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 affect access to TOPS and public school sports; LA GATOR is incompatible with either registered homeschool pathway.

Pathway A: BESE-Approved Home Study Program (R.S. 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 after commencing home instruction — 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, renewal is due October 1 following the school year or within 12 months of initial approval, whichever is later. You satisfy the quality standard with one of three options: a curriculum packet with representative work samples, standardized-test results at or above grade level or showing one-year progression, or a written statement from a Louisiana-certified teacher.

What you gain: eligibility to apply for TOPS subject to score, coursework, documentation, and other requirements; Act 715 (2024) sports access at the public school in your residential attendance zone; and a diploma with the rights and privileges afforded to a diploma from a state-approved nonpublic school under R.S. 17:236.1(G).

Pathway B: Nonpublic School Not Seeking State Approval (R.S. 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, parish, school leader, and total number of students — due by the 30th day after your school session begins. No state curriculum review or portfolio submission.

What you give up: TOPS access while you remain in this pathway, Act 715 public-school sports access, and the specific statutory diploma rights and privileges provided by R.S. 17:236.1(G). A later switch remains subject to current LOSFA and BESE requirements, and time spent in Pathway 2 cannot be counted retroactively. 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 documents that the application was submitted, but it is not by itself proof of BESE approval or enrollment and does not guarantee that no truancy or FINS inquiry will occur.

For the Nonpublic pathway: Complete the annual online registration form on the LDOE website. Save the confirmation as a record of the filing.

Both state filings 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 a student leaving a public school for a private or nonpublic school, R.S. 17:221.3 places the written-notice duty on the receiving school: it must notify the prior public school within 10 days of enrollment and include the student's legal name, date of birth, gender, and race. That notice is separate from a parent's withdrawal letter, which should identify the student and the effective date. 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 when requesting privacy. FERPA generally requires consent for disclosure of education records and directory information, but its statutory exceptions still apply; a directory-information opt-out or consent request is not a blanket bar on disclosure.

Second, send it via Certified Mail with Return Receipt Requested. This creates a dated record showing when the school received notification, which helps document the transition but does not by itself resolve attendance questions.

If you are withdrawing from a Catholic or parochial school, be aware that private-school contracts and records policies can make release of official records subject to financial or property obligations, such as returning devices or uniforms. Request access to and copies of records while preserving any applicable FERPA inspection-and-review rights; where FERPA applies, inspection-and-review access is due within 45 days. 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. A public charter school cannot refuse a parent's withdrawal because of its internal retention policies or funding concerns. Do not wait.

Step 4: Handle Curriculum Areas and the 180-Day Requirement

Louisiana requires 180 days of instruction per year under both pathways. For the BESE Home Study pathway, the cited annual equivalent is 63,720 minutes.

For the BESE pathway, common subject areas to document 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 state does not require a curriculum packet, portfolio, or state curriculum review; maintain the applicable 180 days of instruction.

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. A qualifying result can satisfy the educational-progress renewal option.

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 Tech Early Start: 17 composite, subject to program requirements
• TOPS Opportunity: 20 composite
• TOPS Performance: 23 composite
• TOPS Honors: 27 composite
• TOPS Excellence: 31 composite

When your student registers for the ACT, they should enter school code 969999 — the designated code for BESE-Approved Home Study students. If the code is omitted or entered incorrectly, identify the student's home-study status on the FAFSA or TOPS application and submit documentation to the Louisiana Office of Student Financial Assistance (LOSFA) for verification.

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

Public-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. An exit interview is not listed as a prerequisite in LDOE withdrawal guidance, and a public school cannot refuse a parent's withdrawal or condition it on curriculum proof. Private-school contracts and records policies can create separate obligations.

If an administrator threatens truancy or insists on an interview, ask the school to state its reason in writing and preserve the correspondence. Your LDOE receipt and certified-mail record help document that an application was submitted and notice was sent, but they do not prove BESE approval or guarantee that no truancy or FINS inquiry will occur.

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 filing with the state, or failing to ensure that the receiving private or nonpublic school sends its required notice within the 10-day window when that rule applies — 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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