North Dakota Homeschool Portfolio: What to Keep and How to Organize It

Most North Dakota homeschool parents start the school year with good intentions about keeping records — and end it with a pile of worksheets in a kitchen drawer and no idea whether any of it counts. That's the gap this post closes.

NDCC Chapter 15.1-23 does not require you to submit a portfolio to anyone. But it does require you to prove you've met the 175-day, 4-hours-per-day instruction requirement if you're ever asked — and if your child needs testing, a transcript, college applications, or a scholarship, organized records are what make all of that possible. A North Dakota homeschool portfolio is really just a deliberate documentation habit built around what the law actually demands.

What North Dakota Law Actually Requires You to Keep

The statute itself is leaner than most parents expect. Under NDCC 15.1-23, a home education parent must:

• Provide at least 175 days of instruction per school year
• Deliver at least 4 hours of instruction per day
• Cover the required subjects: reading, language arts, math, science, social studies, health, and physical education
• Include North Dakota Studies in grades 4 and 8 (geography, history, agriculture, and Native American history per SB 2304)
• File a Statement of Intent (SFN 16909) with your local superintendent at least 14 days before you begin, with a 5-day waiting period

The law does not specify a format for records. There's no state-mandated portfolio rubric, no required submission date, and no annual review. What it does require is that you can demonstrate compliance — meaning if your local superintendent ever questions whether your child received 175 days of instruction in the required subjects, you need something to show.

That's why a portfolio matters: not because it's legally required in form, but because it's your evidence.

The Core Documents Every ND Homeschool Portfolio Needs

Regardless of your parent tier (certified teacher, qualified, or monitored), keep these in your binder every year:

Attendance log. Date, hours of instruction, and subjects covered. A simple spreadsheet works fine. You need to hit 175 days × 4 hours = 700 instructional hours minimum per year. Track it as you go — reconstructing it from memory in May is miserable.

Subject coverage tracker. A running record showing that each required subject received regular instruction throughout the year. This doesn't need to be a daily lesson log. A monthly summary by subject is sufficient and takes about 10 minutes to update.

Work samples. These are the actual artifacts — completed math pages, writing assignments, science lab notes, book reports. ND law doesn't mandate a specific number. A reasonable standard is 4-6 samples per subject per semester, drawn across the year so they show progression. Label each with the date, subject, and grade level.

Filed Statement of Intent. Keep a copy of the SFN 16909 you submitted, along with the date filed and confirmation from the superintendent's office. This is the start of your legal paper trail each year.

If you're a monitored parent (no high school diploma or GED), you also need to document your supervising teacher's weekly 1-hour visits during the first two years. Keep a log of dates and the teacher's contact information.

How to Structure a Homeschool Portfolio Binder

The goal is a binder someone else could pick up and understand in five minutes. Divide it into these sections:

Section 1 — Annual overview. Your filed SOI, your curriculum plan or educational philosophy statement, and the grade level for each subject.

Section 2 — Attendance. Your 175-day log, organized by month. Total the hours at the bottom of each monthly page so you can see at a glance whether you're on track.

Section 3 — Subjects. One tab per subject. Behind each tab: your subject coverage tracker and the work samples for that subject. File samples chronologically within each tab, earliest at the back.

Section 4 — Assessments. Test scores (grades 4, 6, 8, and 10 for qualified and monitored parents), any standardized test prep materials, and for high schoolers, course descriptions and credit hour logs.

Section 5 — Special documentation. Monitored parent visit logs, any correspondence with the superintendent, dual enrollment paperwork, scholarship applications (SFN 60374 for the ND Academic/CTE Scholarship).

A 2-inch D-ring binder handles a full school year comfortably for elementary. High school portfolios — especially if you're building toward a notarized transcript for scholarship purposes — benefit from their own dedicated binder per year.

The North Dakota Portfolio & Assessment Templates include pre-built versions of all these tracking forms, structured specifically around the 175-day requirement and ND's subject mandates. It takes the blank-page problem out of getting started.

Elementary vs. High School: What Changes

Elementary portfolios (K–8) are primarily about demonstrating subject coverage and instruction time. The documentation is straightforward: attendance, subject logs, work samples. For grade 4 and grade 8 specifically, include evidence of North Dakota Studies instruction — a few samples from a geography unit, a report on a Native American community, notes from an agriculture lesson. These grades also trigger testing for qualified and monitored parents.

High school portfolios (grades 9–12) require a different layer: credit hours. North Dakota has specific graduation credit requirements for homeschoolers:

• 4 ELA credits
• 2 Math credits
• 2 Science credits
• 4 Social Studies credits
• 0.5 Health credits
• 1.5 PE credits

A credit in a core academic subject equals 120 instructional hours. Sciences and CTE courses require 150 hours per credit. Your portfolio needs to document hours per course, not just days of school. Keep a course-specific log that shows the date, topic covered, and time spent. At the end of the year, total the hours and record the course description — this becomes the source material for your transcript.

For the ND Academic/CTE Scholarship (up to $6,000), you'll need a notarized transcript using SFN 60374. That form requires course names, credit hours, and grades. Your high school portfolio documentation is exactly what makes filling it out possible — you either have the numbers or you don't.

Testing at grade 10 is also required for qualified and monitored parents. Keep your test scores in the portfolio with the date administered and the name of the ND state-certified teacher who administered the test.

End-of-Year Documentation: What to Do in May and June

End of year is when parents realize they've been meaning to file things properly since September. Here's how to close out a school year cleanly:

1. Tally your attendance log. Confirm you've hit 175 days and 700 total hours. If you're short, you have time to add instruction days before the school year ends.

2. Pull your final work samples. You want samples from later in the year showing where your child landed, not just where they started. Include one piece per subject from the final month.

3. Write course descriptions (high school). One paragraph per subject describing what was covered, what curriculum or materials you used, and what the final assessment looked like. Do this while the year is fresh.

4. Finalize credit hour logs (high school). Total hours per course. Round down to the nearest half-credit. Document any co-op, dual enrollment, or outside courses with their own hour logs.

5. File everything and start a new binder. Don't cram year two into year one's binder. Keep each school year as its own archive. If your child's records are ever needed years later — for a scholarship, a college application, a military enlistment — you want to be able to pull a specific year without digging through everything.

Keep records for at least six years, or until your child is 21, whichever is later. Some colleges and military branches request records going back to 9th grade regardless of when you apply.

The One Thing That Trips Up Qualified Parents at Testing Time

North Dakota tests in grades 4, 6, 8, and 10. The test must be administered by a ND state-certified teacher — not by you, not by a friend, and not by an online service that doesn't verify teacher credentials in North Dakota. This catches parents off guard when they've been using a national testing service that's legal in other states but not compliant here.

Find your testing teacher before December of a testing year. NDHSA and local homeschool co-ops keep lists of certified teachers willing to administer tests. Your portfolio should have the teacher's name and certification number on file so you can verify compliance if needed.

The test score itself — and whether it lands above 30th percentile — determines next steps. Above 30th percentile: you're done for that grade. Below 30th percentile (for any student, regardless of parent tier): the law requires a multidisciplinary evaluation. For monitored parents, below 50th percentile extends the monitoring period. Keep all of this in your portfolio's assessment section with the original score report.

Documentation doesn't have to be complicated, but it does have to be deliberate. The parents who struggle at testing time, transcript time, or scholarship time are usually the ones who thought they'd figure it out later. Building the portfolio as you go — one attendance entry, one work sample, one subject note at a time — takes about 15 minutes a week and eliminates the end-of-year scramble entirely.

The North Dakota Portfolio & Assessment Templates give you every tracking form pre-built for ND requirements — attendance logs calibrated for 175 days, subject coverage trackers for all required subjects, high school credit hour logs, and a notarized transcript template. If you'd rather start organized than retrofit the year, that's what it's for.

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