Georgia's Promise Scholarship pays up to $6,500 a year, and most Georgia homeschooling families cannot get a dollar of it. The gate is enrollment history and your zip code. Your child has to be enrolled in a Georgia public school right now, and have been for two consecutive semesters, or be a rising kindergartner. On top of that, you have to live in an attendance zone served by a school on the state's list of the lowest-performing 25%. If your kids have been learning at home for a year, you are outside the program by design.
The rest of Georgia homeschool law is short. You file one form with the state each year. You teach five subjects across the equivalent of 180 days at four and a half hours a day. You write a progress report and keep it in a drawer, and you test every third year starting at the end of third grade. Nothing except that one form ever goes to the state.
What the home study law requires
Georgia's home study statute is O.C.G.A. 20-2-690(c), and it runs to eight short paragraphs. Six of them touch your year.
File a Declaration of Intent within 30 days of starting your program, then by September 1 every year after. It goes to the Georgia Department of Education. Your district is not involved; the department forwards your filing to the local school system on its own.
Hold a high school diploma or a GED. Whoever teaches has to meet that bar, and a tutor you bring in has to meet it too. There is no certification requirement beyond it.
Teach reading, language arts, mathematics, social studies, and science. Those five are the floor. Add Latin or welding on top of them and the statute has nothing to say about it.
Provide the equivalent of 180 school days at four and a half hours each. That works out to roughly 810 hours a year, which is the figure on our Georgia requirements page. Note the word "equivalent." Georgia does not ask you to mirror a public school bell schedule, so a morning at the Fernbank and an afternoon of read-aloud both count, the same way field trips count toward school hours in the states that measure time.
Write an annual progress assessment covering each of the five required subjects, for each student, and keep it for at least three years. You do not send it anywhere. If you have never written one, our walkthrough on what belongs in a homeschool progress report covers the shape.
Test every three years, beginning at the end of third grade, using a nationally standardized, norm-referenced test given in consultation with someone trained to interpret the results. Scores stay in your files. The statute says they "shall not be required to be submitted to public educational authorities."
Attendance is where Georgia families trip. The state stopped requiring monthly attendance reports to districts back in 2013, so nothing gets mailed anywhere. The 180 days are still the law, though. The paperwork moved into your house rather than disappearing.
Filing the Declaration of Intent
The Declaration lives on a GaDOE web form, and filing it takes about ten minutes. It asks for the names and ages of your students, the address where the home study program operates, the school system you live in, and the twelve-month period you are calling your school year.
Submit it and you get back a 36-character confirmation code in the parent signature line, plus an emailed copy of the form. Save both. That code is your proof of enrollment, and it is the thing to reach for if a truancy question ever surfaces or a coach asks whether your teenager is legally enrolled somewhere.
Filing settles less than families assume. It does not obligate you to submit attendance, scores, or progress reports afterward, and it does not withdraw your child from public school on its own. If your student is still enrolled, tell the school yourself so their records show a transfer rather than an absence, which is the same sequence we lay out in the guide to withdrawing from public school. Our letter of intent generator will produce the district-facing letter; the state-facing Declaration still goes through the GaDOE form.
The Promise Scholarship, and who it is built for
Senate Bill 233 created the Georgia Promise Scholarship in 2024, and the first awards followed. The program pays up to $6,500 per student per year in four quarterly installments, with the Georgia Education Savings Authority permitted to hold back up to 5% for administration. Families spend it through an online platform, paying approved schools, tutors, and service providers.
The eligibility rules are where most families stop. A student qualifies by being enrolled in a Georgia public school for two consecutive semesters, or by being a rising kindergartner. Either way, the family has to live in an attendance zone served by a school on the Governor's Office of Student Achievement's list of the lowest-performing 25%, published each year by December 1. The parent needs a year of Georgia residency, with an exception for active-duty military who moved to Georgia within the past year. Families at or below 400% of the federal poverty level get priority in the fall window and are the only applicants considered for spring.
The scholarship also changes your testing year. Accepting funds means disenrolling from public school, and participating students take an annual norm-referenced test in math and language arts. Georgia's home study law asks for a test once every three years. Take the scholarship and you test every single year, which is a real change in rhythm and worth weighing against the money.
The two remaining application windows for 2026-27 are August 1 through 31 and November 1 through 30. The August window is open as this publishes.
The narrow paths that do exist
The Georgia Public Policy Foundation has written the clearest account of how home study families fit, and it does not oversell the fit. Two paths are open.
The first is the rising kindergartner in a qualifying attendance zone. No prior enrollment is required for that child, so a family starting from scratch in the right zip code can apply and then homeschool, spending the funds on curriculum, certified tutors, online courses, therapy services, dual enrollment, and up to $500 a year of transportation.
The second is a family already inside the public system for other reasons, in a qualifying zone, deciding to come home. Two semesters of enrollment satisfies the rule on its own.
You could also enroll a homeschooled child in public school for a year to unlock $6,500. It seldom pays. You would spend that year inside a school the state has flagged as bottom-quartile, then rebuild a routine that was already working. Most Georgia families do better looking at the broader ESA landscape, and pricing out what homeschooling costs before assuming they need a scholarship at all. To see how Georgia compares, we track which states let homeschoolers into ESA programs.
A compliance rhythm that takes an evening
You owe three artifacts as an independent home study family in Georgia, and none of them takes a weekend.
The 180-day record. Log what you did as you do it rather than reconstructing a year in May. Tag activities by subject so reading, language arts, math, social studies, and science each show a trail, which is what core subject tagging in Homeschool Fox is for. Your day count and hours add up as you go, and the hours calculator will tell you the daily pace that gets you to 810.
The annual progress assessment. One page per child, five short paragraphs, done in an evening in May. Name what the child worked through in each subject and where they landed. Print it, file it, keep it three years.
The test, every third year. Georgia families most often use the Iowa Assessments, the Stanford Achievement Test, the California Achievement Test, or PASS. You can administer some of these yourself with a bachelor's degree in any field. Our state-by-state testing breakdown covers what each test involves.
How to decide
If your children are already home, or you are starting from scratch outside a bottom-quartile attendance zone, file the Declaration and stay independent. You keep full curriculum control, you test once every three years, and the only deadline you owe anyone is September 1.
Look hard at the Promise Scholarship in one case: your child is a rising kindergartner or coming out of two semesters of Georgia public school, you live in a qualifying zone, and you are comfortable buying through approved providers and testing every year. That is a real $6,500, and it is worth the application.
Everyone else, file the form and get on with the year.
