OUT-OF-STATE FAMILIES

Arkansas Homeschool Requirements: One Form, No Testing, and Three Doors Into the Public School That Almost Nobody Uses

Arkansas asks you for one page a year and never asks again. The part no guide covers is the other direction: three separate statutes give a homeschooled Arkansas child the right to sit in a public school class, try out for the team, and take college courses the district is forbidden to charge you for. This is what the acts actually say, including the questions the state deleted in 2017 that half the internet still tells you to answer.

Arkansas is one of the least demanding states in the country to homeschool in, and one of the most misdescribed, because the law was rewritten in 2015, 2017, 2021, 2023 and 2025 and a lot of published guidance is quoting a version that no longer exists. Everything below is taken from the enacted acts at the Arkansas General Assembly and from the Division of Elementary and Secondary Education's own current-year documents, with the act number next to each rule so you can check any of it in about four minutes.

The short version

The finding: the state stopped asking for your curriculum in 2017, and the old questions never died online

Search for Arkansas homeschool requirements and you will be told, on page after page, that your Notice of Intent must include "the basic core curriculum to be offered," "the proposed schedule of instruction" and "the qualifications of the parent-teacher," and that the first time you file it you must deliver it to the superintendent in person.

None of that has been Arkansas law since 2017.

Act 635 of 2017 rewrote § 6-15-503 and you can watch it happen in the act's own strike-and-underline text. The curriculum line, the schedule line and the parent-teacher qualifications line are lined out. So is "Parents or guardians shall deliver written notice in person to the superintendent of their local school district the first time such notice is given," replaced with a plain statement that a notice "may be given" electronically including by email, by mail, or in person.

What the notice "shall include" after that rewrite, and after Act 623 of 2021 repealed subdivision (F), is the following. These are the surviving clauses of § 6-15-503(a)(3), quoted one at a time from the act rather than run together, because the act's text interleaves them with the deletions:

The 2026-2027 form the state actually publishes matches that list and nothing more. It asks for the school district, county, start date, your name and address, and for each child a legal name, date of birth, gender, grade level and last school attended. There is no curriculum box on it.

Then there is the sentence that gives all of this teeth, also added by Act 635 and rarely quoted anywhere:

"The department and the student's local school district shall not create additional criteria or require additional information for a student to attend a home school beyond that provided in this section."

If a district office hands you a packet asking for a scope and sequence, a reading list, or a copy of your diploma, that sentence is the whole answer, and it is worth printing and keeping in the folder with your notice.

One requirement Act 623 of 2021 repealed that families still pay a notary for

The notice used to require a statement of plans to seek a driver's license during the school year, and if you checked it, the notice had to carry a notarized signature. Act 623 of 2021 repealed that subdivision outright, and the state's own form now says driver's license guidelines changed in 2020 and that "home school students no longer have to present a notarized copy of their current-year NOI to take the driver's test."

There is still exactly one reason to notarize, and it is worth knowing before you need it. Under § 6-18-201 as amended by Act 918 of 2025, a homeschooled student age sixteen or older who wants to take the GED test "shall provide a notarized copy of the notice of intent to home school provided to the superintendent of the local school district as required by § 6-15-503." That is why the state's form carries an optional notary block and explains it is there "in case a notarized copy of this form is needed by the parents or student(s) for another purpose, such as seeking the GED." If a GED is anywhere in your plan, get that year's notice notarized when you sign it, not two years later when the testing center asks.

The calendar: August 15, June 1, and the five school days

§ 6-15-503(a)(1) gives you two timing options, and Act 623 of 2021 rewrote the second one:

The statute says the superintendent or the local school district board of directors may waive the waiting period, and as of 2025 the online system has a checkbox for exactly that. The state's own instruction sheet puts it plainly: after August 15, "unless waived by the superintendent or local school district board, the public school may require a 5-day waiting period before releasing a student to be homeschooled."

Two dates that are not in the statute but govern in practice. The Division opens submissions for the coming year on June 1, through the online portal at noihs.ade.arkansas.gov or on paper at your district. And if you move to a different district during the school year, § 6-15-503(a)(2) gives you thirty calendar days from establishing residency to give written notice to the new superintendent.

Practical read: file in June, on the portal, and keep the confirmation. The August 15 deadline and the five day wait both stop mattering to a family that files early, and the one thing you will ever want to prove about that notice is its date.

Who is not eligible, and where each reason actually comes from

Arkansas is one of the few states that can make you ineligible to homeschool. The Division's June 2025 memo to superintendents lists four reasons a student may be ineligible: current disciplinary action for violating a written school policy, including excessive unexcused absences; an open FINS or truancy case; a registered sex offender residing in the home; and failure to return school property.

Two of those four are written into § 6-15-503 itself, and we could not locate the statutory home of the other two. We are telling you that plainly rather than picking a side, because it changes what you should do if you hit one.

The testing that ended in 2015, and the one place a test still decides something

Act 832 of 2015 struck the entire home school testing regime out of § 6-15-504. Gone with it: the norm-referenced test selected by the State Board, the education service cooperatives that administered it, the alternate testing procedures, and the provision that a student who refused to test "has not met the statutory prerequisites for home schooling" and was subject to Arkansas truancy law. None of that exists now.

Two pieces of § 6-15-504 survived, and both matter only on the way back in:

The exception, and it surprises people: if your child wants to play, a test comes back. § 6-15-509 requires a homeschooled student to demonstrate academic eligibility with a minimum score at the thirtieth percentile on the Stanford Achievement Test Series, Tenth Edition, or another nationally recognized norm-referenced test taken in the previous twelve months, or a minimum score on a test approved by the State Board. Arkansas does not require your child to be tested and does not pay for this one. Sports is the reason a lot of Arkansas homeschool families test anyway, and it is better to know that in August than in the week of tryouts.

A change on the 2026-2027 form worth asking about

An earlier version of the 2026-2027 Notice of Intent information sheet told families that "home school students may participate in the one-time, state-funded PSAT (10th grade only) or ACT (11th grade only) test," with AP exams available for a fee, and the form itself had checkboxes for each. The version revised in July 2026, which is the one linked from the Division's page today, replaces all of that with a single sentence: "Although standardized testing is no longer required for homeschooled students, parents and guardians may provide testing for their homeschooled students," pointing families to the College Board. The test checkboxes are gone except ATLAS, which is now marked for Educational Freedom Account participants only.

We are not going to tell you the free ACT is gone, because a form is not a statute and a checkbox can come back. We are telling you the state's own form stopped offering it inside the same school year, that a free eleventh grade ACT is worth real money, and that this is a one email question to the Home School Office before you build a testing plan around it.

What your district owes your family, in three separate statutes

This is the part of Arkansas law that is genuinely unusual and almost never assembled in one place. Three different acts give a homeschooled Arkansas student three different kinds of access to the public school, and none of them require you to enroll.

1. Academic courses: the district shall have a policy, and it has to grade the work

Act 430 of 2019 changed § 6-18-232 from "may adopt a policy" to "shall adopt a policy" allowing a student who attends a private school or a home school to enroll in an academic course at a public school or open-enrollment public charter school in the district where the student lives. The same act added the parts that make it usable:

So the honest shape is: this is a right with an escape hatch for the district, not an absolute entitlement. Ask for the written policy by name. Every district is supposed to have one.

2. Concurrent enrollment: the district cannot charge your child unless it charges its own

Act 429 of 2019 added one sentence to the same section, and it is the highest dollar value sentence in Arkansas homeschool law:

"If a student who attends a private school or a home school enrolls in an endorsed concurrent enrollment course as defined by § 6-16-1202(2), the student shall not be charged for the endorsed concurrent enrollment course unless the public school district also charges public school students or open-enrollment public charter school students for the endorsed concurrent enrollment course."

Most Arkansas districts do not charge their own students for endorsed concurrent enrollment. Where that is true, your homeschooled eleventh grader takes college credit at the high school at the same price the kid down the street pays, which is nothing.

3. The Arkansas Concurrent Challenge Scholarship, which names home schools

Separately from the district, the Division of Higher Education runs the Arkansas Concurrent Challenge Scholarship. § 6-85-402(4) defines an eligible "student" as a person in grade nine, ten, eleven or twelve enrolled at a public high school in Arkansas, a private high school in Arkansas, or "Home school, as defined in § 6-15-501." The award is $125 for each endorsed concurrent enrollment credit course or certificate program, up to two per semester, capped at $500 per academic year or the actual tuition and mandatory fees, whichever is less. Eligibility also requires a student success plan under § 6-15-2911(b).

A detail worth having, because two acts amended the same definition two days apart in 2025. Act 340 of 2025, the Arkansas ACCESS Act, was approved March 18 and carries the definition at grades ten through twelve. Act 353 of 2025 was approved March 20 and adds grade nine, along with up to $250,000 in total awards for ninth graders. Act 353 is the later of the two. If a campus tells you ninth grade is not eligible, that is the act to cite.

And the fourth door, which is sports

Act 630 of 2023 rewrote § 6-15-509 and the changes are all in the family's favor. Reading the act's strike-and-underline text:

What you owe in return is procedural and easy to miss: report to the resident district within the first eleven days of the fall or spring semester, notify the principal in writing before the signup, tryout or participation deadlines, and include the academic eligibility statement described above. After that your child meets the same criteria as everyone else, including tryout criteria, codes of conduct, practice times, required drug testing, permission slips and physical exams, and participation fees. Your child may be required at school "not more than one (1) period per school day," and may be transported by the district the way it transports other participants.

The reason the district says yes is in the act, and it is money. Act 630 lets the resident district enroll a participating homeschooled student in a nonacademic class period coinciding with the activity, so the district receives "an amount equal to one-sixth (1/6) of the state foundation funding amount" for that enrollment. Nobody at the front office will explain this to you. It is useful to know that saying yes to your child is not a favor that costs the school anything.

Private schools work the same way under § 6-15-510, and Act 728 of 2025 repealed the rule that a homeschooled student had to live within a certain radius of the private school to take part.

The money: $7,208 a year, and the window that closed in June

Arkansas has one of the largest homeschool-eligible school choice programs in the country, and the most useful thing we can tell you about it in September is a piece of bad news.

The Arkansas Children's Educational Freedom Account Program began as part of the 2023 LEARNS Act with narrow eligibility, and Act 920 of 2025 confirms that "beginning with the 2025-2026 school year" a student is eligible if a parent is an Arkansas resident and the student is eligible to enroll in an Arkansas public school. That is universal eligibility. The same act requires that at application, "an applicant shall indicate whether he or she will attend a private school or file a notice of intent to home school." Homeschooling families are squarely inside the program, which is why the Notice of Intent form now has a Social Security number field marked for EFA participants only.

The 2026-2027 amounts, from the Division's own families page: $7,208 for the year, disbursed $1,802 quarterly, for students who did not come from the old Succeed Scholarship, and $8,011 for the year, $2,002.75 quarterly, for former Succeed students. The Division states these are net of transaction fees "so families can spend 100% of this amount." Funds are spent through the ClassWallet portal, and past purchases can be reimbursed with a dated receipt showing vendor and line items, typically within fourteen business days.

Now the timing, and this is the part to write on the calendar. Act 920 requires the Division to open the initial application period "no sooner than February 1" and finish "no later than June 1" for an upcoming school year. For 2026-2027 the Division ran it from March 9 to June 1, 2026, and its own page says applications submitted after June 29, 2026 "may be considered for review at a later date, pending available funding," and that "submission does not guarantee review or processing." If you are reading this in the fall and just started homeschooling, the honest answer is that the money for this school year is almost certainly closed and the thing to do is put a reminder on your phone for the first week of February.

What the account buys, and the trade nobody mentions. Qualifying expenses under § 6-18-2505 include "instructional materials required for either in-person or virtual instruction provided by a participating service provider or participating school," "instructional or tutoring services," "curriculum," supplemental materials required by a course of study, fees for courses and examinations for college credit or career training, and technological devices used to meet the student's educational needs, which expressly exclude televisions, video game consoles, home theater or audio equipment and phones. The statute also says qualifying expenses "shall not mean optional expenses payable to a third party."

The trade is in subsection (h). A parent whose account is used for expenses "not associated with full-time enrollment in a participating school or a participating service provider" must agree "to provide an education for his or her participating student in at least the subjects of English language arts, mathematics, social studies, and science," and that signed agreement "shall satisfy the compulsory school attendance requirements of § 6-18-201." Read that next to plain Arkansas homeschool law, which imposes no subject requirement at all, and the shape is clear: taking the money adds a commitment the homeschool statute does not contain. For most families teaching four core subjects anyway that costs nothing. It is still a term of the deal, and you should know you agreed to it.

Whether a monthly online teacher is a qualifying EFA expense

We are not going to answer that, and you should be suspicious of any company that does.

Here are the doors, honestly. "Instructional or tutoring services" and "curriculum" are both named categories. So are instructional materials for virtual instruction. Here is the obstacle, just as honestly: the virtual instruction category is written as instruction "provided by a participating service provider or participating school," and the Division maintains a separate registration process for service providers. Kitchen Table School is not a registered EFA service provider in Arkansas, and we are telling you that rather than letting you find out at the ClassWallet screen. Whether a purchase like ours can be reimbursed under a different category is a question for the program, in writing, before you spend. Ask, keep the answer, and do not take ours for it. A confident answer from a company that profits from the answer is worth nothing.

Compulsory attendance, the GED, and the diploma

Two changes from Act 918 of 2025 are worth knowing if you have a teenager. A child "who has received a GED or a high school diploma or its equivalent as determined by the State Board of Education is not subject to the attendance requirement," and separately, for purposes of rating school districts, "a student who passes a GED test shall not be counted as a dropout when calculating a public school district's five-year graduation rate." The second one is not about you at all, and that is exactly why it helps: it removed a district's institutional reason to be unhelpful about a sixteen year old taking the test.

The mechanics, from the same act: a student age sixteen or above enrolled in a home school who wants to take the GED provides a notarized copy of the current Notice of Intent and must achieve at least the minimum official GED practice test scores. A sixteen or seventeen year old enrolling in an adult education program does the same, with a minimum composite of 490 on the GED practice test.

The diploma itself is yours. Arkansas does not issue or recognize a homeschool diploma, and a district will not award one to a returning student who has not attended its classes for the nine months immediately before graduation. That is less alarming than it sounds. Arkansas homeschool graduates are named by statute as eligible for the state's own scholarships: the residency rule for state-funded scholarships in the ACCESS Act counts a student who "will graduate or has graduated from an Arkansas public school, private school, or home school," the Academic Challenge Scholarship reaches a student who graduated "from a private high school, an out-of-state high school, or a home school high school" with a minimum ACT superscore of nineteen, and the Workforce Challenge Scholarship names "Home school under § 6-15-501 et seq." So the transcript your child needs is one you build, and a test score does the verifying. That is a twelve year documentation habit, not a senior year project.

How an AI teacher fits into a state like this one

Start with what we are not. Kitchen Table School is not a school in Arkansas. We are not a home school under § 6-15-501, we are not a private or parochial school, and enrolling with us does not create or satisfy anything. Your home school is yours. We do not file your Notice of Intent, we do not talk to your superintendent or your district's home school coordinator, we are not an EFA participating service provider, and we do not issue a diploma, because in Arkansas that comes from you.

What we do is the part every one of those statutes leaves entirely to you, which in Arkansas is all of it. Before anything else, the teacher sits down with your child for a free placement conversation that feels like a friendly chat rather than a test, and tells you where they actually are in each subject, not where the grade label says they should be. From there your child gets a patient teacher working one on one at their real level, kindergarten through twelfth grade. Arkansas families take the upload your own curriculum path: you choose the materials, and the teacher reads them and teaches from their actual pages.

And every session writes itself down. The date, the subject, the book and unit, how long it ran, what your child worked on, and what they got solid on. In a state that never asks, that record is not compliance, it is the thing you will want anyway: the raw material for a transcript nobody else is keeping, evidence when a district asks whether your ninth grader is ready for the academic course you want them in, and a starting point to measure growth against in a state that does not hand you one.

Arkansas gives you an unusual amount of freedom and then quietly leaves several doors unlocked that most families never try. Somebody still has to do the teaching in between. That is the job we are actually applying for.

This is general information for Arkansas families researching home education law, current as of publication on September 1, 2026, and it is not legal advice for your situation. Arkansas homeschool law has been amended in 2015, 2017, 2019, 2021, 2023 and 2025, and widely published summaries are frequently quoting superseded text, so verify dates on any source, including this one. Statutory quotations here come from the enacted acts at the Arkansas General Assembly: Act 832 of 2015, Act 635 of 2017, Act 429 and Act 430 of 2019, Act 623 of 2021, Act 630 of 2023, and Act 340, Act 353, Act 728, Act 918 and Act 920 of 2025. The codified text of the Arkansas Code is published for free public access by the Bureau of Legislative Research through arkleg.state.ar.us. Departmental material comes from the Division of Elementary and Secondary Education's Home Schools page, its 2026-2027 Notice of Intent revised July 2026, Commissioner's Memo COM-25-076, and the Educational Freedom Account information for families page. Confirm anything you are relying on with your local district and the Home School Office at 501-683-3162, and consult an attorney about your own circumstances.

Curious how this works day to day? Here's the honest guide to teaching your own curriculum with us, written for every out-of-state family, Arkansas included. Since Arkansas never asks for a record and your child's transcript is entirely yours to build, homeschool record keeping is the natural next read; it covers the habit itself, and the principle travels. If the reason you are here is a child who was struggling in a classroom, our guide to homeschooling with an IEP or a learning difference is worth reading before you withdraw. Or see the requirements for every other state.

See where your child stands first, free

Arkansas repealed testing in 2015, which means nobody is going to tell you where your child actually is. The free placement assessment does: it feels like a friendly chat, never a test, it takes about fifteen minutes, and it works the same in Arkansas as anywhere else. No card.

Start with the free assessment
← More posts