HS-BASE v0.5 — Home-educated student

Status: Working normative text

1. Relationship to Texas law

HS-BASE is a voluntary conformance standard based on the Texas-law framework for home education, including Texas Education Code §§ 29.916(a)(1) and 33.0832 and Texas Education Agency v. Leeper, 893 S.W.2d 432 (Tex. 1994). See the authority notes.

HS-BASE intentionally tightens the Texas-law category. It does not expand, liberalize, or establish the outer boundary of home-school status under Texas law. Qualification as home schooled under applicable Texas law is a necessary but not sufficient condition for qualification under HS-BASE. A student who does not qualify as home schooled under Texas law cannot qualify under HS-BASE; a student who may qualify under Texas law may nevertheless fail HS-BASE. No provision of HS-BASE shall be construed to enlarge the class of students eligible as home-schooled students under Texas law.

2. Home-educated student and institutional responsibility

A home-educated student is a student whose parent or person standing in parental authority provides, in or through the student’s home, the student’s general elementary or secondary educational program and retains institutional responsibility for that program.

Institutional responsibility resides with the parental authority only when the parental authority retains final authority to:

1. establish or adopt the requirements of the student’s general elementary or secondary educational program;
2. determine whether and how courses, instruction, assessments, credits, grades, credentials, and other educational accomplishments provided or determined by third parties satisfy the requirements of that program;
3. determine the student’s advancement within that program, including completion or graduation; and
4. maintain, or cause to be maintained under the parental authority’s authority, the canonical academic record of that program.

Canonical academic record means the authoritative cumulative academic record representing the student’s general elementary or secondary educational program to third parties.

A parental authority’s ability to withdraw the student from a third-party program, decline continued enrollment, or change providers does not establish institutional responsibility for the student’s general elementary or secondary educational program. The parental authority must retain the four authorities above while the student participates in the arrangement, not merely regain them after it ends.

3. Educational services provided by third parties

The parental authority may obtain from or delegate to one or more third parties any portion, including all, of the curriculum, instruction, assessment, grading, testing, recordkeeping, or other educational services used in the student’s program without relinquishing institutional responsibility.

Neither the proportion or number of educational services supplied by third parties nor the physical location at which those services are performed determines home-education status.

A third party may establish requirements and determine curriculum, instruction, assessments, grades, credits, prerequisites, advancement, credentials, or completion within a course or program offered by that third party without thereby acquiring institutional responsibility for the student’s general elementary or secondary educational program. The parental authority retains final authority to determine whether and how, if at all, those determinations are recognized within the student’s home-education program.

4. Enrollment in another educational program

A student does not qualify under HS-BASE when another elementary or secondary school or institution has assumed institutional responsibility for the student’s general elementary or secondary educational program.

Enrollment in individual courses or other educational services offered by an elementary or secondary school does not, by itself, constitute such an assumption of institutional responsibility.

Enrollment in a college, university, vocational institution, or other postsecondary program does not constitute an assumption of institutional responsibility for the student’s elementary or secondary educational program.

5. Provider and family characterizations

A provider’s or family’s characterization of an arrangement as “home school,” “home-school,” “homeschool,” “home education,” “hybrid,” “part-time,” “full-time,” “supplemental,” or similar terminology does not determine status under HS-BASE. Status is determined by the actual educational relationship and the allocation of institutional responsibility.

6. Texas bright-line exclusions

Regardless of any other provision of HS-BASE, a student does not qualify under HS-BASE during any period in which:

1. the student is enrolled in a Texas public elementary or secondary school, including a public charter school or full-time public virtual school;
2. the student is enrolled in the general elementary or secondary educational program of a private school eligible to participate in the Texas Education Freedom Accounts program as a participating private school eligible for the private-school funding category, regardless of whether TEFA funding is sought, accepted, or received for that student; or
3. the student is enrolled in the general elementary or secondary educational program of a school that is a member of the University Interscholastic League (UIL), Texas Association of Private and Parochial Schools (TAPPS), or Southwest Preparatory Conference (SPC).

Purchasing courses or other educational services from an institution described in item 2 or 3 does not itself constitute enrollment in that institution’s general elementary or secondary educational program; §§ 2–4 still govern that distinction.