About Homeschool Owl
Who runs this
Homeschool Owl is built and maintained by David Rupe, founder. To be upfront about it: David isn't a homeschool educator or a lawyer — he built Homeschool Owl to give homeschooling families one place to check their state's rules, track instructional days, and generate the documents their state expects, instead of piecing it together from scattered blog posts and outdated PDFs.
Because neither he nor anyone on this site is a licensed attorney, nothing here is legal advice — see our Terms of Service for the full disclaimer. What we can promise is that we tell you plainly where information comes from, and we fix it quickly when we get something wrong.
How we research state compliance data
Every state's tier, notification, testing, and reporting requirements are checked against primary sources — the actual state statute or regulation, and the state Department of Education's own published guidance — with HSLDA's state summaries used as a cross-check, not a primary source on their own.
Every state page shows the date that state's data was last checked, right in the disclaimer box below the summary. If a state shows no date, it means we haven't re-verified that page's data ourselves yet — that's disclosed rather than hidden.
Every state page has a correction form built in. If something looks wrong or your state has changed its rules, that report goes to a real inbox and gets reviewed — it's not a black hole.
How we research articles
The articles on this site are researched and written with a simple rule: every specific claim gets linked to a real, checkable source — a government page, an actual statute, an official institutional policy — not just a name-dropped organization. Where a commonly repeated claim didn't hold up against the primary source, we've corrected it rather than repeated it; a few examples are called out directly in the articles themselves. Where we couldn't verify something, we say so instead of guessing.
Contact
Found an error, have a question, or just want to say hi — that inbox goes to David directly.