South Dakota’s homeschooling movement has outpaced every other state in terms of growth, going from 4,333 students in 2015-16 to 10,536 students in 2023-2024 –that’s a 143% increase! This drastic rise is due in part to former Governor Kristi Noem backing the effort to protect parental choice and loosen compulsory attendance laws in 2021. South Dakota has great homeschool laws, and more families are taking responsibility for the education of their children.

Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) ranks South Dakota as a “low regulation” state. Unfortunately, threats are looming on the horizon. Legislators have already told the media they plan to seek additional “oversight” and “improve accountability” over homeschool families.

We expect to see a number of harmful bills to surface this year, including an annual report of notice to homeschool. Additionally, we obtained leaked emails that confirm the possibility of a bill to revoke a family’s ability to homeschool in certain situations.

Prior to 2021, parents were required to inform their local school district annually of their intention to homeschool. In 2021 the law was amended to a one-time notification, as the annual notice served no real purpose and created confusion. It was also used as a way to harass and intimidate homeschool families.

I can remember clearly the morning as a young kid when I answered our landline phone, and on the other line was a mother in tears. She was terrified, and explained that her family was facing truancy charges – she explained that she needed to get ahold of legal representation right away. My parents served on the board of the statewide homeschool group at the time, which is why she called our house (and why I knew where to go in my mom’s contact book to find the Homeschool Legal Defense Association). Later that day, we discovered the rest of the story – the family was not facing legitimate truancy charges, but rather an idle threat from a school district acting outside its legal authority and playing games.

Here’s what happened: The family had submitted their annual paperwork as usual, but the school decided not to approve it – something they didn’t have the authority to do. The school could not approve or reject their paperwork, because the annual notice was just that: a notification (not an application). Nevertheless, the school decided to reject the notice and started counting the days as absent (without telling the family). They waited until the family had “missed” enough days at school to be truant and made the threatening phone call. I wish stories like this had been rare, but they were not.

“The annual notice seems like a simple requirement, but year after year we saw it cause chaos and confusion,” Monica Tanner, former president of South Dakota Christian Home Educators (SDCHE), shared with us recently.

The yearly notice requirement was abandoned not only because it was ineffective, but because it infringed on the fundamental rights of parents to direct the upbringing and education of their children without government interference.

Monica from SDCHE shared a glimpse of the challenges faced by homeschool families under pre-2021 annual-report laws:

• District offices insisted on parents submitting their children’s birth certificates with the form, despite other options such as an affidavit with a witness or a notary seal.
• Districts insisted that all three forms of verification were completed, rather than one. Parents had to submit their children’s birth certificates, have an affidavit with witnesses, and a notary seal.
• The yearly notice forms included a school board sign-off, which resulted in families (especially military families) left in a truancy status until the next board meeting – if they had time to address the homeschool forms that meeting. Until the board approved the forms, the families were informed that they MUST enroll their children in the public school. Oftentimes, school boards would not approve ANY homeschool forms in an effort to corral families back into the “public school fold,” arbitrarily deciding that children were not appropriately served by homeschooling.
• District offices would ask what curriculum would be used – information the parents were not legally required to provide. The districts would then mandate that they use the district curriculum (another nonexistent legal requirement), of which only scraps and leftovers were provided.
• Parents were required to declare their children’s ethnicity on the annual notice form, and if they failed to do so, one would be randomly assigned to them.
• District offices would assign grade levels to children inconsistent with what the parents provided on the forms.
• District offices insisted on students taking the standardized testing provided by the district, and often told parents that their children could not graduate or obtain a diploma. The offices also told parents that homeschooling is not accredited and their children must be enrolled in an accredited online program approved by the district. Neither of these were true.

Here’s the bottom line: government bureaucracy harms homeschool families.

Making parents jump through hoops to educate their children at home is a violation of parental rights and educational freedom – and we won’t stop until every bill that attempts to needlessly regulate homeschooling in South Dakota is shut down.

Stay tuned – Each of these harmful bills will be posted on our 2026 Legislative Radar and we will need your help to stop them!

You can also make plans to join us January 27 for our Day at the Capitol and talk with your legislators face-to-face about the importance of homeschool freedoms in South Dakota.