Someone in your homeschool group shares a screenshot with a warning: the government is coming for homeschoolers, and a bill called the Make Homeschool Safe Act is how they plan to do it. Half the comments are panic, and half are people telling everyone to relax. You have a full year of lessons to plan and no clear sense of which half to believe. The bill itself answers most of the questions, so start there instead of in the comment section.
What the Make Homeschool Safe Act is
The Make Homeschool Safe Act is a model bill. It is not a federal law, and it is not on the books in any state as written. A model bill is a template: an advocacy group writes the version of a law it wants and then offers it to friendly legislators, who can introduce it, in whole or in part, in their own statehouses. The MHSA was drafted by groups that favor greater government oversight of home education, and it is designed to serve as a starting point for state-level legislation. Model legislation is an ordinary tactic across many policy fights, from tax law to tenant rights: one organization writes the ideal text and many legislators borrow from it. The MHSA is the homeschool-oversight version of that approach.
That distinction shapes how much to worry. Nothing in the model bill binds your family today. What it does is hand a ready-made script to any legislator who wants to expand homeschool regulation, which means its provisions can appear one at a time, under different bill numbers, in states that never use the phrase "Make Homeschool Safe Act" at all. Learning the provisions is how you recognize them when they surface. You can check what your own state requires right now on the HomeschoolFox state requirements pages, the baseline from which any proposed change would move.
What the model bill would require
Boiled down, the model bill asks a homeschooling family to do six things. HSLDA tracks the model and the state bills built from it on its MHSA page:
Notify the superintendent within 30 days of starting to homeschool, and again every year.
Teach a fixed list of mandatory subjects matching the public school curriculum, rather than setting the scope yourself.
Submit each child to an annual in-person academic assessment by a credentialed education professional, with the child present.
Turn in a portfolio of work or standardized test scores each year as proof of progress.
Hand over student identification, immunization, and academic records to the superintendent.
Bar a family from starting to homeschool while it is under an active child abuse or neglect investigation.
A few of these echo what many states already do: annual notices and periodic testing are common in moderate-regulation states. Others go beyond any current state law, in particular, the in-person evaluation of the child by an outside professional and the routine handover of medical and identification records. If a version of this passed where you live, the day-to-day weight would land on your record-keeping and on how you log hours of instruction by subject.
The records requirements are the sharpest break from current practice. No state today asks every homeschooling parent to route immunization and identification records to a superintendent as a condition of teaching, and the annual in-person evaluation would put an outside professional in the role of judging your child's progress once a year. Those two provisions are where most of the opposition concentrates.
Where the model showed up in 2026
Few bills carry the title "Make Homeschool Safe Act." You see its individual provisions instead, and several 2026 state bills show that pattern.
Connecticut went the furthest. HB 5468, signed by Governor Ned Lamont as Public Act 26-37 in the spring, makes Connecticut the first state to require a Department of Children and Families screening of household adults before a parent can homeschool, and it bars homeschooling when a household member has an open DCF case or appears on the state's child abuse and neglect registry. It also adds a declaration-of-intent filing and a state registry of homeschooling families. An earlier draft would have required portfolio and test-score submission; legislators dropped that piece before passage. HSLDA condemned the law, and one of its attorneys testified against the bill during a 19-hour committee hearing. Connecticut's families now operate under the state's new rules, and supporters tied the bill to high-profile abuse cases, including the death of 11-year-old Mimi Torres-García.
Nebraska took a narrower piece. LB 937, an education bill Governor Jim Pillen signed in 2026, adds a 14-day delay before a family under an active Division of Children and Family Services investigation can move a child from public school to any other option, home school included, even when the report has not been substantiated. The Unicameral passed it 49 to 0, which says something about the reach of the investigation-delay idea; HSLDA opposed it anyway, and you can see where Nebraska now stands on its state page. The measure is a version of West Virginia's "Raylee's Law," named for a child whose death exposed gaps between schools and child-welfare agencies, and Nebraska is the second state to write such a delay into law.
West Virginia tried and failed. SB 972 and HB 5669 both aimed to restrict a parent's ability to withdraw a child into home schooling during an abuse or neglect investigation, and both died when the legislature adjourned at midnight on March 14, 2026. West Virginia's requirements did not change as a result.
Which provisions have momentum
The provisions do not all carry the same weight, in politics or in practice. The investigation-based restrictions, Nebraska's 14-day delay, and Connecticut's DCF screening, draw on real child-welfare cases and have support well beyond the usual oversight advocates; Nebraska's passed without a single no vote. The mandatory curriculum and outside-evaluation provisions are a harder sell and have not advanced as far, because they reach into how every family teaches rather than targeting a narrow set of cases. Whether you find any of it reasonable is your call to make. The value in knowing the model lies in separating the parts with real momentum from those that still live only on paper, so you respond to what is moving. A mandatory-curriculum requirement and a one-time investigation delay are not the same threat, and bundling them together is how a single Facebook post turns a narrow child-welfare measure into proof that homeschooling itself is under attack.
The other direction
Not every legislature moved toward oversight. New Hampshire went the opposite way. HB 1268, the Home Education Freedom Act, cleared both chambers in spring 2026 and went to Governor Kelly Ayotte's desk. It would make district notification optional rather than required, repeal the mandatory annual evaluation, and drop the requirement that parents keep records and instructional materials, while adding an optional certificate of completion for students who want one. If it holds, New Hampshire would carry some of the lightest homeschool rules in the country. Connecticut tightened its law the same year New Hampshire moved to loosen its own, which is the fuller picture: the states are not moving in one direction on this.
What you can do now
None of these rewards panic, and none of them reward tuning the topic out. A few concrete steps cover most of it.
Start by confirming what your state asks of you today, before any proposed change. If you are new to home education, how to start homeschooling walks through filing your notice the right way the first time, and knowing that baseline is what lets you tell a real change from a scary screenshot.
Sign up for HSLDA's legislative alerts in your state so a bill reaches you from a source that cites the statute, not from a comment thread. Then find your state homeschool advocacy organization, the people who testify at hearings and read bill text for a living; they knew about Connecticut's HB 5468 and West Virginia's SB 972 long before the panic posts did.
Keep good records, no matter what the law requires. Most of these bills turn on proof, and a family that already logs attendance, hours, and work samples has little to scramble for if rules tighten. HomeschoolFox tags each activity by subject and flags which subjects count as core, so your hours and record keeping stay export-ready. If you ever have to produce a portfolio or a year's worth of instruction, the work is already done. A clean attendance log and a folder of dated work samples answer most of what any of these bills could ask for, and they take a few minutes a day rather than a frantic weekend before a filing deadline. That same habit is what makes homeschooling day to day calmer, with or without new regulations.
