How to Homeschool in Louisiana: A Step-by-Step Process

Starting homeschool in Louisiana involves two distinct decisions that most parents conflate: choosing a legal pathway and withdrawing from the current school. Get the sequence wrong — or skip a step — and you risk truancy proceedings before your child has spent a single day learning at home.

Here is the complete process, in order.

Step 1: Choose Your Legal Pathway Before You Do Anything Else

Louisiana is unusual in offering two entirely separate legal frameworks for home education. You must actively choose one before withdrawing from school. Registering under the wrong pathway can cost your child access to state scholarships, public school sports, or the new LA GATOR Education Scholarship Account funds.

Pathway A: BESE-Approved Home Study Program (RS 17:236.1)

This is the formal, state-recognized route. You apply to the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) through the Louisiana Department of Education (LDOE) portal. You must file the initial application within 15 days of withdrawing from traditional school — and the only document required for the initial application is a certified copy of your child's birth certificate. No teaching credentials, no curriculum submission at this stage.

Every year after that, by October 1, you submit a renewal demonstrating your program meets a "sustained curriculum of quality at least equal to that offered by public schools." You satisfy this with one of three options: a curriculum packet (outline + a page or two of student work per core subject), qualifying standardized test scores, or a written statement from a Louisiana-certified teacher.

What you gain: full TOPS scholarship eligibility, legal right to participate in public school sports and extracurriculars under Act 715 (2024), and a diploma that carries the same legal weight as any state-issued public school diploma under RS 17:236.1(G).

Pathway B: Nonpublic School Not Seeking State Approval (RS 17:232)

Under this option, you register your home as a private school. You complete a basic annual online form with the LDOE — school name, address, your name, number of students — due within 30 days of starting your school session. No curriculum review, no portfolio, no oversight.

What you give up: TOPS eligibility (students are explicitly excluded), public school sports participation, and the automatic legal recognition of your diploma under state law. For families whose children are young and college is far off, this trade-off may be acceptable. For anyone approaching high school, it rarely is.

Make this decision before you send a single letter to your current school.

Step 2: Submit Your State Registration or Application

For the BESE pathway: Go to the LDOE online portal and submit the initial Home Study application. The system sends an automated email confirmation immediately. Save that email — it is your legal proof that your child is enrolled in a recognized education program and stops any truancy clock the moment it is received.

For the Nonpublic pathway: Complete the annual online registration form on the LDOE website. Same principle: save the confirmation.

Both registrations are free. There are no fees to homeschool in Louisiana under either pathway.

If you are pulling your child out mid-year, complete this step on the same day you notify the school, or ideally the day before. Louisiana law treats five unexcused absences in a semester as the trigger point for formal truancy referral. A gap between "child stopped attending" and "homeschool registered" is the window where families get into trouble.

Step 3: Send the Formal Withdrawal Letter to the Current School

Now that you have your registration confirmation in hand, send a formal written withdrawal notice to the school principal.

For students leaving public school, Louisiana law (RS 17:236) requires written notice within 10 days of transferring to a nonpublic setting. The notice must include your child's legal name, date of birth, gender, and race. Homeschool Louisiana (the state's primary advocacy organization) provides specific template letters — one for public school exits and one for private school exits.

Two critical points about this letter:

First, cite the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) — 20 U.S.C. § 1232g — in your letter. This legally prohibits the school from releasing your child's records or directory information without your written consent. Pre-empting this prevents schools from sharing information with third parties without your knowledge.

Second, send it via Certified Mail with Return Receipt Requested. This creates a dated legal record proving the school received notification, which neutralizes any subsequent truancy claims tied to the date your child stopped attending.

If you are withdrawing from a Catholic or parochial school, be aware that archdiocesan policy typically requires all financial obligations to be settled and all school property (devices, uniforms) returned before official records will be released. Budget time and money for this before you expect to receive transcripts or cumulative files.

If you are in the New Orleans charter system: charter operators are funded on per-pupil headcount dates (primarily October 1 and February 1), and administrators may pressure you to delay. Your right to withdraw under RS 17:236 is absolute and supersedes any charter's internal retention policies. Do not wait.

Step 4: Handle the Mandatory Subjects and 180-Day Requirement

Louisiana requires 180 days of instruction per year under both pathways. For grades 1 through 12, that works out to approximately 330 minutes of instruction per day, not counting lunch or recess.

For the BESE pathway, required subjects at the elementary and secondary level include:

• English language arts (reading, writing, grammar, literature)
• Mathematics
• Science
• Social studies (including Louisiana and US history)
• Health and physical education
• The arts (art or music)

The state does not mandate a specific curriculum or textbook. It does not maintain a list of approved programs. The standard is qualitative: your program must be "of quality at least equal to that offered by public schools." Classical education, unschooling, online academies, packaged curricula — all are legally permissible under this standard.

For the Nonpublic pathway, the requirement is simply to teach "subjects required by law," which courts and the LDOE interpret as the same general core academic content.

If you plan to submit a curriculum packet at renewal time, it helps to keep notes throughout the year on what your child is studying and save one to two pages of completed work per core subject. The state's review of these packets is not adversarial — the LDOE asks for evidence of engagement, not perfection.

If you prefer a clean, objective renewal process, have your child take a recognized standardized test (ACT, SAT, Iowa Test of Basic Skills, Stanford Achievement Test, California Achievement Test, or the Louisiana LEAP tests) and submit the scores instead. If scores meet or exceed grade level, renewal is essentially automatic.

Step 5: Set Up Your Recordkeeping System

If you are on the BESE pathway, your records are not optional — they are required by law. At a minimum, maintain:

• Attendance log showing 180 days of instruction per year
• List of subjects studied with the materials or curriculum used
• Sampling of student work per core subject (one to two pages per subject is sufficient for renewal)

For high school students, the stakes are considerably higher. Louisiana's TOPS scholarship — the state's primary merit-based college funding program — requires BESE-Approved status specifically during 11th and 12th grade. Since the passage of ACT 359, the documentation timeline has become stricter: the LDOE now requires formal records of 9th and 10th grade years before it will process 11th and 12th grade Home Study status for TOPS eligibility.

TOPS ACT score thresholds for Home Study students under current rules:

• TOPS Opportunity: 20 composite
• TOPS Performance: 23 composite
• TOPS Honors: 27 composite
• TOPS Excellence: 31 composite

When your student registers for the ACT, they must enter school code 969999 — the designated code for BESE-Approved Home Study students. This flags their scores to the Louisiana Office of Student Financial Assistance (LOSFA) as a recognized home study applicant. Missing this code can create processing problems with your scholarship application.

Documentation for TOPS must be manually submitted to LOSFA by January 15th following the one-year anniversary of high school graduation.

What Happens If the School Pushes Back

School administrators sometimes tell withdrawing parents they cannot leave mid-year, must attend an exit interview, or need to prove they have an approved curriculum before the withdrawal is processed. None of these demands are legally enforceable. The school cannot refuse a withdrawal request. The school cannot require a parent to produce evidence of future homeschool plans as a condition of releasing a student.

If an administrator threatens truancy or insists on an interview, your LDOE registration confirmation and a certified mail receipt of your withdrawal letter establish your legal standing completely. The submission of the state application and the formal withdrawal letter satisfy your full legal obligation under Louisiana law.

For families dealing with persistent administrative resistance, Homeschool Louisiana and the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) both provide legal support and have specific experience with Louisiana school districts.

The withdrawal process in Louisiana is manageable when you execute the steps in order. The common errors — choosing the wrong pathway, sending a withdrawal letter before registering with the state, or failing to notify within the 10-day window — are avoidable with preparation.

The Louisiana Legal Withdrawal Blueprint walks through every step with fill-in-the-blank letter templates, a TOPS timeline, the LDOE portal walkthrough, and scripts for handling pushback from administrators — everything organized as a single, sequenced reference document so you do not have to piece it together from multiple sources.

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