Homeschooled students in state hit lowest level in 4 years

According to a data report from the Arkansas Division of Elementary and Secondary Education, a total of 27,528 children in grades kindergarten through high school were homeschooled during the 2023-2024 school year.

The lowest number is four years.

It’s down 2,251 students from the 29,779 homeschoolers the state reported for the 2022-23 school year, the 30,205 homeschoolers in 2021-22 and the 30,267 homeschoolers in 2020-21, the year the global COVID-19 pandemic was at its peak.

In 2019-2020 the total was 22,267.

The annual number of homeschooled students in Arkansas exceeds the enrollment in any of the state’s traditional or open-enrollment charter school systems. By comparison, the Springdale School District is the largest traditional public school system in the state with 21,712 students.

Homeschoolers are not public schools. Homeschooled students are students whose parents or guardians have chosen to take full responsibility for their children’s education. However, parents who homeschool their child must register their intention to homeschool with the state.

According to state data, some school districts have hundreds of homeschooled students, while other numbers are in the single digits — Augusta, 6, and Earle, 4, for example.

Of the 27,528 homeschooled students last school year, 1,432 were residents of the Bentonville School District, 509 lived in the Bryant School District, 641 in the Cabot district, 736 in Conway, 514 in Fayetteville, 511 in Fort Smith, 890 in Rogers, 579 in Siloam Springs and 806 in Springdale.

In Pulaski County, there were 360 ​​homeschooled students in the Jacksonville/North Pulaski School District, 548 in Little Rock, 258 in North Little Rock and 998 in the Pulaski County Special School District this past school year.

The state’s latest report on homeschooling enrollment for 2023-2024 comes just as the state is making taxpayer-funded Educational Freedom Accounts available to homeschool families for the first time in the upcoming 2024-2025 school year.

A total of 1,453 homeschooled students have been approved for the bills so far this summer, Kimberly Mundell, spokeswoman for the Arkansas Division of Elementary and Secondary Education, said Friday.

Approved homeschooling families can use Educational Freedom Account vouchers to offset their education costs, including the costs associated with the relatively new Arkansas concepts of “learning groups” and “microschools.”

“It’s absolutely a game changer for our community,” Kanesha Adams, founder and director of The Learning Lounge, a microschool in Pine Bluff, said Thursday of the impact the Educational Freedom Accounts have had on her client base of homeschooling families.

“This is a great opportunity for parents who want more choice in where their students go and the types of services they receive,” Adams said.

A learning pod is defined as a community of homeschooled students that is established by a volunteer parent association. A microschool is a tuition-based organization that serves a community of homeschooled students and is responsible for hiring staff.

The organization Reform Alliance, which advocates for private, charter and homeschooling options for students, lists eight microschools in total on its website, with two in Little Rock and one each in Marshall, Royal, Casa, Wynne and Brookland, plus one in Pine Bluff.

The Learning Lounge has helped about six homeschooling families with a school program a few days a week and as many as 14 families with after-school tutoring over the past year, Adams said.

This coming year, The Learning Lounge will move into a former public elementary school building and into a more traditional five-day, on-site school program for the majority of enrollment. And with 27 homeschoolers enrolled, the microschool is nearly full, Adams said. Only a small number of students will have a school schedule other than the five-day program, she said.

The kindergarten-through-sixth-grade microschool, with class sizes limited to one teacher for every 10 children, must be staffed by certified teachers, including herself, Adams said. The school will charge families for the educational services. Families will authorize payment of the microschool fees from the child’s state account if the student meets the state’s required qualifications for Educational Freedom Accounts this new school year.

Act 237 of 2023, the multifaceted 145-page Arkansas LEARNS Act, authorizes the state to provide a minimum of $6,856 in taxpayer funds to eligible students to cover tuition and other costs for private and homeschooling during the 2024-2025 school year.

During the 2023-24 school year, state-funded vouchers were available to more than 5,000 private school students, or 1.5% of the state’s public school enrollment. In the coming year, funds will be available to about 14,000 students, or 3% of the state’s public school enrollment, in 2022-23.

To qualify for state funding for private and homeschooling expenses, students must meet eligibility requirements. These include special educational needs, being homeless or in foster care, being the child of active and veteran military personnel, children of first responders, children enrolled in a public school with a D or F grade, or being eligible to enroll in kindergarten in the 2023-24 or 2024-25 school year.

For the 2025-2026 school year, all students can apply for vouchers.

State rules regarding Educational Freedom Accounts for homeschoolers limit the payments parents make with account funds toward their children’s education.

“A parent of a participating student may not receive a payment from the student’s EFA account unless it is a reimbursement for a pre-approved eligible expense” — with some exceptions, Mundell said.

“A parent of a participating student may only receive reimbursement for pre-approved eligible expenses, including course and testing costs, curriculum, tuition and fees for online courses, tutoring costs, therapy costs, and transportation,” she added.

“The family submits a request for pre-approval for one of the pre-approved eligible expenses. Once approved, the family may incur the expenses and submit a receipt for services that match the pre-approved expenses.”

This chart shows that a total of 27,528 kindergarten through 12th graders were homeschooled students in the 2023-24 school year, according to a state report. That’s down 2,251 from the 2022-23 school year, the largest year-over-year decline since the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the decline, the annual number of homeschooled students in Arkansas exceeds the enrollment in any of the state’s school systems. (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette chart)