Homeschooling in Maryland with ADHD or Dyslexia: What Parents Need to Know

Two things bring parents of kids with ADHD or dyslexia to homeschooling faster than almost anything else: a school that refuses to provide appropriate services, and a school that does provide services but in an environment so dysregulating that the child cannot benefit from them. Maryland has plenty of both situations.

The practical questions are: What do you lose when you withdraw? What can you still access? And how do you document a home program for a child whose learning does not follow a straight line?

Maryland's Child Find Obligation and What It Means for Homeschoolers

The federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) requires every state to identify, locate, and evaluate children with disabilities who may need special education services. This is called Child Find. In Maryland, this obligation rests with local education agencies — your county school system.

When your child is enrolled in public school, Child Find operates proactively. The district is supposed to notice signs of a learning disability and initiate evaluation. Many parents of children with dyslexia or ADHD know exactly how well this works in practice — identification is frequently delayed, evaluations are resisted, and families often pay out of pocket for private evaluations to force the school's hand.

When you withdraw your child from public school to homeschool under COMAR 13A.10.01, the district's proactive Child Find obligation does not automatically extend to your home. The district is not required to monitor your homeschooled child for potential disabilities or initiate evaluations. However, you retain the right as a parent to submit a written evaluation request to your local school system, and Maryland districts are required to consider such requests and respond within a reasonable timeframe.

What the district is not required to do — and this is important — is provide the same level of special education services to a homeschooled child that it would provide to an enrolled student. Federal law permits districts to limit or decline direct services to parentally placed private school students, including homeschooled children. Whether a given Maryland county will conduct an evaluation and offer any services varies significantly by county.

ADHD: What Changes and What Does Not

ADHD is among the most common reasons Maryland families choose to homeschool. The structured, timed, group-instruction model of a public school classroom is genuinely difficult for many children with ADHD — not because they cannot learn, but because the environment creates constant friction.

When you homeschool:

• You control the schedule. You can front-load harder academic work in the morning when medication is effective and attention is highest, and shift to hands-on or movement-based learning in the afternoon.
• You control transitions. The five-minute warning before switching subjects does not have to be a bell.
• You control the pace. A child who hyper-focuses on a subject can go deep without being interrupted. A child who cannot hold focus on a specific topic can move on without the shame of falling behind peers.

What ADHD does not eliminate is the requirement to document instruction across Maryland's eight required subjects. This is where many parents run into trouble. Children with ADHD often learn in bursts, cover topics out of sequence, and produce work samples that look thin for certain subjects even when real learning occurred. The portfolio still needs to show evidence of regular instruction in all eight areas.

The practical solution is building a documentation habit that captures instruction as it happens — dated logs, photographs, brief notes — rather than trying to reconstruct it before a review. A well-structured activity log kept in real time is your protection when a county reviewer asks why there are fewer written work samples in a given subject.

Dyslexia: Documentation When Written Output Is the Hard Part

Dyslexia creates a specific documentation challenge in Maryland: the state's portfolio review standard is built around work samples, and dyslexia affects the very output — written work — that portfolios traditionally rely on.

COMAR 13A.10.01 requires evidence of instruction, not evidence of written production. Calvert County's portfolio review guidelines, for example, specify 3 to 5 artifacts per subject representing the beginning, middle, and end of the semester — but the guidelines do not specify that those artifacts must be handwritten or even written at all. Photographs of projects, audio recordings, printed transcripts of verbal responses, and teacher observation logs all constitute evidence of instruction.

For a child with dyslexia, this means your portfolio documentation strategy should rely less on written work samples and more on:

• Observation logs noting what the child read, discussed, or demonstrated
• Photographs of completed projects, experiments, or activities
• Printed outputs from dyslexia-specific programs (such as All About Reading, Barton, or Wilson Reading System), which often generate lesson progress reports
• Notes from tutors or educational therapists documenting sessions and progress

When a county reviewer sits down with your portfolio, they are evaluating whether instruction occurred — not whether your child performed at grade level or produced polished written work.

The Science of Dyslexia and Maryland Schools

In 2019, Maryland passed the Maryland Literacy Standards Act, sometimes called the "right to read" legislation, requiring schools to use structured literacy methods aligned with the science of reading for early grades. Subsequent legislation in 2022 expanded dyslexia screening requirements. In 2024, Maryland added requirements for evidence-based reading instruction more broadly.

Despite this legislation, implementation is uneven. Many Maryland parents of children with dyslexia report that their child sat in a general education classroom without adequate intervention for years before receiving either an evaluation or appropriate instruction. That experience — watching a child fall further behind while the district cycles through interventions that do not work — is the context in which homeschooling becomes not just an option but a relief.

If you are withdrawing a child specifically because of inadequate dyslexia services, you are making a reasonable, legally defensible choice. Maryland does not require you to justify your withdrawal to anyone. You submit a Home Instruction Notification at least 15 days before beginning home instruction, and you are done with that step.

Evaluations and Testing Accommodations After Withdrawal

The timing of any pending evaluations matters. If your child is mid-evaluation when you withdraw, the district's obligation to complete that evaluation is less clear, and some counties will stop the process. If you want the evaluation completed — particularly because the results would be useful for outside therapists or future accommodation requests — it may be worth either completing the evaluation before withdrawing or pursuing a private evaluation independently.

For standardized testing, College Board (SAT, AP) and ACT both have their own processes for accommodating students with disabilities. Homeschooled students are eligible to apply for accommodations, but the process requires documentation of the disability — typically an evaluation completed within three to five years. If your child's school evaluation is recent and thorough, retain it. If it is old or inadequate, a private evaluation is worth the cost if college testing accommodations matter to your family.

Maryland also allows homeschooled students to participate in dual enrollment at community colleges. Some Maryland community colleges — including Montgomery College and Howard Community College — have their own disability services offices. Students who pursue dual enrollment can register with those offices using their existing disability documentation.

Building the Portfolio for a Child Who Learns Differently

Maryland's semi-annual portfolio review does not distinguish between children with and without learning differences. The standard is the same: evidence of regular, thorough instruction in English, mathematics, science, social studies, art, music, health, and physical education.

For families homeschooling a neurodivergent child, the biggest risk in the portfolio is not failing to provide instruction — it is failing to document it in a format that a reviewer can evaluate quickly. A reviewer who sees a binder full of worksheets knows immediately what to assess. A reviewer who sees a disorganized collection of photos, printed program reports, and handwritten notes may spend the review asking clarifying questions.

The solution is structure. Even if the content of your instruction is entirely non-traditional — oral narrations, project-based work, outdoor learning, educational apps — the portfolio's organizational structure should be consistent and clearly mapped to all eight required subjects. Each section should have a dated log and at least a few supporting artifacts, even if those artifacts look different from what a traditional schoolroom would produce.

The Maryland Portfolio & Assessment Templates at /us/maryland/portfolio/ are built around COMAR's eight-subject structure with fillable logs designed for exactly this kind of documentation — including non-core subjects and non-traditional work samples. If your child's primary output is not written work, a well-organized activity log is your most important document in the portfolio.

The Bottom Line on Special Needs Homeschooling in Maryland

Maryland does not make homeschooling a child with ADHD, dyslexia, or related learning differences legally complex. The legal requirements are identical to those for any other home instruction family. What changes is the documentation strategy, because the evidence of instruction for a child who learns differently often looks different from the evidence of instruction for a neurotypical child.

The approximately 42,000 Maryland homeschooled students as of the 2024-2025 school year include a substantial number of children with learning differences. Many of their families withdrew precisely because the public school environment was not serving them. Maryland's regulatory framework, while demanding, does not require you to replicate the school model — only to document that regular, thorough instruction is occurring.

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