Mississippi Homeschool Requirements: One Page by September 15, and a Sentence at the End of the Statute That Explains Why

Mississippi has no homeschool statute. It has a compulsory attendance statute, Miss. Code § 37-13-91, and homeschooling lives inside it as one of three exceptions. Everything a Mississippi family owes the state comes from that one section and from the State Board of Education rule written under it. Both are short enough to read in twenty minutes, and this guide quotes the parts that matter, including the paragraph at the end that most published guides skip entirely.

The short version

• One certificate of enrollment a year, due to the school attendance officer where the child resides on or before September 15.
• It goes to the state, not the school district. The Office of Compulsory School Attendance Enforcement is the only entity authorized to hand out and collect it, and district personnel are forbidden to fill one out.
• The form may ask for six things and nothing else: the child's name, address, phone and date of birth; the parent's name, address and phone; a simple description of the type of education the child is receiving; and the parent's signature. The state's own form asks for those and a checkbox for the type of program. Sign it in blue ink.
• No testing. No required subjects. No required number of days. No records to keep. No qualification requirement for the parent. None of those exist in Mississippi law.
• Compulsory school age is six to seventeen, measured on September 1, with one trap at each end that this guide covers.
• Miss the deadline and you get written notice and ten days to fix it before you are in violation.
• Public school sports are closed to homeschoolers, both by the absence of a statute and by the athletic association's own handbook, and the bills to change that died again in 2026.
• Dual credit is open, but through the community college's admissions office rather than through the school district.
• Mississippi's one education account program excludes home instruction by name, twice, in the statute.

The paragraph that explains everything else

Most guides describe Mississippi as an easy state and move on. That is true and it is not useful, because it leaves you thinking the freedom is a habit that could change on a Tuesday. It is not a habit. Subsection (9) of § 37-13-91, the last paragraph of the compulsory attendance law, says this:

"Notwithstanding any provision or implication herein to the contrary, it is not the intention of this section to impair the primary right and the obligation of the parent or parents, or person or persons in loco parentis to a child, to choose the proper education and training for such child, and nothing in this section shall ever be construed to grant, by implication or otherwise, to the State of Mississippi, any of its officers, agencies or subdivisions any right or authority to control, manage, supervise or make any suggestion as to the control, management or supervision of any private or parochial school or institution for the education or training of children, of any kind whatsoever that is not a public school according to the laws of this state; and this section shall never be construed so as to grant, by implication or otherwise, any right or authority to any state agency or other entity to control, manage, supervise, provide for or affect the operation, management, program, curriculum, admissions policy or discipline of any such school or home instruction program."

Read the verbs: control, manage, supervise, provide for, affect. Read the nouns: operation, management, program, curriculum, admissions policy, discipline. And read who it binds: the State of Mississippi, any of its officers, agencies or subdivisions, any state agency or other entity.

That is why the certificate of enrollment asks so little. It is not a small form because somebody was being nice. It is a small form because the statute that authorizes it also says the state may not use it to reach into your program.

Two practical consequences worth carrying:

• If a district employee asks to see your curriculum, your lesson plans, your child's work, or your credentials, they are asking for something the law does not give them. You can be polite about it. You do not have to comply, and this paragraph is the reason.
• It also tells you what a future change would have to look like. Any real expansion of Mississippi homeschool regulation has to get past subsection (9) or amend it. That makes the legislature, not the department, the place to watch. There is a section below on exactly what the legislature tried in 2026.

The certificate of enrollment: what it asks, who takes it, and when

§ 37-13-91(3) lists the three circumstances that excuse a compulsory-school-age child from public or nonpublic school attendance, and the third is "when a compulsory-school-age child is being educated in a legitimate home instruction program." A parent in that situation "shall complete a certificate of enrollment in order to facilitate the administration of this section."

The statute then does something unusual: it says the form "shall be designed to obtain the following information only," and lists four items. The State Board's rule, 7 Miss. Admin. Code Pt. 3, R. 30.7, repeats them:

1. the name, address, telephone number and date of birth of the child;
2. the name, address and telephone number of the parent, guardian or custodian;
3. "a simple description of the type of education the compulsory-school-age child is receiving," and, if the child is in a nonpublic school, that school's name and address; and
4. the signature of the parent, guardian or custodian, and the date.

The actual form is one page. The Office of Compulsory School Attendance Enforcement's Certificate of Enrollment, last revised July 2020, asks for the school year, the county, the student's name and date of birth, a 911 address and phone, the parent's name, mailing address and email, a checkbox for the type of education program, one blank line for the "simple description of educational program for home instruction," and a signature. Under the signature line it says, in its own words, Blue Ink Signature.

The program checkboxes are worth noticing, because the state's own form already contemplates what a lot of families are actually doing: Home Instruction, Home Instruction - Online Program, Private School, and Private School - Online Program.

Who takes it, and why that surprises people

The certificate goes "to the school attendance officer where the child resides." A Mississippi school attendance officer is not a district employee. § 37-13-91(2)(g) defines the term as "a person employed by the State Department of Education pursuant to Section 37-13-89." The State Board rule is blunter about the boundary than any guide we have read:

"The Office of Compulsory School Attendance Enforcement shall be the only authorized entity to disseminate and collect the certificates of enrollment. Certificates of Enrollment will not be provided to school district personnel for distribution... District personnel cannot at any time complete a certificate of enrollment. The certificate of enrollment must be completed by the parent, guardian or custodian of the compulsory-school-age child enrolling in a home school program."

The rule also puts a duty on the district: "School district personnel must notify the Office of Compulsory School Attendance Enforcement (state school attendance officer) if a parent, guardian or custodian is seeking to enroll a compulsory-school-age child in home school." So the district's role is to point you at the state, not to process you.

Practically: call the Office of Compulsory School Attendance Enforcement at 601-359-3178, get your county's attendance officer, and send the form there. If your principal's office hands you a district homeschool packet with extra questions on it, that packet is not the certificate, and subsection (9) is the reason you do not have to answer it.

September 15, and what happens if you miss it

The certificate "shall be returned to the school attendance officer where the child resides on or before September 15 of each year." Then the sentence families need:

"Any parent, guardian or custodian found by the school attendance officer to be in noncompliance with this section shall comply, after written notice of the noncompliance by the school attendance officer, with this subsection within ten (10) days after the notice or be in violation of this section."

You get written notice and ten days. Missing September 15 by itself is not a violation, it is a letter. That is worth knowing before somebody panics you about it.

There is also a mid-year path written into the statute. If a child was enrolled in public school within fifteen calendar days after the first day of the school year as required by subsection (6), "the parent or custodian may, at a later date, enroll the child in a legitimate nonpublic school or legitimate home instruction program and send the certificate of enrollment to the school attendance officer and be in compliance." You may start homeschooling in October. The certificate follows.

What Mississippi does not require, listed on purpose

Every one of these is an absence in the statute rather than a permission granted by it, which is why nobody at a school office will confirm them for you:

• No standardized testing, ever. There is no assessment provision for home instruction anywhere in § 37-13-91.
• No required subjects. The statute never says what a home instruction program teaches.
• No parent qualification. No diploma, no credential, no approval.
• No records to keep or submit. Nothing is collected after the certificate.
• No 180 day requirement, and this one gets stated wrong constantly. § 37-13-91(2)(e) defines "school" as a public school in session at least 180 school days "except that the 'nonpublic' school term shall be the number of days that each school shall require for promotion from grade to grade." A home instruction program is a nonpublic school under subsection (2)(i), which defines the term to "include, but not be limited to, private, church, parochial and home instruction programs." So your school year is however long your school decides a grade takes.
• The unlawful absence machinery does not reach you. After defining unlawful absence and listing eleven valid excuses, the statute says flatly: "This subsection shall not apply to children enrolled in a nonpublic school."

The one thing the statute does insist on is good faith. A "legitimate" nonpublic school or home instruction program is defined, twice, as one "not operated or instituted for the purpose of avoiding or circumventing the compulsory attendance law." Mississippi asks you for one page and one word, and the word is legitimate.

Ages six to seventeen, and a trap at each end

A "compulsory-school-age child" is one "who has attained or will attain the age of six (6) years on or before September 1 of the calendar year and who has not attained the age of seventeen (17) years on or before September 1 of the calendar year." That is one of the shortest compulsory windows in the country: a child who turns seventeen on or before September 1 is outside it entirely.

The trap at the young end is in the same definition. The compulsory age group "shall include any child who has attained or will attain the age of five (5) years on or before September 1 and has enrolled in a full-day public school kindergarten program." Kindergarten is not compulsory in Mississippi. Enrolling your five year old in it is what makes them compulsory-school-age a year early. If you are undecided about kindergarten, that sentence is the decision.

The trap at the old end is in the State Board rule, and it is the sort of thing a family finds out at the worst moment. The rule says a certificate of enrollment for a student beyond compulsory school attendance age "will only be accepted if a student is or has been previously enrolled in a home instruction program," and that certificates "will not be accepted for individuals registering to enroll in a home instruction program, for the first time, that have exceeded the compulsory school age," nor will such a student be considered a "transfer to home school."

In plain terms: if you pull a seventeen year old out of public school in Mississippi to homeschool for a senior year, there is no certificate for the state to accept, because they are past compulsory age. That does not make it illegal, since nothing compels their attendance any more. It does mean there will be no state paper trail of that year, which matters for a diploma conversation later. If that is your situation, get the plan for the transcript settled before you withdraw, not after.

What can actually go wrong, said soberly

Mississippi's enforcement provisions are real, and they are aimed at truancy rather than at homeschoolers, but a family should know the shape of them.

Under subsection (5), a parent "who refuses or willfully fails to perform any of the duties imposed upon him or her under this section or who intentionally falsifies any information required to be contained in a certificate of enrollment, shall be guilty of contributing to the neglect of a child" and punished under § 97-5-39. The statute then sets out what makes a prima facie case: evidence that the child has not been enrolled in school within eighteen calendar days after the first day of the school year, or has accumulated twelve unlawful absences.

And the protection attached to it, which is easy to miss: "no proceedings under this section shall be brought against a parent, guardian or custodian of a compulsory-school-age child unless the school attendance officer has contacted promptly the home of the child and has provided written notice." Contact first, notice in writing, then proceedings. A family that files a certificate and answers the phone is not in this paragraph's world.

2026: what the legislature tried, and what it means that it failed

This is the section no other Mississippi guide carries, and it is the reason to date this page. We pulled the full 2026 regular session measure list from the Legislature's own bill status system and read every bill touching compulsory attendance, home instruction, and school choice. Here is the complete picture.

House Bill 1512 would have ended the Mississippi homeschool arrangement described on this page. Its text amends § 37-13-91 to require that every homeschooling parent, "on or before June 30 of each school year," submit to the Mississippi Department of Education an annual homeschool academic file containing:

• a copy of the certificate of enrollment;
• "a portfolio summary containing representative work samples, curriculum descriptions, and a written progress report aligned with the Mississippi College and Career Readiness Standards";
• results from MDE-approved online benchmark assessments in English Language Arts, Mathematics and Science, "completed between April 1 and June 15 under secure conditions and proctored by a certified individual";
• attendance records "demonstrating instructional days substantially equivalent to one hundred eighty (180) days of public school instruction"; and
• for grades 3, 5, 8 and 11, standardized test results from an MDE approved assessment "administered by a certified teacher."

Failure to comply "shall constitute noncompliance and may result in intervention, mandatory remediation, or withdrawal of homeschool status."

It died in committee on February 3, 2026. So did every other bill in this territory. The Tim Tebow bills that would have opened public school extracurriculars to homeschoolers, House Bill 609 and Senate Bill 2070, both died in committee the same day. Senate Bill 2506, which would have added a disability assessment to the compulsory attendance procedures, and Senate Bill 2297, which would have made kindergarten compulsory, died the same day. House Bill 2, the "Mississippi Educational Freedom Program Act of 2026," got further, clearing the House before dying in a Senate committee on March 3. Senate Bill 2286, revising the compulsory attendance law, made the mirror trip and died in a House committee on the same date.

Now the counterweight, because a dead bill is not a permanent answer. The 2025 session tells you the same story with one difference: House Bill 1617, another Tim Tebow Act, passed the House and died in a Senate committee on March 4, 2025. These ideas keep coming back, from both directions, and Mississippi's regular session runs from January into the spring. The honest sentence is that nothing about Mississippi homeschool law changed in 2025 or 2026, and that this is a thing to check once a year, in the spring, at the Legislature's own site rather than from a guide. The check takes two minutes: go to billstatus.ls.state.ms.us, open the current session, and look at All Measures. Do that with this page too. It is dated at the bottom for exactly that reason.

What the public school owes your family: one closed door, one open one

Sports and activities: closed, and closed twice

Mississippi has no statute admitting homeschooled students to public school athletics or activities. That is the first closure. The second is the Mississippi High School Activities Association's own 2026-2027 handbook, which closes it from the other side. Rule 2.5.2 requires that a participant "shall be legally enrolled in a MHSAA member school." Rule 7.1.3 lists the entities member schools may not compete against, and item 9 on that list is "Home schooled teams or individual students," with a narrow exception for home schooled teams approved by the National Federation of State High School Associations.

And a rule that matters if your program is online, which we are pointing out because it cuts against us. Rule 2.5.1: "If a school or student chooses to be virtual, this is considered being home schooled and no participation will be allowed in athletics or activities." In Mississippi, a virtual student is treated as a homeschooler for eligibility, and that is a closed door too.

The one piece of good news is on the way back in. Rule 2.16.1 provides that "a home school student from an accredited home school program entering grades 10, 11 or 12, having met the Mississippi Department of Education required credits and Carnegie Units, will be considered eligible upon enrollment in an MHSAA member school." A returning homeschooler does not sit out a year, unlike a public school student out for a semester, who must first earn a 2.0. If a sport is genuinely the thing your child cannot give up, enrollment is the mechanism, and it is not penalized.

Dual credit: open, through the college rather than the district

Mississippi's dual enrollment statute, § 37-15-38, is built entirely around a student "enrolled in high school." It requires the local school board to establish the dual enrollment system, requires the superintendent of the local school district to give "unconditional approval" to any course before college credit is awarded, and requires grades to be recorded "on the high school student record." A homeschooled student has no local school board in that sense, no superintendent to approve courses, and no district-held record, so the statutory dual credit machinery is not built for them.

But subsection (4) is where the door is. It provides that students "may be admitted to enroll in community or junior college courses under the dual enrollment programs if they meet that individual institution's stated dual enrollment admission requirements." The colleges set the criteria, and Mississippi community colleges do admit homeschoolers.

A concrete example, so this is not an abstraction. Hinds Community College publishes a Homeschool Transcripts section for dual enrollment applicants. It asks for an official transcript developed by the parent or by an approved third-party homeschool agency, prefers a notarized one, and specifies the contents: the name of the homeschool, its physical address, the student's name and identifying information, all completed and in-progress coursework with dates, a cumulative GPA on a 4.0 scale, the anticipated graduation date, and a signature from the "School Principal," which "in many cases will be the parent or legal guardian," notarized if a parent signs.

Two things follow from that list, and they are the practical takeaway of this whole page. First, the door is open, and the key is a transcript you wrote. Second, that transcript needs course names, dates and grades going back years, which is the one thing a family cannot reconstruct in the fall of eleventh grade. Check your nearest community college's own dual enrollment page for its criteria, because they differ by institution, and start keeping the record long before you need it.

The money: there is none for homeschooling, and the statute says so twice

Mississippi runs an Education Scholarship Account program for students with special needs under Miss. Code § 37-181-1 et seq. It is the state's only individual education account, and homeschooling families cannot use it. The exclusion is explicit, and it appears in two separate places:

• The definition of "eligible school" covers a state-accredited special purpose school, a state-accredited nonpublic school, or a nonpublic school providing services for the student's disability, and then says: "An eligible school does not include a home instruction program under Section 37-13-91."
• The parent agreement a participant signs requires the parent to agree "not to file for their participating student a certificate of enrollment indicating participation in a home instruction program under Section 37-13-91."

That is about as closed as a door gets. Taking the money requires promising in writing that you are not homeschooling. The program is also funded per student "at Six Thousand Five Hundred Dollars ($6,500.00) for school year 2015-2016," adjusted each subsequent year in proportion to the student base amount under § 37-151-203, with new enrollment limited to 500 additional students a year, so we are deliberately not printing a current-year figure we could not open. Bills to restructure the program, Senate Bills 2599 and 2601, both died in 2025.

On the tax side we are going to be careful rather than confident. We could not find an education expense credit or deduction for individuals in the Mississippi Department of Revenue's individual income tax material, and Mississippi is not a state where homeschool families commonly claim one. That is a search that came up empty, not a certified negative, and the difference matters when the answer changes what you file. If you think you have a Mississippi education expense credit coming, ask the Department of Revenue for your filing year and keep the answer in writing. And on whether a subscription like ours would ever qualify for anything: we are not answering that. A confident answer from a company that profits from the answer is worth nothing.

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 Mississippi. We are not a nonpublic school under § 37-13-91, we are not an accredited home school program, and enrolling with us does not create or satisfy your home instruction program. Your program is yours. We do not file your certificate of enrollment, we do not talk to your school attendance officer, we are not an ESA eligible school, and we do not issue a diploma, because in Mississippi that comes from you.

We will also say the thing that costs us, because you should hear it from us and not from a coach in August: under MHSAA rule 2.5.1, a student who is virtual is treated as homeschooled, and that means no public school athletics or activities. Using us does not change that in either direction, since a Mississippi homeschooler was already outside those doors, but we are not going to let you discover the rule after you have made plans around it.

What we do is the part § 37-13-91 leaves entirely to you, which in Mississippi 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. Mississippi 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. Mississippi will never ask you for any of it. Read that list against the Hinds transcript requirements above and you will see who does ask: a community college admissions office, four years from now, wanting completed and in-progress coursework with dates and a cumulative GPA, signed by the school principal, who is you. That record is also the only evidence anyone will ever have of a year you spent teaching a seventeen year old the state stopped counting.

Mississippi trusts you completely and writes the trust into the statute. Somebody still has to do the teaching. That is the job we are actually applying for.

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, Mississippi included. Since Mississippi never asks for a record and the transcript a community college will want 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 first, because Mississippi's one funded program is built around special needs and closed to homeschoolers. Or see the requirements for every other state.