To: Home Education Advisory Council
From: Chris Hamilton
Subject: Reporting of Home Education statistics
Date: May 11, 2004

ED 315 requires participating agencies to yearly notify the commissioner of education of the number of children for whom home education programs were established. These figures are currently reported by districts on the same form they use for regularly enrolled public school students, and by non-public school principals on the same forms they use to report attendance by their students enrolled in their school. This has led to the creation of meaningless data, such as a student's grade level or attendance record. It also has the potential to lead administrators to believe that they must meet certain reporting requirements, such as the new Unique Pupil Identifier number, when reporting attendance figures for home educated students, requirements which really only apply to public school pupils.

I would like to propose that the Department of Education create a separate form on which all participating agencies - districts, non-public schools and the DOE -- can report home education program statistics. Home educated students are no longer included in the ADMR statistic, so there is no need to group them with attendance by public school students for purposes of state aid. Since the adoption of the new UPI will probably bring about new methods for the reporting of data by districts, now would seem to be the time to make such a change. Use of a separate form would clarify that a home education program is a distinct method of complying with the compulsory attendance law, with its own set of expectations regarding data collection. Since all three types of participating agencies would use the same form, software could be written to handle the entire process, eliminating the tedious manual merging of figures that Angie LeBel has needed to do each year.