12-month period, with each school day consisting of at least 4.5 hours of instructional time. As of 2012, families no longer submit monthly attendance forms to the local superintendent. The requirement to operate for 180 days at 4.5 hours remains intact — the submission requirement was removed, not the underlying standard.

What you need to retain:

• An attendance log showing which days instruction occurred. A simple calendar, a planner marked with school days, or a digital spreadsheet all work. The log should clearly identify the dates counted as school days and should add up to at least 180.

• Documentation of the 4.5-hour daily standard. Georgia's law allows broad interpretation of "educational time." Field trips, laboratory experiments, museum visits, physical education, and project-based work all qualify. The challenge is translation: your log needs to reflect that these activities counted toward the daily instructional hours. A field trip entry noting "Georgia Aquarium — marine biology and ecosystems (science), 6 hours" is more defensible than a calendar entry that just says "field trip."

You are not required to submit attendance records to anyone under normal circumstances. But if a truancy concern is ever raised — by a school district that didn't receive your DOI confirmation, by law enforcement during a neighborhood sweep, or by a social worker responding to a complaint — your attendance log is what you produce.

There is no mandatory retention period stated in Georgia statute specifically for attendance logs. Retaining them for the same three-year period as progress reports is the conservative and practical approach.

Standardized Test Results: Retained Indefinitely

Georgia requires a nationally standardized test to be administered to home study students in consultation with a trained test administrator at least every three years, beginning at the end of third grade. The standard schedule is third, sixth, ninth, and twelfth grade.

The results of these tests are not submitted to the state or local school district. They are retained entirely in the home portfolio.

There is no statutory minimum retention period stated specifically for standardized test results, but the practical reality is that you should retain them permanently. Here's why:

• They are used as supporting documentation when a student applies for the HOPE or Zell Miller Scholarship
• They provide external validation of academic progress for college admissions offices reviewing your student's unaccredited transcript
• In high school, the SAT or ACT scores that determine scholarship eligibility must be from a single national test administration — having a record of prior testing years helps establish the testing trajectory

Acceptable tests include the Iowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS), Stanford Achievement Test (Stanford 10), California Achievement Test (CAT), and Personalized Assessment of Student Success (PASS). Georgia Milestones, which public school students take, does not satisfy the requirement — it is a criterion-referenced state assessment, not a nationally normed instrument.

Keep the original score reports in your portfolio. If the test was administered through an online proctoring service, save the digital score report to a location you control, not just to the service's platform.

Work Samples: Supporting but Advisable

Georgia law does not specify a work sample requirement the way some states do. You are not mandated to collect and retain a certain number of work artifacts per subject per year.

However, work samples serve a practical function that makes them worth keeping:

• They substantiate the claims made in your annual progress report ("the student demonstrated mastery of multi-digit multiplication" is more credible when accompanied by a graded math worksheet)
• They provide evidence of grade-level progression for school re-enrollment situations
• For high school students, they support the course descriptions required by selective college admissions processes and scholarship reviewers

A practical approach for elementary grades: keep three to five artifacts per subject per year, selected to show beginning-of-year, mid-year, and end-of-year work. This demonstrates longitudinal growth rather than just a snapshot.

For middle and high school: keep major tests, essays, lab reports, research projects, and any dual enrollment coursework. These become the building blocks of the course descriptions that accompany a high school transcript.

The DOI Confirmation Code: A Special Case

The 36-character confirmation code generated by the GaDOE portal when you submit your DOI deserves special treatment. This code is your official proof that you are a registered Georgia home study family. It is referenced specifically in GHEA guidance as the credential needed for driver's permit applications, work permits, and Dual Enrollment eligibility verification.

Save this code in at least two places:

1. Printed in your physical portfolio binder
2. Saved in a digital document stored outside any single subscription platform

Do not assume the GaDOE portal will always have your submission history accessible online. Print the confirmation page at the time of submission every year.

What Happens When Records Are Missing

The most common scenario where missing records become acute: a family homeschools for several years, the student reaches high school, and the parents realize they never systematically retained annual progress reports or attendance logs. Now they need to produce documentation for a dual enrollment application, a HOPE scholarship evaluation, or a selective university's admissions process.

Reconstruction is possible but imperfect. You can write current-year progress reports thoroughly and include them in the portfolio going forward. You can compile whatever curriculum records, curriculum provider emails, test score reports, and dated work samples still exist from prior years. But you cannot produce a three-year-old progress report that was never written.

The cleaner solution is to build the habit from the first year. A Georgia-compliant portfolio is not a massive undertaking if you maintain it consistently. It's a stressful undertaking if you try to assemble it retroactively.

Building a Portfolio System That Works

A complete Georgia home study portfolio for one academic year contains:

1. Printed DOI confirmation with the 36-character signature code
2. Attendance log showing 180 days at 4.5 hours per day
3. Annual written progress assessment report covering all five required subjects
4. Representative work samples (three to five per subject)
5. Standardized test score report, if the year falls in the triennial testing cycle
6. Literature/reading list for the year
7. Field trip and extracurricular log

This is not an overwhelming amount of documentation. It becomes overwhelming only when families defer it until they need it urgently.

The Georgia Portfolio & Assessment Templates at homeschoolstartguide.com/us/georgia/portfolio provide pre-structured templates for each of these components — aligned specifically with O.C.G.A. § 20-2-690(c)'s five subject areas, the 180-day attendance tracking requirement, and the standardized testing cycle. The templates are designed to be completed as you go, not assembled in a rush at the end of the year.

The Direct Answer on Retention

To summarize the retention requirements clearly:

Georgia gives you control of your records. That control is both a freedom and a responsibility. The families who treat it as a freedom alone eventually find themselves without documentation at the moment they need it most.

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