Colorado Homeschool Requirements: Your Notice of Intent Does Not Have to Go to Your Own District

Colorado is usually filed under moderate regulation, and on paper that is fair. There is an annual notice, a day count, an hour count, a subject list, and a testing requirement at five points across twelve years. But the statute is written with a particular attitude toward parents that shows up in the details, and three of those details are worth more to a Colorado family than the summary is. The notice does not have to go to the district you live in. The only academic standard in the law is a floor set at the thirteenth percentile, and there is a route that skips percentiles entirely. And a brand new 2026 law just changed what your district's part-time enrichment program is allowed to do this fall. Here is the whole picture, taken from the statutes and from the Colorado Department of Education.

The short version

• Compulsory attendance runs from age six to seventeen. C.R.S. 22-33-104(1)(a) covers "every child who has attained the age of six years on or before August 1 of each year and is under the age of seventeen years".
• There are three legal doors, not one. A nonpublic home-based educational program, enrollment in an independent or parochial school, or instruction at home by a Colorado licensed teacher. The third requires no notice and no testing.
• File written notice fourteen days before you start, and annually after that, with a school district in the state. Name, age, place of residence and number of attendance hours for each child.
• 172 days of instruction, averaging four instructional contact hours per day. Not 180, and the four hours is an average, not a daily minimum.
• Nine named subjects, including regular courses of instruction in the constitution of the United States.
• Evaluation at grades 3, 5, 7, 9 and 11 only. Either a nationally standardized achievement test or an evaluation by a qualified person. You pay for it either way.
• The only numeric standard in the law is the thirteenth percentile, and it applies only to the test route.
• No teaching license required. The statute exempts you from the Colorado Educator Licensing Act by name.
• You keep permanent records of attendance, test and evaluation results, and immunizations, and produce them on fourteen days' written notice.
• Your child may participate in public school activities under C.R.S. 22-32-116.5, and the school may not make them take a course to do it.

The sentence that opens the statute

Before any of the requirements, C.R.S. 22-33-104.5 opens with a legislative declaration, and it is short enough to memorize:

"The general assembly hereby declares that it is the primary right and obligation of the parent to choose the proper education and training for children under his care and supervision."

That is not decoration. Everything that follows in the section is written as a set of minimum guidelines around a right the legislature says you already had, which is why the parent qualification requirements you find in states like Washington do not exist here, and why the statute goes out of its way to say that a parent, or an adult relative a parent designates to provide the instruction, is not subject to the requirements of the Colorado Educator Licensing Act of 1991, nor to the provisions of article 61 relating to teacher employment.

The article nobody quotes: "a school district within the state"

Here is the notice requirement, in the statute's own words. A parent shall provide "written notification of the establishment of said program to a school district within the state fourteen days prior to the establishment of said program and each year thereafter if the program is maintained".

Read the article. It says a school district within the state. It does not say your school district, your district of residence, or the district whose boundary your house sits inside. HSLDA reads it the same way and tells Colorado families plainly that the notice may be filed with any district in the state.

Why that matters practically: the district that receives your notice is also the district that receives your evaluation results at grades 3, 5, 7, 9 and 11, and it is the entity that can request your records on fourteen days' notice. For a family whose withdrawal from the local school went badly, or who simply would rather not have a continuing paperwork relationship with the people they just left, the statute offers a legitimate alternative, and it offers it in ordinary words rather than a loophole.

Now the part that is new in 2026, and it cuts the other way. If you want your child in a publicly funded part-time enrichment program, the program is now required to hold a copy of your Notice of Intent, and the programs are being pulled back inside district boundaries. So the family who files far from home to avoid a difficult district may find that the same choice complicates enrollment in the local program their child actually attends. See the next section. Decide the notice question and the enrichment question together, not separately.

What filing elsewhere does not do: it does not exempt you from the days, the hours, the subjects, or the evaluations. It changes the mailing address on your paperwork, nothing more. And it does not create any obligation on the receiving district to serve your child.

What actually changed this year: SB26-023

This is the most current thing on this page and the least likely to be in any guide you read last spring. Colorado's 2026 School Finance Act, SB26-023, added new statutory language governing publicly funded part-time programs for homeschool students, effective for the 2026-27 school year. Per the Colorado Department of Education's own application and requirements page, the practical effects are these:

• Your Notice of Intent is now a condition of enrollment. The program must have a current copy of the NOI for each student, and may only enroll students who have filed one with a Colorado public school district and are not enrolled in an independent school to satisfy compulsory attendance.
• Geography is back. A provider generally may not run a part-time homeschool program outside its own geographic boundaries. Programs operating outside an authorizer's boundaries for 2026-27 had to be authorized by the local board where the programming happens, or by CDE, with an application deadline of August 14, 2026.
• No growth. Programs going through that authorization had to have operated in 2025-26 and cannot expand enrollment beyond the prior year's level.
• A spending line. A part-time public program cannot, directly or indirectly, fund, reimburse or subsidize a private activity or private purchase for a student or family.

If your family used an enrichment program, a one-day-a-week academy or an out-of-district homeschool program last year, that program's shape may have changed for this school year, and seats may be capped at last year's count. This is a question to ask the program in August, not in October.

The days, the hours, and the subjects

The statute requires "no less than one hundred seventy-two days of instruction, averaging four instructional contact hours per day." Two things there are worth pausing on. Colorado asks for 172 days rather than the 180 most states name, and the four hours is stated as an average across the year, which means a heavy Tuesday and a light Friday are not a violation. CDE's guidance also allows families starting mid-year to prorate the requirement.

The subject list, from the same section, is instruction in "communication skills of reading, writing, and speaking, mathematics, history, civics, literature, science, and regular courses of instruction in the constitution of the United States as provided in section 22-1-108".

That last item is a real requirement and it is the one families forget, because it is not a subject anyone assigns a curriculum shelf to. It is also not a burden. A unit on the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and how the three branches work satisfies a Colorado statute and takes a few weeks.

The evaluation, the thirteenth percentile, and the route around it

Colorado does not test annually. Under 22-33-104.5(3)(f), each child "shall be evaluated when such child reaches grades three, five, seven, nine, and eleven." Five times in a K-12 education. In every other year the state asks nothing.

Route one is a nationally standardized achievement test. You arrange it, you pay for it, and the results go to the school district that received your notification, or to an independent or parochial school in the state.

Route two is an evaluation of your child's academic progress by a qualified person. CDE describes the qualifying pool as a Colorado licensed teacher, a teacher at an independent school, a licensed psychologist, or a person holding a master's degree or higher in education.

Here is the difference that matters. The thirteenth percentile rule attaches to the test, not to the evaluation. Under subsection (5), a composite score above the thirteenth percentile means the child continues to be exempt from compulsory attendance. At or below it, the statute gives you a retest, including with an alternate version of the test, before anything else happens. An evaluation by a qualified person produces a written account of where your child is, not a percentile, and there is no percentile threshold written against it.

Understand what the thirteenth percentile actually is before you worry about it. It is a floor, and a deliberately low one. Colorado did not write a standard of average, or grade level, or proficiency. It wrote the bottom eighth of the distribution, with a retest attached. This is a state checking that nothing has gone badly wrong five times in twelve years, not a state grading your school.

Which route to pick is a real decision rather than a formality. A test is cheaper and simpler and gives you a number that transfers well. An evaluation costs more and gives you a professional's written read on your specific child, which is the more useful document if you already suspect something is not landing.

The records, and the fourteen days

You keep permanent records: attendance data, test and evaluation results, and immunization records. Nothing goes to CDE, which keeps no homeschool records at all. The relevant clause is that you must produce them on fourteen days' written notice.

Fourteen days is not much time to assemble two years of attendance from memory, and this is the quiet reason record keeping in Colorado is worth doing as you go rather than in a panic. The families who find this requirement painless are the ones whose attendance log was written the day it happened.

The other two doors

Enrollment in an independent or parochial school. C.R.S. 22-33-104(2) exempts a child "enrolled for a minimum of one hundred seventy-two days in an independent or parochial school which provides a basic academic education." Colorado has umbrella schools built for exactly this, and a family enrolled under one is complying through the school rather than through the homeschool statute. Note the interaction with SB26-023 above: a student enrolled in an independent school to satisfy compulsory attendance is not eligible for a publicly funded part-time homeschool program.

Instruction by a licensed teacher. The same subsection exempts a child who is "being instructed at home", and the first of the two ways it lists is by a "teacher licensed pursuant to article 60.5 or 61 of this title". This is the door for a family where a parent already holds a current Colorado teaching license, and it is the least burdensome path in the state: no notice of intent and no evaluation cycle, because the child is not in a nonpublic home-based educational program at all.

Sports, activities, and the fee cap

C.R.S. 22-32-116.5 is better than most states' equivalent and contains two specifics worth knowing before you call the athletic director.

First, a district or public school "shall not require a student who is participating in a nonpublic home-based educational program" to enroll in a course or complete course credits in order to participate, unless the activity is an extension of a course. Several states let districts attach a class requirement to a jersey. Colorado closed that.

Second, there is a cap on what you can be charged: the fee for a nonenrolled student may not exceed one hundred fifty percent of what the school charges an enrolled student. A premium is allowed. An arbitrary one is not.

College credit while you homeschool, and the one word that decides it

Colorado's free college-credit program is Concurrent Enrollment, and free is not marketing language. C.R.S. 22-35-103 (6)(a) defines concurrent enrollment as the simultaneous enrollment of a qualified student in a local education provider and in one or more postsecondary courses at an institution of higher education, and it ends the sentence with the words "at no tuition cost to the qualified student or the qualified student's parent or legal guardian." Then the same section of the same statute closes the door, quietly, nine definitions later.

"Qualified student" means a person who is less than twenty-one years of age and is enrolled in the ninth grade or a higher grade level in a local education provider.

And a local education provider, at subsection (13), "means a school district, a board of cooperative services, a district charter school, or an institute charter school." A nonpublic home-based educational program is none of those four, and Colorado's homeschool statute says so in its own definition. The program described at 22-33-104.5 (2)(a) is one that is not under "the supervision and control of a school district". So a family homeschooling under Colorado's own homeschool law is not a qualified student, and the state's free college credit does not reach them by that route. Nothing about the paperwork fixes this. It is not a form you failed to file.

The way in is the part-time door, and the department says so in writing

Colorado's answer is not a homeschool exception to the Concurrent Enrollment Programs Act. It is part-time enrollment, which turns your child into a student of a local education provider for the part of the day they are there. Section 22-33-104.5 (6)(a) is the hinge: it addresses a child who is participating in a home-based program "but also attending a public school for a portion of the school day," and lets that district count the child for school finance purposes.

The Colorado Department of Education answered the college half of this directly, in a question added to its part-time programs page on June 22, 2026. The question itself names the case, asking what applies when a part-time homeschool student "is enrolled in concurrent enrollment courses that are available to full-time students". The answer treats that as a normal thing to do and moves straight to the practical problem of geography:

When a part-time homeschool student is enrolled with the full-time students, no application to operate outside the geographic boundaries will be required if the student is participating in concurrent enrollment or CTE outside the geographic boundaries of the LEP

The sentence continues with one condition, in the department's words: that the arrangement be consistent with the opportunities provided to the full-time students in the full-time school. Read that as a floor rather than a ceiling. If the district's own students can drive to a community college campus for a course, your part-time enrolled child is not stopped by a boundary line.

What the department cannot tell you is whether your district does any of this, because Colorado does not require it to. The 2026 School Finance Act added C.R.S. 22-33-104.3, and its operative sentence is written in the permissive: a local education provider may offer one or more part-time programs for homeschool students if each program meets the standards in that section. CDE's own answer to families is the same shape, and it is worth reading as an instruction rather than as information: "You can contact your local school district or local charter schools to ask if they intend to offer any part-time programs for homeschool students in the 2026-27 school year."

Which means this is a spring phone call, not an August one, and everything in the SB26-023 section above applies to it: your Notice of Intent has to be current and on file with the program, a student meeting compulsory attendance through an independent or parochial school cannot enroll, and programs that operate outside their own boundaries are capped at last year's enrollment. A district that says yes in March may have no seat left in August.

ASCENT, the free fifth year, is closed by the same word twice

ASCENT is Colorado's fifth-year program: a student who has finished twelfth grade spends another year taking college courses that the state pays for. It is one of the best deals in American secondary education, and it is closed to a homeschooled student in two places rather than one. Section 22-35-108 (1)(a) says the program "is available to qualified students who are designated by their enrolling local education providers", and (1)(b) lets a designated student concurrently enroll "in the year directly following the year in which the qualified student was enrolled in the twelfth grade of the local education provider." So you need to be a qualified student, and you need to have been enrolled in twelfth grade at the provider that designates you.

There is also a cap that no summary mentions and that matters to anyone planning around it. Subsection (2)(c) says that for the 2025-26 state fiscal year and each year after, a local education provider "shall not designate a total number of ASCENT program participants that is greater than the total number of ASCENT program participants that it designated in the 2024-25 state fiscal year." The program is frozen at its 2024-25 size statewide. A district with a waiting list is not going to grow its way out of one.

The homework Colorado assigned itself in 2009 and has not turned in

This is the part of the Colorado story that no other guide carries, and we went looking for it only because the definition above seemed too tidy. The legislature saw this gap. It said so, in the statute, and then nothing happened.

On or before January 1, 2010, the department shall explore strategies by which the state may provide opportunities for children who are participating in a home-based educational program pursuant to section 22-33-104.5 to participate in a concurrent enrollment program.

That is 22-35-104 (11), still on the books, still unrepealed. The deadline passed more than sixteen years ago. The definition of qualified student has not changed. We are not calling that a scandal; departments get handed more directives than they get budget, and the strategy the department landed on may simply be the part-time door described above. But it is a real, dated, citable sentence, and it is the single most useful thing a Colorado homeschool parent can put in front of a school board member, a legislator, or a district that says the law does not allow it. The law told the department to find a way.

One more sentence from the same section, because it governs everything else here. Subsection (10)(b) says nothing in the article "shall be interpreted to require an institution of higher education to allow the concurrent enrollment of qualified students", or to require a college to enter into a cooperative agreement at all. Even the enrolled route depends on a college that chose to be in the program.

The one state credit program written with homeschoolers already in it

Colorado has a program that awards real college credit and that names home-based education in its own eligibility statute, and it treats your family better than it treats a public school family. The Colorado Student Leaders Institute, at C.R.S. 22-106-103, is a four-week residential summer program for students entering tenth or eleventh grade. Subsection (4) is the payoff: "The host institution shall award three hours of postsecondary academic credit to each student who successfully completes the institute."

A public school student has to be nominated by a superintendent, and a charter or private school student by a principal. Your child does not:

A student who is participating in a nonpublic home-based educational program, as described in section 22-33-104.5, may apply without having been nominated.

And here is the honest part, because the statute is not the whole picture. The program's own site is now run by a nonprofit, Friends of Colorado Student Leaders Institute, and it carries a message describing state budget cuts that ended the effort to keep the program funded, alongside work to reinstate it. It currently advertises an application window opening October 1, 2026 for a program the following summer. Its published eligibility page also reads differently from the statute: it says students from Colorado public schools or non-public schools, giving homeschool as one of its examples of the latter, "may be nominated." That is not the same as the statute's no-nomination-needed. We are printing both rather than picking one, because we cannot resolve it and the program can. Write to the program before you build a summer around it, and keep the answer.

What to actually do, in order

• Call the district you filed your Notice of Intent with, in February or March, and ask two separate questions: does it run a part-time program for homeschool students, and can a part-time enrolled student take concurrent enrollment courses. Those are two different answers from two different offices, and the second one is the one people forget to ask.
• Call the community college too. A college may admit a high-school-age student on its own terms, entirely outside the Concurrent Enrollment Programs Act, at ordinary tuition. That is a different transaction with a different price, and it does not require anyone's permission but the college's.
• Remember that the high school half of the credit is yours. You issue the transcript in Colorado, so whether a college course also counts toward your child's graduation requirements is a decision you make and write down, not one you ask for.
• Get the district's answer in writing and keep it with your records. A part-time seat that existed last year is not a seat this year, and 22-33-104.3 is one school year old.

The money question, answered honestly

Colorado has no state education savings account, voucher or tax credit for homeschooling. Families arriving from Arizona, Indiana or Alabama should know that up front, because a great deal of homeschool advice online is written from states that have one.

There is one development worth watching rather than acting on. Governor Polis sent the IRS an advance election in January 2026 for Colorado to participate in the new federal tax-credit scholarship, under which taxpayers who donate to approved scholarship granting organizations claim a federal credit of up to $1,700, with the credit taking effect January 1, 2027 and eligibility reported at up to 300 percent of area median income. As Chalkbeat Colorado has reported, the decision has been contested in the legislature and the U.S. Treasury is still writing the implementing rules, including the definition of a qualified expense. Whether any of it reaches a homeschooling family is a question the rules have not answered yet. There is nothing to apply for today. Watch it, and do not plan a budget around it.

The honest part

Colorado's requirements are light and the five-year evaluation cycle is lighter than it sounds. But look at the shape of the feedback that cycle gives you. A third grader is evaluated. Then nothing until fifth grade. Then nothing until seventh.

Two years is a long time to be wrong about a subject. The most common way a homeschool year goes sideways is not a parent who stopped caring. It is a fifth grade math gap that nobody noticed until seventh grade, because a family teaching four subjects to two children does not have time to run diagnostics on all of it, and because a child who is quietly guessing looks a lot like a child who is quietly working.

How an AI teacher fits into a state like this one

Start with what we are not, because Colorado's categories are specific. Kitchen Table School is not a school in Colorado or in any other state. We are not an independent or parochial school, we are not an approved online program, and signing up with us does not enroll your child anywhere or satisfy compulsory attendance by itself. We do not file your notice of intent, we are not a qualified person for the purposes of the grade 3, 5, 7, 9 and 11 evaluation, we do not administer or score any standardized test, and we do not issue a diploma, because in Colorado the parent does. In the statute's terms we are part of what you choose, and 22-33-104.5 says that choice is yours.

What we do is the two years in between. 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. Colorado families take the upload your own curriculum path: you choose the materials, including whatever you are using for the constitution requirement, and the teacher reads them and teaches from their actual pages, paced across your 172 days.

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 counts instructional contact hours and can ask for your records on fourteen days' notice, a log that fills itself in is worth more than a shoebox. Alongside it sit per skill evidence receipts and a portfolio that assembles itself, which is more than Colorado will ever ask to see and much closer to what a fifth grade evaluator, or a college admissions office, eventually wants.

The grade five evaluation is still yours to arrange. What changes is that you would walk into it already knowing roughly what it is going to say, because somebody has been paying attention since third grade.

Curious how this works day to day once the notice is filed? Here's the honest guide to teaching your own curriculum with us, written for every out-of-state family, Colorado included. If a learning difference is part of your picture, our guide to homeschooling a child with an IEP or a learning difference is the companion piece. Or see the requirements for every other state.