Homeschooling a Child Who Had an IEP: A Former Special Educator’s Field Guide

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You’re pulling your kid out of school, and somewhere in a drawer is a 20-page IEP that took three meetings to write. You want to know what you’re allowed to keep, what you’re about to lose, and whether you can run this at the kitchen table without a case manager. Homeschooling a child with an IEP works, but the paperwork doesn’t come with you. The IEP is a public school document; the day you withdraw, the school’s legal duty to deliver it ends. What transfers is everything the IEP taught you about your kid. I spent about fifteen years in schools writing IEPs and then chairing the meetings as a principal, and the useful part of the document was never the signatures.

What happens to the IEP when you homeschool?

An IEP is a contract between a public school and a student who is enrolled in it. The federal law behind it, IDEA, promises a free appropriate public education (FAPE) to eligible kids in public school. Withdraw, and that promise is no longer owed to you. The IEP doesn’t get revoked or deleted; it stops being anyone’s job.

What replaces it depends on your state. Federal rules treat kids in private schools their parents chose as “parentally placed,” and the U.S. Department of Education’s guidance says whether a homeschooled child counts as parentally placed “is determined under State law.” In states that classify a homeschool as a private school, your kid is in that bucket. In states that don’t, the district may owe you less. Either way, parentally placed kids have no individual right to services. Districts set aside a share of federal money for them, decide after consulting with parents what to offer, and write a services plan for the kids they choose to serve. A services plan lists only what the district offers; it has no goals, no progress reports, and no due-process teeth.

Two things survive no matter what. The district still has a child find duty to locate, identify, and evaluate kids with disabilities who live in its boundaries, homeschoolers included, so you can request an evaluation or a reevaluation in writing at no cost. And if you re-enroll, the Department’s guidance says the child “would return as a child with a disability” and the district must make FAPE available unless it finds the child no longer eligible. The door back in is open. The file is what you carry through it.

What I’d do before the withdrawal letter goes in: call the special education office, ask whether they serve homeschoolers and which services they’ve funded for homeschool families in the last year, and get the answer in an email. Then decide. If the district is offering OT for your seven-year-old and that’s the one thing you can’t replace, a part-time arrangement might beat a clean break. Verify what your state allows; this varies more than any other part of homeschool law.

What’s actually in the IEP, and what each part is worth at home

Federal regulations require nine things in every IEP. Parents usually read two of them. Here’s the whole document sorted by what it’s worth once the school is out of the picture.

Notice what isn’t on the list to replace: the evaluation. The psychoeducational evaluation behind the IEP is the thing of value, and it stays valid at home exactly as long as it would have at school.

Accommodations: keep every one of them

An accommodation is a change to how a child learns or shows what they know, without changing what they’re expected to learn. Extended time, text read aloud, a quiet room, breaks, ten problems instead of thirty, oral answers instead of written ones, large print, a keyboard.

Every one of those transfers to your house with zero paperwork, because the paperwork existed to make a classroom teacher do them. You don’t need to be made to. Most of them get easier. “Preferential seating” in a room of one is a joke. “Frequent breaks” becomes “we stop when he’s done.”

The trap is dropping them because they feel unnecessary now. I’ve watched parents at the counter describe a reading program that “stopped working” in November, and when we back up, the kid used to get his math read aloud at school and now reads the word problems himself, so he’s spending his energy on decoding instead of math. The accommodation was doing work nobody could see. Run the accommodations on purpose for the first semester, then drop them one at a time and watch what happens.

Does your kid still need the accommodation, or just like it? That’s a fair question for a twelve-year-old and a cruel one for a seven-year-old. Under ten, assume the need is real. Over twelve, make it a conversation: “Do you want the audiobook for this chapter or do you want to try it?” Either answer is fine.

Related services: this is the real loss

Related services are the specialized therapies on the IEP: speech-language therapy, occupational therapy, physical therapy, counseling, sometimes a one-on-one aide. These are the services a school delivers with licensed people, and they are what most families are actually asking about when they ask whether they can homeschool with an IEP.

You have three options, and none of them is a guarantee.

• Equitable services from the district. Ask. Some districts fund speech for homeschoolers; some don’t serve them at all. Federal guidance says the district decides after consulting with parents and that there is no individual entitlement. Get whatever they offer in writing as a services plan.
• Dual enrollment for the service only. Some states allow a homeschooler to attend public school part-time for a class or a service. Whether that makes your child a “public school child” again for IDEA purposes, the Department of Education says, depends on state law. Ask your district directly and verify with your state’s department of education.
• Private providers. A private speech-language pathologist or OT. Costs vary by region, and whether insurance covers it often turns on whether the need is coded as medical or educational. Ask before the first appointment.

If a related service is the center of your child’s day, that service is the first thing to solve, before curriculum, before the withdrawal letter. Everything else on this page is secondary to that.

Goals: write three, not twelve

School IEP goals are written to be measurable by a stranger in a classroom of 24 kids. “Given a third-grade passage, student will read 90 words per minute with 95% accuracy in 4 of 5 trials.” That’s a fine goal. It’s also one of twelve, and nobody can hold twelve goals in their head while also teaching history.

At home, pick two or three. One academic (the thing the evaluation says is hardest, usually reading or math), one functional (handwriting, attention, following a two-step direction), and one your kid picks. Write each as a sentence a grandparent could understand, with a number in it. “Read a page of Frog and Toad aloud without stopping to sound out more than three words.” Then check it once a month. One number, one date, one line in a notebook.

I’d rather you kept three goals and actually measured them than kept twelve and measured none. The twelve are still in the file. Pull the next one when the first one is met.

If you want this in software, Homeschool Planet is the one I see often among families tracking goals, and a paper version from the planner shelf does the same job for less. We compared the common ones in our roundup.

The paper trail you must keep (and why it isn’t optional)

Before you withdraw, request the complete special education file in writing: the current IEP, the eligibility determination, every evaluation report, progress reports, and service logs. Schools keep these; you are entitled to copies. Put them in one folder, paper and scanned, and keep adding to it. This folder runs four things in your child’s future.

Reevaluations

Under IDEA, an eligible child’s reevaluation happens at least every three years unless the parent and district agree it isn’t needed. That three-year clock applies to parentally placed kids too, and the district where you live is responsible for it. A current evaluation is what keeps the door open for everything below. If your last one is more than three years old, request a reevaluation from your district in writing, or pay for a private one.

SAT and ACT accommodations

Homeschoolers apply for testing accommodations without a school. For the SAT and AP exams, College Board’s SSD office lets families request directly, using high school code 970000 for homeschoolers, and it requires documentation with every direct request. Processing can take up to seven weeks, and an incomplete request restarts the clock. ACT works the same way: homeschooled examinees submit their own request, including an Exceptions Statement Form signed by the person responsible for instruction (that’s you) and full diagnostic documentation. ACT says it doesn’t approve accommodations on a diagnosis alone; prior IEPs and records of past testing accommodations count as supporting evidence. That “testing accommodations” page of the old IEP is suddenly worth a lot.

College disability services

Colleges don’t honor IEPs. They run their own disability offices under different laws, and each office sets its own documentation rules. AHEAD, the professional association for those offices, says the student’s own account, a disability professional’s observations, and third-party records such as IEPs and 504 plans all count as documentation. The kid who can describe what accommodations she used and why, and hand over a folder with the history, is in a much stronger position than the one with a diagnosis and nothing else. Start that conversation around tenth grade.

Re-enrollment

If homeschooling doesn’t work, or works for three years and then doesn’t, the child returns to public school as a child with a disability, and the district must offer FAPE unless it determines the child is no longer eligible. A current evaluation and a folder of progress notes make that a two-week process. A three-year-old evaluation and no records make it a semester of “let’s see how he does first.” I sat in those meetings. Bring the folder.

Curriculum that carries the accommodations for you

It’s less tiring to buy curriculum that already works the way your kid does than to bolt accommodations onto whatever is popular. Who it fits and who it doesn’t, by the needs I see most at the counter.

Dyslexia and reading disabilities

All About Reading and All About Spelling are Orton-Gillingham-style programs: explicit, multisensory, mastery-based, scripted so the parent doesn’t need training. Letter tiles instead of pencil for the kids who hate pencils. Who it fits: a struggling reader whose parent can sit beside them for 20 minutes a day. Who it doesn’t: a kid who reads fine and needs comprehension work, or a family that needs independent work. We wrote a full All About Learning Press review for struggling readers.

Math disabilities and working-memory limits

Math-U-See teaches one concept per level with physical blocks and a video of the author teaching the lesson. Mastery before moving on, which is exactly what a kid with dyscalculia needs and exactly what a spiral program denies them. Who it fits: the kid who needs to hold the number in his hands. Who it doesn’t: a strong math student who gets bored at one concept a month, or a family that wants grade-level labels. Teaching Textbooks is the other one I point to for math: on-screen, read-aloud, auto-graded, so the parent isn’t the reader and the grader. It fits the kid who needs read-aloud built in and doesn’t fit the kid who needs hands-on. Our math comparison goes deeper.

Handwriting and fine motor

Handwriting Without Tears was written by an occupational therapist and is what many school OTs have used. Short lessons, simple strokes, wide lines. Who it fits: any kid with an OT goal about letter formation. Who it doesn’t: a kid whose issue is spelling or composition rather than the physical act of writing; that’s a different program. And if the goal was keyboarding, skip handwriting curriculum entirely and let him type.

Attention and executive function

No curriculum fixes attention, and anyone selling you one is selling. What helps is structure: open-and-go programs with short lessons and a visible finish line. Workbook-based programs like Christian Light Education and the Lifepac units, where a kid can see “six pages and I’m done,” do more for an ADHD kid than any special program. Pair them with a timer and a checklist. The accommodation is the schedule, not the book.

Frequently asked questions

The short version

The IEP ends; the knowledge in it doesn’t. Keep every accommodation, rewrite the goals down to three, solve related services before anything else, and keep the file current, because testing, college, and re-enrollment all depend on it. Then buy curriculum that does the accommodating for you.

Browse used All About Reading →

Sources

• U.S. Department of Education, OSEP, “Questions and Answers on Serving Children with Disabilities Placed by Their Parents in Private Schools” (rev. Feb. 2022) (homeschool status set by state law, Q I-1; no individual right to services, Q C-1; services plan vs IEP, Q E-1; reevaluation every three years, Q A-9; return as a child with a disability, Q K-5; checked October 2026)
• 34 CFR § 300.320, “Definition of individualized education program” (required IEP contents; transition services at 16; checked October 2026)
• 34 CFR Part 300, Subpart B, “Children With Disabilities Enrolled by Their Parents in Private Schools” (child find and equitable services for parentally placed children; checked October 2026)
• College Board SSD, “Requesting Without Going Through the School” (homeschool code 970000, documentation required, up to seven weeks; checked October 2026)
• ACT, “Examinees Who Are Homeschooled or Are Not Currently Enrolled” (direct request, Exceptions Statement Form, diagnostic documentation; checked October 2026)
• AHEAD, “Supporting Accommodation Requests: Guidance on Documentation Practices” (what counts as college documentation; checked October 2026)