Florida Homeschool Requirements: One Notice, One Evaluation, and the $8,000 Fork in the Road

Florida's home education law is short, genuinely permissive, and has not changed much in years. What changed is everything around it. Since the state opened school choice to nearly every family, there are now two completely separate legal ways to educate a child at home in Florida, they are governed by different statutes, they ask different things of you, and only one of them is called home education. A parent who reads about the money and a parent who reads about the law are often reading about two different programs and do not realize it. Here is both, taken from the text of Florida Statute 1002.41 itself, the Florida Department of Education's own scholarship materials, and HSLDA's Florida guidance.

The short version

• Compulsory attendance runs from age 6 to 16. A child who turns 6 by February 1 is in. Under Florida Statute 1003.21, that upper end is 16, which is younger than most states.
• One notice of intent, filed with your district superintendent within 30 days of starting. Names, addresses, and birthdates of your students. You file it once. It is not an annual renewal.
• You keep a portfolio. A log of educational activities made as you go, plus samples of your child's work. Keep it two years.
• One annual educational evaluation, satisfied five different ways. You choose which.
• The superintendent may ask to see the portfolio, with 15 days written notice. This is the part that makes Florida different from Texas.
• No required subject list. No required hours. No required days. No parent credential. The home education statute names none of them.
• A notice of termination when you finish, within 30 days, with the final evaluation attached for a graduating student.

Step 1: the notice you file exactly once

Within 30 days of establishing your home education program, you send written notice to the superintendent of the district you live in. The statute asks for the full legal names, addresses, and birthdates of the students in the program. That is it.

Two things about that notice surprise people.

It is a notification, not an application. Nobody approves it. There is no waiting period, no review, and no discretion on the district's end.

You do not refile it every year. Florida families sometimes spend years re-sending a letter nobody asked for again. The obligation is one notice at the start and one notice of termination at the end.

The statute also contains a small protection worth knowing. The superintendent may not assign a grade level to a home education student, and may not put a Social Security number or other personal information about your child into a state or district database, unless the child later enrolls in a district program. Your child is not being tracked in a state system by filing.

Step 2: the portfolio, and what actually goes in it

This is the piece Florida families most often over build and under keep. The statute asks for two things:

• A log of educational activities, made contemporaneously with the instruction, listing the titles of any reading materials used. "Contemporaneously" is the operative word. It means written as you go, not reconstructed in May from memory.
• Samples of any writings, worksheets, workbooks, or creative materials your child produced.

You keep it for two years. You do not mail it anywhere.

But the superintendent may request to review it, and the statute gives you 15 days written notice before that review. That single sentence is the whole practical difference between Florida and a state like Texas. In Texas nobody can ask. In Florida somebody can, rarely, and when they do you have two weeks to produce two years of records you were supposed to be writing down all along.

Nobody is auditing compliant families at random. But fifteen days is not enough time to build a log you never kept, and that is the entire reason the word "contemporaneously" is in the law.

Step 3: the annual evaluation, five ways

Once a year your student is evaluated. Florida gives you five options and lets you pick, which makes this far less frightening than a state that mandates one test on one date:

1. A Florida certified teacher reviews the portfolio and interviews the student. This is the most common choice and usually the least stressful for an anxious kid.
2. A nationally normed standardized achievement test, administered by a certified teacher.
3. A state assessment, administered by a certified teacher.
4. An evaluation by a licensed psychologist, or a school psychologist holding the applicable Florida license.
5. Any other valid measurement tool, mutually agreed on by the superintendent and the parent.

The evaluation goes to the superintendent. If a student does not demonstrate adequate educational progress, the district notifies you in writing and you have one year to provide remedial instruction before the student is evaluated again. That is a runway, not a trapdoor, and it is worth knowing it exists so the word "evaluation" stops sounding like a verdict.

Step 4: closing the program

When the home education program ends, whether your child returns to school or graduates, you file a notice of termination with the superintendent within 30 days. For a student finishing high school at home, the final annual evaluation goes with it. That last piece of paper is the closest thing Florida produces to a completion record, so do not skip it in the excitement of being done.

The $8,000 fork in the road

Here is the part that reorganized homeschooling in this state, and the part most articles get subtly wrong.

Florida's Personalized Education Program, known as PEP, gives a scholarship to students who are not enrolled in a public or private school. The award averages roughly $8,000 per student for the 2026-27 year and is administered through scholarship funding organizations such as Step Up For Students and AAA Scholarship Foundation. It is real, it is large, and for a family buying curriculum, tutoring, therapies, and classes, it changes the math completely.

And here is the sentence almost nobody leads with: a PEP student is not a home education student under Florida law. They are two different legal statuses under two different statutes, and you are in one or the other, not both.

What that actually changes

So the trade is legible: PEP pays for the year and asks you to submit a learning plan and a test score. Home education pays nothing and asks for a portfolio nobody will probably ever read. Neither is the wrong answer. What is wrong is choosing without knowing there was a choice.

The part with a deadline on it

PEP is capped by law at 140,000 students for 2026-27, and demand has run past supply. Applications for the 2026-27 year closed on April 30, 2026, and Step Up For Students has reported being at capacity for new students for that year, with AAA Scholarship Foundation the remaining avenue for new applicants. If you are reading this partway through the school year and planning ahead, the thing to put on your calendar is next year's window, not this one, and to verify the current dates on the state's own scholarship pages rather than trusting any blog, this one included. Award amounts and windows are the details most likely to have moved by the time you read this.

What the public schools owe your family

Most Florida homeschool guides stop at the notice, the portfolio and the evaluation, which are the three things the state asks of you. They almost never cover the two things the state gives you, and both of them are worth real money. Neither one lives in the home education statute, which is exactly why they go unread.

Sports and activities: the Craig Dickinson Act

Florida Statute 1006.15, the Craig Dickinson Act, opens its definition of who may play with you, by name:

"Eligible student" means a home education student, charter school student, private school student, Florida Virtual School student, alternative school student, or traditional public school student who wishes to participate in an interscholastic or intrascholastic extracurricular activity.

Plenty of states have a sentence like that. Florida is unusual in what follows it, because four separate provisions close the four doors a district or an athletic association would otherwise use.

• You are not limited to the activities your own school lacks. Subsection (4)(e) lets an eligible student participate at a school other than the one they attend when "The school in which the student is enrolled does not offer the same interscholastic or intrascholastic extracurricular activity or the student is in a home education program." Those last nine words are the whole trick. For every other kind of student that is a hardship exception. For yours it is unconditional. The one limit is geography: the school has to be in the district where you live.
• A district cannot quietly make it harder for you. Subsection (5): "a district school board may not establish requirements for participation in interscholastic extracurricular activities which make participation in such activities less accessible to home education students than to other students."
• The athletic association cannot lock you out, and a school may not belong to one that tries. Governing organizations, the statute's term for the Florida High School Athletic Association and its equivalents, "Shall permit home education associations to join as member schools" and may not discriminate against any eligible student based on an educational choice of public, private or home education. Then subsection (7): "Public schools are prohibited from membership in any governing organization that discriminates against eligible students in public, private, or home education." In most states the association, not the school, is what closes this door. Florida made membership in a non-complying association unlawful for the school.
• You pay what the enrolled kids pay. This one is quietly worth hundreds of dollars. Subsection (9)(c) lets a school charge a student who is not enrolled there either the ordinary activity fee or "a reasonable fee based on the costs to the school, not to exceed $400 per activity." Subsection (9)(d) then carves you out of it: a home education student "may only be assessed the fee paid by students enrolled at the school to participate in the activity." If a school hands you a four hundred dollar invoice, that subsection is the answer, and every school has to publish its complete fee list, by activity, on its own website before the year begins.

What you owe in return is real and you should plan for it. Under subsection (4)(c), while your child is participating you have to demonstrate educational progress in all subjects taken at home, by a method you and the principal agree on. The statute lists the ways: a certified teacher of your choosing reviewing the work, grades earned through correspondence, grades earned in courses at a Florida College System institution, state university or district career center, standardized test scores above the 35th percentile, or any other method the home education statute allows. That is a check-in during the season, not just the once a year evaluation. Your child also holds the same 2.0 grade point average and the same conduct standards as everyone else on the roster, you provide the transportation, and a student may not play a sport at two different schools in the same school year. Insurance a district provides for participants has to cover your child too.

Dual credit: free tuition, free books, and no grade point average required

Florida's dual enrollment law is the most generous thing in this guide, and the reason is a scholarship program written specifically to pay for students like yours.

Statute 1007.271 gives home education students their own subsection, (13). You provide proof of your home education program, you sign a home education articulation agreement, and you are "responsible for his or her own transportation unless provided for in the articulation agreement." The obligation runs the other way too: each eligible public postsecondary institution "must enter into a home education articulation agreement with each home education student seeking enrollment in a dual enrollment course and the student's parent." A college does not get to decline the paperwork.

Two lines inside that agreement are worth reading twice.

The college cannot fence you into a smaller catalog. "Any course or program limitations may not exceed the limitations for other dually enrolled students."

And you cannot be shut out for having no transcript. "A high school grade point average may not be required for home education students who demonstrate achievement of college-level communication and computation skills." A placement test stands in for the report card you were never going to have. That is the single most common way a homeschooled sixteen year old gets turned away in other states, and Florida wrote it out of the law.

Then the money. Subsection (16): "Students who participate in dual enrollment programs are exempt from the payment of registration, tuition, and laboratory fees." Subsection (17): "Instructional materials assigned for use within dual enrollment courses shall be made available to dual enrollment students free of charge."

Books are where this used to fall apart for homeschoolers, because the statute makes the school district pay for materials for public high school students and you do not have a district buying anything for you. Florida closed that gap with a dedicated fund. The Dual Enrollment Scholarship Program opens by declaring that dual enrollment "should be available for all eligible secondary students without cost to the student," and it reimburses colleges for tuition and instructional materials costs in the fall and spring terms for exactly three categories of student, the second of which is "Home education program secondary students."

The honest limit is in the statute rather than in the fine print of a brochure: "Reimbursement for dual enrollment courses is contingent upon an appropriation in the General Appropriations Act each year," and if the statewide total runs past the appropriation, the reimbursements are prorated among the institutions. That is a risk carried by the colleges rather than a bill sent to you, but it is a reason to register early in a term rather than late. Developmental education and courses that focus on the physical execution of a skill, physical education among them, are excluded, and a course has to be one the Department of Education has approved for dual enrollment.

Part-time classes at the public school

This one is a permission rather than a right, and the difference matters. Statute 1002.44 says any public school in the state, charter schools included, "may enroll a student who meets the regular school attendance criteria" of section 1003.01(16)(b) through (f), a list that includes home education, "on a part-time basis, subject to space and availability." So a chemistry lab or a band period is a conversation with a principal who is allowed to say yes and allowed to say no. Ask early, before the master schedule is built, and ask in writing.

One asymmetry to settle before you take the PEP money

Go back to that eligible student definition at the top of this section and read the list again: home education, charter, private, Florida Virtual School, alternative, traditional public. Personalized education program students are not on it. That is not obviously a drafting oversight either, because the Legislature named PEP students explicitly in the dual enrollment statute and again in the scholarship program that pays for the books. In the athletics statute they are absent.

We are not going to tell you what that means. We are not your lawyer, and a confident answer from a company that profits from the answer is worth nothing. What we will tell you is that the fork earlier in this guide has a second prong almost nobody mentions: the statute that guarantees your child a tryout names home education students and does not name PEP students. If there is an athlete in your house, ask your scholarship funding organization and your district athletic director that exact question, in writing, before you switch routes, and keep the reply. It is a cheap email and it is far cheaper than finding out in August.

The honest part

Florida asks less than its neighbors and more than Texas, and it lands in a reasonable place. One notice, one portfolio, one evaluation you get to choose the shape of.

The honest gap is this. Four of the five evaluation options are satisfied by an adult forming a judgment once a year, in the spring, about a whole year that already happened. That is a compliance check. It is not the same thing as knowing, in October, that your son never got solid on fractions and that everything since has been built on sand. A yearly verdict tells you what happened. It does not tell you what to do next week.

Plenty of Florida families handle that well, informally, because they are sitting right there. But the parent lying awake wondering "is he behind, and would I know before the evaluation tells me" is asking a fair question, and one evaluation a year is not built to answer it.

How an AI teacher fits into a state like this one

Start with what we are not. Kitchen Table School is not a registered school in Florida or any other state. We do not file your notice of intent, we are not your evaluator, we are not a scholarship funding organization, and we do not administer state assessments. You are the parent on the paperwork, exactly as 1002.41 intends.

What we do is the part between the evaluations. 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, on the curriculum you choose. Florida families take the upload your own curriculum path: you pick the materials, the teacher reads them and teaches from their actual pages, paced across your school year.

And every session writes itself down, as it happens. The date, the subject, the book and unit, how long it ran, what your child worked on, and samples of the work itself. That is, almost word for word, the log of educational activities and the work samples Florida asks you to keep contemporaneously, plus the attendance register and the printable portfolio behind it. If a superintendent ever sends you a fifteen day letter, the answer to it already exists. If a certified teacher reviews the portfolio in the spring, they are reading a real record instead of a shoebox.

Whether you go home education or PEP, the record is the thing that makes the year defensible. Florida is one of the few states where you may actually be asked for it.

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, Florida included. Or see the requirements for every other state.