Homeschool co‑op, umbrella and microschool software in Baltimore: Maryland wants a portfolio, and the 529 wants a school

Three people in Baltimore are starting a school year without a school. The first is a parent in Hamilton who took a nine-year-old out of public school in August and has just learned that the state wanted a signed form at least 15 days before the first lesson, and that Baltimore City will want to see a portfolio of the child’s work, in person, at the end of each semester. The second is the volunteer who keeps the records for a church umbrella in Perry Hall. Every fall, whoever holds that job has to tell Baltimore County, Baltimore City, Harford and Howard which of the umbrella’s children are continuing, which are new and which have left, and has to be able to show that every family had its conferences. The third is a former teacher in Hampden who wants to open a fifteen-student microschool next September at $9,000 a year, and whose first prospective parent has asked whether tuition can come out of a 529 plan.

None of them is doing anything unusual. Maryland’s school systems reported 40,653 homeschooled students in a partial count for the 2025–26 school year, 7,195 of them in Baltimore City and Baltimore County, and behind those numbers sit hundreds of umbrellas, co-ops, hybrid programs and small schools. What all three have in common is that homeschooling in Maryland is a matter of record. A five-part regulation decides which forms are filed and when, who may review a child’s work and how often, what an umbrella must report to each county, and what happens when a review goes badly. A different set of rules, at the NCAA, the College Board and the Department of Education, decides what a homeschooler’s records must show and, for the NCAA, who may sign the transcript. And under the 2025 federal tax law, a family can now pay up to $20,000 a year of K–12 costs from a 529 plan tax-free, but only, on the text, if the child is enrolled at a school.

Very little of that is visible in the software these groups use. The products sold to homeschool families are planners, the products sold to co-ops are membership and class-registration systems, and the products sold to small schools are student information systems priced for established schools; none of the ones we priced is built around what a Maryland portfolio must cover or what an umbrella owes a county. Many groups run instead on a sign-up form, a spreadsheet and a payment app, which works until the treasurer changes, a family moves across the county line or a parent asks for a receipt the tax rules will accept.

This guide is for the people who run homeschool co-ops, umbrella programs, hybrid schools and microschools in Baltimore City and Baltimore County, and for anyone choosing their software or building their website and online store. It starts with the market and what the software costs, works through Maryland’s home instruction regulation as the data model it is, the two very different ways Baltimore’s school systems apply it, what an umbrella owes each county and the three legal forms a microschool can take, then the new federal money and the records outsiders ask for. It ends with what Baltimore-area and national homeschool groups show families and machines online, how we would sell classes, memberships and curriculum, a note for readers in Lithuania, and what we would build. We are a software studio, not lawyers or tax advisers, and nothing here is legal or tax advice; where we read a statute or a regulation, we say so and link to it.

Baltimore’s homeschool market: about 7,500 children, 59 umbrellas and a sector growing faster than private schools

Maryland counts its homeschooled children through the local school systems, which report how many families have filed the state’s notification form, and the State Department of Education publishes the totals in a fifteen-year table, last revised on June 26, 2026. Before the pandemic the number barely moved: 27,742 homeschooled students in 2015–16 and 27,754 in 2019–20. Then it jumped 53.6% in a single year, to 42,632, and it never fell back to the old level. In 2024–25, the last complete year, the systems reported 42,151, still 51.9% above the pre-pandemic level, and the partial count for 2025–26, taken on April 30, 2026, was 40,653. In a June 2026 briefing to the State Board, the department put homeschoolers at 3.9% of all Maryland students, public, private and home-educated together, up from 2.6% in 2019–20.

Baltimore City and Baltimore County together reported 5,210 homeschooled students in 2019–20 and 7,487 in 2024–25, an increase of 43.7%. Over roughly the same years, enrollment in their nonpublic schools, preschools included, grew 3.3%, from 41,207 in September 2019 to 42,548 in September 2024, so even in absolute numbers more of the change went to teaching at home, 2,277 more children, than to private schools, 1,341 more. The County homeschools at about twice the City’s rate, 5.25% of its public K–12 enrollment in 2024–25 against 2.63%, and three of the counties around them higher still: 5.7% in Anne Arundel, 7.4% in Carroll and 10.1% in Harford. One caution about the newest numbers: the partial 2025–26 figures show the City up 81.7% to 3,488 and the County down 33.4% to 3,707, while the two together fell only 3.9%. That looks more like a change in how children were assigned between the two systems than 1,500 children moving across the city line, and we would not read anything into the split until the final figures appear.

The organizations around these families are numerous and small. The state’s register lists 358 organizations registered to supervise homeschooling, more than the 350 schools on its current list of approved nonpublic schools, and 59 of them are in Baltimore City or Baltimore County. The nonpublic schools themselves are often tiny: of the approved and church-exempt schools with K–12 students that answered the state’s 2025 survey, 15 of 45 in the City and 30 of 81 in the County had fewer than 50 students, microschool size in all but name. Many church schools do not answer at all; only 25 of the City’s 51 church-exempt schools did. And behind the organizations is a large self-employed workforce. The Census Bureau counted 2,096 educational businesses with no employees in Baltimore City in 2023, with receipts of $28.8 million, and 2,790 in Baltimore County, with $47.3 million, against fewer than 300 employer establishments in each. Many of them are the tutors, music and art teachers, former classroom teachers and coaches who teach the co-op’s Tuesday classes.

What families pay is easiest to see at the umbrellas that publish it. Among five Maryland umbrella fee sheets we found, the annual fee for a first child ran from nothing, for a church that supervises its own members free, to $540, with a median of $350; most charge less for second and third children, add an application fee of $100 to $150, and some charge extra for transcripts. Co-ops charge less, and microschools much more, as we show below. Nationally, the National Microschooling Center estimated in 2025 that about 750,000 children, roughly 2% of American students, attend microschools, with a median of 22 students per school, and its 2024 survey found 24% of microschools meeting in houses of worship and 20% in homes. Maryland publishes no count of microschools, because Maryland law has no such category.

What homeschool co‑op and microschool software costs, and what the meter counts

There is no single product category here, which is the first thing to understand about the prices. A family keeping its own records buys a planner. A co-op that sells classes buys a membership or registration platform. An umbrella that supervises hundreds of families across several counties needs something closer to a school’s student information system. A microschool that charges $9,000 a year in tuition needs billing above all. Each of those is sold by different companies, and each is metered differently: by family, by student, by staff member, by attendee, by registration or by a share of the money that passes through. We checked every price below on the vendor’s own page on October 12, 2026, and noted where the page did not exist.

The family tools are the cheapest and the most familiar. Homeschool Planet costs $84.95 a year or $9.95 a month, Homeschool Manager $49 a year, Homeschool Tracker $65 a year, and Homeschool Panda $5 or $8 a month, with its transcript report only on the higher plan. These are planners and logbooks that one family pays for and one family uses; Homeschool Tracker advertises state compliance packs and year-end portfolios for umbrella schools, but none of these pages mentions Maryland’s eight required subjects, and none of the tools sends anything to an umbrella or a county. Many families also pay $150 a year for membership in HSLDA, the national homeschool legal-defense association, which is not software but often sits in the same budget line.

For groups, the platform built most squarely for co-ops is Homeschool-life, which charges by family rather than by student: $9.95 per family per year for its Connections plan and $11.95 for Academy, which adds class tools. The plan table shows only those numbers; the page’s own code adds a minimum of ten families ($99.50 or $119.50) and a stated maximum of $2,497.45 or $2,999.45 a year, with “families beyond 250” free. Setup is optional at $250, text messaging is extra, and a branded app is $79 a year. For a 60-family co-op on Academy, that is $717 a year before payments.

Software for small schools costs more and counts differently. ClassReach, which sells to private schools, hybrid schools and co-ops, lists four plans at $175, $350, $700 and $1,320 a month, flat per school; its own page for the Lite plan says $150 a month, so it is worth asking which one applies. Sycamore School charges $4 per student per month with every module included, an 18-month minimum term and onboarding from $2,500, and publishes its own payment fees, which a school can absorb or pass on to parents: 3.9% on cards and, on bank transfers, 1.8% capped at $5 plus a Sycamore fee of 1% that it describes as always uncapped. TeacherEase’s student information system starts at $7.83 per student per year for schools under 100 students, and Transparent Classroom, popular with Montessori programs, charges $2.50 per child per month, billed on the children enrolled the month before, so a school closed for the summer pays nothing.

Class and registration software is where many co-ops end up, because what they sell looks like enrichment classes. Jackrabbit Class starts at $49 a month, metered by the number of students at month’s end, with its full tier table unpublished. CourseStorm costs $99 to $399 a month on annual billing, and adds Stripe’s card fees and $2.49 for every registration on every plan. Amilia SmartRec costs $99 or $499 a month plus a 1% service fee on every invoice, with onboarding from $899. Many churches, including some that run umbrellas, already use Planning Center, whose Registrations product is free for five attendees and then $15 to $239 a month depending on the size of your largest event, with US card payments at 2.15% plus 30 cents and bank payments at a flat 30 cents. Wild Apricot, a membership system many associations use, costs $66 a month for 100 contacts.

Several companies publish nothing. Brightwheel and Procare, which many preschools and child care centers use, ask for a quote; so do Blackbaud, Veracross and Gradelink, which sell to established private schools; Regpack’s pricing address now redirects to a different domain that shows only a processing rate. Six of the pricing addresses we tried returned “page not found,” in at least two cases because the prices had moved to another page. And the one price aimed squarely at people who want to start a microschool, KaiPod’s self-paced Catalyst 101 course at $49 a month with a one-time $249 fee, or $499 a year, was still listed at introductory pricing.

The subscription is the small number

The number that decides the bill is usually not the software. It is how families pay. A co-op that collects class fees through PayPal pays 3.49% plus 49 cents on a checkout payment, 2.99% on a goods-and-services transfer, or 1.99% plus 49 cents if PayPal has approved it for its charity rate; Stripe charges 2.9% plus 30 cents on a US card and 0.8% on a bank debit, capped at $5. On a few hundred dollars a family, the difference is small. On tuition, it is not. We modeled two Baltimore groups to show where the money goes.

Two things fall out of the arithmetic. For the co-op, the cheapest setup in cash is the one many co-ops already run, a form, a sign-up sheet and PayPal, and the most expensive, a school-management system or a platform that charges by the registration, costs $1,400 to $2,700 a year more, which is real money for a volunteer group but not the main cost of running one. The real cost of the cheap setup is the work, the volunteer treasurer matching 180 payments to 60 families and 100 children by hand. For the microschool, the payment method is the biggest decision on the page. If every family paid by card, the school would give up $6,138 a year more than if every family paid by bank debit, about 2.3% of its tuition and more than any software line in either model. A system that makes the bank option the easy default pays for itself before anything else it does.

Maryland’s home instruction rule, read as a data model

Maryland requires every child who lives in the state and is at least 5 and under 18 to attend public school, and then lists the exceptions. The one that makes homeschooling legal is item (a)(3) of Education Article §7–301: a child who “is receiving regular, thorough instruction during the school year in the studies usually taught in the public schools to children of the same age.” The statute says nothing about how anyone is supposed to know. That is left to the State Board of Education, which answered in 1987 with COMAR 13A.10.01, a chapter of five short regulations last amended in 2019. It takes about ten minutes to read, and almost every sentence in it describes a record: who creates it, who receives it, and when.

A family that homeschools under the supervision of its local school system starts by signing a statement on a form the State Department of Education prescribes and handing it to the local superintendent at least 15 days before the program begins. In signing, the parent agrees to three things: to teach English, mathematics, science, social studies, art, music, health and physical education “on a regular basis during the school year”; to keep a portfolio of materials that shows it; and to let a representative of the school system review that portfolio. Every year after that, before the school year starts, the parent verifies that homeschooling continues, and if the child’s status changes during the year, the parent tells the superintendent.

The portfolio is the center of the whole arrangement. The regulation describes it as “relevant materials, such as instructional materials, reading materials, and examples of the child’s writings, worksheets, workbooks, creative materials, and tests,” and says it shall be reviewed “at the conclusion of each semester of the local school system,” at a time both sides agree on. A review may not happen more than three times in a school year, its only stated purpose is to see whether the child is receiving regular, thorough instruction, and the school system “may not impose additional requirements” beyond the chapter. If a reviewer finds the program deficient, the superintendent must say so in writing, the family has 30 days to show that the problem has been or is being corrected, and only if it has not must the child be enrolled in a public or nonpublic school. A teenager taking courses at a college, such as the Community College of Baltimore County, can submit the college report card or transcript for those courses instead of portfolio material.

Read as software, the regulation is unusually precise about some things and silent about others. The unit is the child, not the family: each child has a supervision type, a date the notice was filed, a school year, eight subject streams and a portfolio of dated work. The counterparty is the local school system, and its calendar matters, because the review falls at the end of each of its semesters, and Baltimore City and Baltimore County run separate systems with separate calendars and separate home instruction offices. The regulation says nothing about what format the portfolio takes, so a binder of worksheets and a shared folder of photographs are equally acceptable under its text, and nothing about how many pieces of work a reviewer may expect per subject. That gap is where the practical friction sits: a family that keeps everything and cannot find the pages that show music and health, or a reviewer who asks for more than the rule requires and a parent who cannot point to the sentence that says otherwise.

One regulation, two school systems, two kinds of portfolio

The clearest proof that format is left open is that Baltimore’s two school systems, implementing the same five regulations, ask for portfolios that look nothing alike. Baltimore City Public Schools describes a paper object reviewed in person. Its home schooling page asks for a lesson plan or schedule, samples of instructional and reading materials, “adequate dated and graded samples of student work for each subject,” and samples of tests, assembled “in a tabbed notebook or pocket folder, with work arranged chronologically within subject areas,” with a composition or spiral notebook for each subject. The review is a face-to-face session of about 45 minutes with City Schools staff, and the result is one of three ratings: acceptable; acceptable but needing better evidence of instruction; or unacceptable, in which case the portfolio must be revised and reviewed again within 30 days. The City’s notification form, last revised in 2023, is a two-page PDF to print, sign and return, with a fax number still among its optional contact fields.

Baltimore County Public Schools runs what is in effect a document workflow. Families choose Option A, reviews by the County, or Option B, an umbrella, on the notification form, which a family already in the County’s schools can submit inside Focus, the County’s student information system. Portfolios are due at the end of each semester, which the County places between November and early January and between April and early June, and they can go in four ways: an upload form inside Focus, a Smartsheet form for families who would rather not log in, the mail, or a drop-off arranged by December 1 or May 1. Google Drive links are accepted if the reviewer is given view access. For students using an online program, an electronically generated grade report can stand in for work samples, and for a paper portfolio in kindergarten through ninth grade, the County says a description of physical education, art, music and health is enough without samples. Paper portfolios are not returned; after the review they are shredded. The reviewers are current and retired educators who are trained every year, and the County says deficient reviews are very rare.

Neither approach is wrong, and the regulation permits both. But they produce two different data problems for the software that families, umbrellas and co-ops use. A family in the City needs its records to print well, sorted by subject and date, in a form that survives a 45-minute conversation. A family in the County needs them to upload well, as PDFs and images grouped by subject, with a short overview of each. A family that moves from Hamilton to Parkville changes format at the county line, and an umbrella with families on both sides of it does not have to care about either format, because its families are supervised by the umbrella instead of reviewed by the county. That last point is a good part of why umbrellas exist.

The chapter also contains two quieter provisions worth building around. A homeschooled child may take the standardized tests the local public school gives its own students, if the parent asks. And when a homeschooled teenager applies to a Maryland public high school, the superintendent decides the grade and the credits by an evaluation that “may include administration of standardized tests and examinations and interviews with the child.” Both are reasons for a family to keep a record that would make sense to a stranger years later, which is also what colleges and the NCAA will ask for, as we explain below.

The umbrella: a church or a private school that files three lists a year

The alternative to county reviews is written into regulation .05 of the same chapter, and it is the part of Maryland homeschooling that looks most like a business with a database. A family may instead homeschool “under the supervision of” one of two kinds of organization. The first is a school or institution “operated by a bona fide church organization,” whose supervision must include, at a minimum, pre-enrollment conferences with the parents, textbooks and lesson materials designed for a child to use away from a school, and further conferences “at appropriate intervals.” The second is a nonpublic school holding a certificate of approval from the State Board, which must supply the same kind of materials and assign “a school-based teacher” to help the parent and to issue progress reports, mark papers and grade tests. Families under either kind of umbrella are spared the county’s portfolio reviews, though they still file the state’s notification form 15 days before starting.

What the umbrella owes the county is a set of lists. Every year it must verify with the local superintendent the students “whose instruction is continuing under its supervision,” notify the superintendent of students “newly added,” and identify students “no longer under its supervision,” and during the year it must report any change in a student’s status. Maryland has 24 local school systems, and an umbrella reports to the one where each child lives, so an umbrella with families in Baltimore City, Baltimore County, Howard and Harford has four superintendents to report to, each with its own office and contact. Baltimore County’s homeschooling office puts it plainly: umbrellas “provide BCPS with annual enrollment reports and notify the school system when the student’s homeschooling status changes,” and a family under an umbrella who wants written proof of its status can ask the County for an annual confirmation letter.

The state keeps the register. On October 12, 2026, the Maryland State Department of Education’s list of nonpublic entities registered to supervise home instruction had 358 entries. The list assigns 44 of them to Baltimore County, second only to Prince George’s County with 57, and 15 to Baltimore City. Most names are those of Christian churches, schools and ministries, Catholic programs among them, but the list also includes Islamic centers, Jewish programs and Quaker meetings, and eleven umbrellas give addresses outside Maryland, in the District, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia; one of them is Seton Home Study School in Front Royal, Virginia. The list is also a small lesson in data quality. It has a column for each organization’s classification, as an education ministry, a church-exempt school or a private school, and that column is blank for 230 of the 358; only 87 entries carry a state school number.

Behind each of those names is an operation that keeps records on children, reports to the state and, in most cases, charges families for it. Few of them say what they charge. Only two of the nine Baltimore-area church and school umbrellas whose websites we read published a homeschool fee, and across the five Maryland umbrella fee sheets we found, the first child cost between nothing and $540 a year. The obligations an umbrella takes on are a product specification in plain sight: a family record with each child’s county, grade and start date; a conference log that shows the pre-enrollment conference and the later ones actually happened; a materials record for the textbooks and lesson materials the rule requires; for approved-school umbrellas, the teacher assigned to each child and the progress reports, marked papers and graded tests that teacher issues; and, every year, three lists per county, produced from the same data rather than retyped. When an umbrella promises families that it will keep the county informed, that is the job it is promising to do.

A microschool in Maryland is one of three things

“Microschool” is a word, not a legal category, and Maryland law does not use it. What Maryland does have is a short and strict rule in Education Article §2–206: a “noncollegiate educational institution may not operate in this State without a certificate of approval from the State Board.” The statute exempts a few kinds of teaching, among them courses in art, music, dance, drama, sports, crafts or photography taken for personal enrichment, and tutoring or supplemental programs “to students concurrently enrolled in public or nonpublic schools.” On our reading, a homeschooled child is enrolled in neither. The regulation behind the statute then defines a school by headcount and habit: an educational program for “an organized group of students, at least two of whom do not have the same parents or legal guardians and at least two of whom are not being instructed on a regular daily basis by the students’ parents or legal guardians.” Organizations that only “supervise home instruction,” the umbrellas, are excluded from that chapter. So the legal form of a microschool matters from the first day, and in practice there are three doors, each with its own records.

Door one: an approved nonpublic school

An approved school holds a certificate from the State Board under COMAR 13A.09.09, and the regulation reads like an operations manual. The certificate records the school’s name, location, the legal authority that runs it and the grades it may teach, must be posted on the premises, and must be amended with 60 days’ notice before any change. Teachers of English, mathematics, science and social studies need a bachelor’s degree or 120 semester hours of college credit, and the school keeps a written statement of each teacher’s qualifications. The school must publish a daily schedule and a calendar of at least 170 days, plus three to five weather days, and give both to parents every year. It keeps a cumulative record for each student with twelve specified items, from the date the child entered and the grade on entry to performance in each curricular area and the number of days attended. A high school must require at least 21 credits and be able to produce a transcript for each year. Even its marketing is regulated: a school’s public relations information, “by whatever means provided, shall be accurate and may not be erroneous or misleading.” And one sentence closes the door on the smallest microschools: “A school may not be approved to operate in the living space of a private residence.”

Door two: a church-exempt school

A school “operated by a bona fide church organization” needs no certificate, but it is not invisible. It registers with the Maryland State Department of Education by filing a church-exempt registration form and documents showing that the church organization legally exists. Under the department’s fact sheet on church-exempt schools, it is exempt only from education regulations, not from zoning, health, fire safety, asbestos rules, criminal background checks, child abuse and neglect reporting or child care licensing. The State Board sets no educational standards for it; the governing church does. Without a certificate, §2–206 adds, an institution “may not receive State funds,” apart from school meals for children from nursery school through eighth grade; the state’s textbook loans and BOOST scholarships, described below, are built as aid to students. Many of the umbrellas on the state’s list are church-exempt schools that also supervise homeschooling families, and a microschool can be organized the same way, as a ministry of a congregation that lends it a building and its legal standing.

Door three: families who homeschool together

The third door is the one most co-ops and many small “learning communities” use, often without saying so. Each family files its own notification form and homeschools under the regulation, supervised by its county or by an umbrella, and the families share a teacher, a space, a schedule and the cost. Legally, the instruction remains each family’s home instruction, the portfolio remains each family’s portfolio, and the group is a service the families buy. The state has said where this door ends. Its home instruction FAQ accepts co-ops in which parents teach one another’s children “in certain subjects or on certain days,” or hire a tutor together, as a supplement, but says a co-op “cannot provide regular daily instruction to an organized group of students who are not in the same family because this may constitute an unapproved nonpublic ‘school,’” and that the department may then act against the co-op’s operators. On our reading, a group that meets two days a week with parents in charge is on one side of that line; a five-day program with a hired teacher and no parents is on the other, whatever it calls itself. Staying on the right side changes what the group can promise: it is not a school, it should be careful about calling itself one, it cannot issue a credential that means more than its own name, and its families are homeschoolers for every purpose, from the county’s reviews to the 529 rules.

Running alongside all three is child care law. The statute’s definition of a child care center excludes nonpublic kindergartens and nonpublic schools for grades 1 through 8, and a group of homeschooling families is not a nonpublic school. The licensing regulation, COMAR 13A.16.01.02, then sets the test in days and hours: an establishment that cares for children of different parents “on a regular schedule for at least 2 days per week and for at least 2 hours per day,” including a facility that offers “specialized training in a specific discipline or subject” together with a service such as transportation, free play, snacks, tutoring or homework sessions. Scouting, sports and youth clubs are excluded, as are programs that run for six weeks or less a year and the occasional supervision a church or similar sponsor offers while parents attend its own activity on the same premises. On our reading, a co-op that meets once a week with parents in the room is outside the definition, and a drop-off program that takes other people’s children two or more days a week, for two hours or more at a time, is the case to raise with the state’s Office of Child Care before opening, which our article on childcare software covers from the licensed side. And whichever door a microschool uses, if it has employees, Maryland’s paid family and medical leave program starts taking payroll contributions on January 1, 2027, under Labor and Employment §8.3–601.

The new federal money, and the schoolhouse door it stops at

Two federal changes from the 2025 tax law, Public Law 119–21, give homeschool families and microschool founders in Baltimore a new reason to ask about receipts. One widened what a 529 savings plan may pay for below college. The other created a federal tax credit for gifts to scholarship organizations, starting in 2027. Both are worth real money, both are easy to mistake for new money for homeschooling, and on the text both turn on the same question: is the child enrolled at a school?

The 529 sentence that did not survive

Since 2018, families have been able to take up to $10,000 a year out of a 529 plan, federally tax-free, for tuition at an elementary or secondary school. Section 70413 of the 2025 law did two things. For distributions after July 4, 2025, it rewrote 26 U.S.C. §529(c)(7) to add curriculum and curricular materials, books and other instructional materials, online educational materials, tutoring or educational classes outside the home, standardized and admissions test fees, dual enrollment fees and educational therapies for students with disabilities. And for taxable years beginning after December 31, 2025, it doubled the annual limit to $20,000. The tutoring category has its own conditions: the tutor or instructor must not be related to the student and must be a licensed teacher in any state, have taught at an eligible educational institution, or be “a subject matter expert in the relevant subject.”

The words that matter come first. All of those expenses count only “in connection with enrollment or attendance at, or for students enrolled at or attending, an elementary or secondary public, private, or religious school.” The version of the bill that passed the House in May 2025 went further. Its section 110110 was titled “Additional elementary, secondary, and home school expenses,” and it ended with a sentence saying the expanded list “shall include expenses … in connection with a homeschool (whether treated as a homeschool or a private school for purposes of applicable State law).” That sentence is in the House text and is not in the law that was signed. The IRS’s own guide for 2025 returns, Publication 970, lists the new categories without using the word homeschool at all, and defines an eligible school as one that provides elementary or secondary education “as determined under state law.”

So the question for a Maryland family is whether state law makes a homeschool a school, and on our reading Maryland’s regulation answers it. COMAR 13A.10.01 treats home instruction as an alternative to school, and when a family fails to correct a deficiency, the remedy is that the child “shall be enrolled promptly in a public school or a nonpublic school,” which only makes sense if the child was not enrolled in one already. On our reading that holds for umbrella families too: the regulation calls theirs a home instruction program “under the supervision of” a church school or an approved nonpublic school, though its wording for church umbrellas (“preenrollment conferences,” a “period of enrollment”) leaves room for argument. We are not tax advisers. The Treasury Department has said, in its scholarship-credit rules, that it intends to issue guidance on what counts as a school “as soon as possible,” and a family should take advice before relying on any of this. But a Maryland homeschool family that pays for curriculum from a 529 today is taking a position the statute does not clearly support.

The picture is different for a microschool or hybrid school that is itself a school. A student enrolled at a Maryland nonpublic school, approved or church-exempt, is enrolled at a private or religious school on any reading, and from 2026 the family can use up to $20,000 a year of 529 money for its tuition and, on the new list, for curriculum, books, online materials, tests and qualifying classes connected with that enrollment. That makes the school’s invoice a tax document. It should name the school, the student and the school year, and it should separate tuition from books, from online materials, from tests and from classes taught by outside instructors, because those are the categories the statute uses and the ones a family may need to show. Maryland’s own 529 tax rules follow the federal list, on our reading. A contributor can subtract up to $2,500 a year per beneficiary for deposits into the state’s college investment plan under Tax-General §10–208(o), and the state adds money back to income only when a withdrawal is not used for “qualified higher education expenses,” a term §10–205(h) defines by pointing to §529 itself. A 2026 bill, HB 930, would have taken K–12 spending out of those Maryland benefits; it went no further than its committee hearing.

The federal scholarship credit: thirty states in, Maryland out

The second change is a new tax credit in 26 U.S.C. §25F. From January 1, 2027, an individual who gives cash to a qualifying scholarship-granting organization can take a federal credit of up to $1,700, which Treasury reads as up to $3,400 for a married couple filing jointly. The scholarships go to students in households with incomes up to 300% of the area median who are eligible to attend public school, and they pay for the expenses on the older Coverdell list in §530(b)(3)(A), which covers tuition, fees, academic tutoring, books, supplies and equipment, uniforms and transportation a school requires, and computers and internet access, all tied to a student’s “enrollment or attendance” at a public, private or religious school. The House version had a homeschool sentence here too, and it was dropped here too.

Unlike the 529 change, this one works only in states that choose it. The statute leaves the election to “the Governor of the State” or whoever state law designates, and the state must send the IRS a list of qualifying organizations each year. On the IRS list of participating states as of September 14, 2026, there are 30. Virginia is one of them, because its outgoing governor filed the election days before leaving office in January. Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania and the District of Columbia are not. Governor Wes Moore called the program a “tax scheme” in a July speech, as WBFF reported, and the General Assembly settled nothing in 2026: a bill to opt Maryland in, HB 455 with its Senate twin SB 329, and a bill to forbid the governor from opting in, HB 930, all went no further than their committee hearings in February. The door is not shut for good: Treasury’s new rules let a state elect for 2027 until 11:59 p.m. on January 1.

Two details in Treasury’s proposed regulations of October 2, 2026 matter to anyone who sells to families. The first is that a donor “may contribute to any SGO without regard to the taxpayer’s residence,” so a Baltimore donor can claim the credit by giving to an organization in Virginia, although the scholarships it funds go to Virginia students. The second is the money trail. A scholarship organization may pay a family only a “qualified reimbursement” backed by a receipt that verifies both that the payment was made and that the expense qualifies; tuition and fees charged by a school must be paid to the school directly; other vendors can be paid directly only if they have been verified and are not related to the student; and the rules create a “qualified digital wallet,” a third-party platform where families submit purchase requests and approved vendors are paid. For a Maryland microschool, none of this applies while Maryland stays out. For a curriculum seller or a hybrid school with families on both sides of the Potomac, it is a specification for the receipt and the checkout, and it is coming in 2027.

Maryland has a scholarship program of its own, and it is not a homeschool one. BOOST, short for Broadening Options and Opportunities for Students Today, has existed only in the annual budget since fiscal 2017 and had $9 million in both fiscal 2026 and fiscal 2027. It pays scholarships to students who qualify for free or reduced-price meals and attend a participating nonpublic school, which must take part in the state’s textbook program, give national norm-referenced tests and agree not to discriminate in admissions, retention or expulsion on grounds that include sexual orientation and gender identity; the department says that “due to limited funding, we are unable to provide scholarships to every qualified applicant.” The textbook program itself, Aid to Non-Public Schools, lends students at approved or registered nonpublic schools textbooks, computer hardware and software worth up to $65 a student, or $95 and $155 at schools with more low-income families, from a $6.04 million line in the fiscal 2027 budget. A school qualifies only if its average net tuition is no more than $22,911, and this year’s applications run from October 20 to December 31, 2026. A microschool that becomes an approved or church-exempt school can apply for both. A group of homeschooling families can apply for neither, and Maryland has no education savings account or homeschool tax credit; bills to create them have been introduced and have died.

The records other people ask for: transcripts, signatures and student data

Maryland’s regulation stops at the end of each school year. It says nothing about transcripts, diplomas or grade point averages, and mentions credits only for a child returning to public school, yet those records are exactly what a homeschooled teenager is asked for at seventeen. The people asking are colleges, the NCAA, the federal student aid system and, if the student ever goes back, the local high school. Each has its own rules about what the record must show, the NCAA also has rules about who may sign it, and the differences are specific enough to model.

The clearest example is the NCAA. Its Eligibility Center page for homeschooled students treats a course as homeschool coursework when a parent, tutor or umbrella program plans and delivers the instruction, grades the work, decides the final grade and puts it on a transcript. It then assigns signatures by role. The parent must always complete and sign a homeschool administrator statement, “regardless of whether the student is enrolled in an umbrella program.” Transcripts “may be signed by an umbrella program administrator when the student is enrolled in an umbrella program,” but “if the program operates as a homeschool co-op, the transcript must instead be signed by the parent or guardian.” And in all cases the parent completes and signs a core-course worksheet for each course. In other words, the same class taught by the same person produces a document an umbrella may sign and a co-op may not.

Federal student aid is looser but still specific. A homeschooled student qualifies under 34 CFR 668.32(e)(4) either with a homeschool completion credential the state provides for or, where state law requires none, by having “completed a secondary school education in a home school setting that qualifies as an exemption from compulsory attendance requirements under State law.” Maryland’s home instruction regulation creates no such credential, so for a Maryland family the record that matters is the one showing that the exemption applied, year by year, under the county or an umbrella. On the testing side, the College Board gives every homeschooler the same SAT school code: “The high school code for all homeschoolers is 970000,” which also means scores do not flow to any school’s records unless the family sends them.

Then there is the question of who protects all this data, and the honest answer is: less law than most parents assume. The federal student privacy law, FERPA, applies under 34 CFR 99.1 to schools and agencies “to which funds have been made available under any program administered by the Secretary” of Education, which leaves out home education entirely and, as a rule, the co-ops, umbrellas and small private schools that take no Department of Education program money. Maryland’s Student Data Privacy Act covers only operators under contract with a public school or local school system, as we explained in our article on tutoring software. The state’s general privacy law, which does reach nonprofits, starts only at the data of 35,000 Maryland residents a year, far more people than a typical umbrella serves; our guide to that law explains the count. An umbrella’s roster of children’s names, birth dates, addresses, grade levels and, for some families, disabilities and custody arrangements is protected mainly by whatever its own policies and its software vendor’s contract say. That is a reason to read the contract, and a reason to collect less.

For software, all of this adds three requirements that the family planners we priced meet only in part. Each course needs a record of who planned it, who taught it, who graded it and who may sign for it, separately, because a co-op instructor, an umbrella reviewer and a parent can each hold one of those roles. The transcript needs to be generated from those course records rather than typed afresh in eleventh grade. And every record about a child needs an owner, a retention period and an export, so that a family leaving an umbrella, or an umbrella closing, does not take a child’s school years with it.

What 41 Baltimore-area homeschool groups show families, and machines

To see what families actually find, we built a list of the homeschool organizations that serve Baltimore City, Baltimore County and the towns around them, from Towson and Catonsville to Ellicott City, Columbia, Bel Air and Glen Burnie, and read their websites on October 12, 2026. The list came from the state’s register of umbrellas, the Maryland co-op and support-group directories on TheHomeSchoolMom, the umbrella directory of the Maryland Association of Christian Home Educators, and web searches. We found 46 organizations: 43 with a website of their own and three that exist only as Facebook groups or pages. Forty-one of the websites worked: nine umbrellas run by churches or schools, 14 co-ops, five hybrid programs, two microschools, two support groups and nine providers of classes and enrichment for homeschoolers. We read up to about sixteen pages on each, without registering, paying or contacting anyone, so a feature we report as missing may exist deeper in a site. One caution about the umbrellas: we matched only ten of the 82 umbrellas the state register places in and around Baltimore to a website, so this is a picture of those that are easy to find online, not of every umbrella.

The clearest finding is that the umbrellas, the organizations that families need first, are the least transparent about price. Two of the nine published a fee for homeschooling families, one of them Perry Hall Christian School, which lists a homeschool enrollment fee of $100 per student and sells it through its own online checkout; the other seven published nothing for homeschoolers, and two showed only their day-school tuition. Co-ops did much better: nine of 14 published prices, with family memberships from $75 to $450 a year and class or per-student fees on top. Four of five hybrid programs published tuition, from $2,552 to $5,000 per student a year, both microschools did, and so did eight of the nine enrichment providers. Not one of the 41 sites, umbrellas included, let a family book a portfolio review online.

The tools behind the sites are a patchwork. Google Forms and FACTS, the tuition and admissions system used by many private schools, tied as the most common ways to register, on ten sites each, followed by Jotform on seven and Homeschool-life’s hosted pages on five; five sites used Calendly to book tours or consultations, and five offered no online way to register at all. For payments, ten sites used FACTS or its TADS tuition plans, a few took checks, Square, Stripe or PayPal, and only three took a homeschool fee by card through their own checkout; 21 of the 41 said nothing about how fees are paid. Eleven linked PDF forms, packets or handbooks. Twelve published a statement of faith, and three asked families to sign or affirm it, a reminder that for many church umbrellas and co-ops the membership terms are part of the product and belong in the sign-up flow, not in a separate PDF.

For search engines and AI assistants, the picture is thinner still. Twenty sites carried structured data of some kind, but only one described itself as an educational organization, and that was a class provider whose site builder had generated the markup; just three exposed a price, all of them store products. Nine served a real llms.txt file, and four blocked at least one AI crawler in robots.txt. Most sites are kept up: 26 already mentioned the 2026–27 school year. But an assistant asked which umbrella near Towson costs least, or which co-op in Catonsville still has room in a ninth-grade biology class, would find almost nothing on the groups’ own pages to answer from.

Several groups show what a clear page looks like. Spartek Academy, an Acton Academy in Columbia, lists three tiers on one page with their deposits: $15,860 a year full time, $6,344 a year for a two-day program, and $120 a year for umbrella supervision that includes two portfolio reviews. The Baltimore Unschooling Cooperative answers its own fee question in plain words, $450 per family for the year, and runs sign-up through a Google Form and payment through a PayPal invoice on a free Google Sites page. The Howard County Homeschooling Community publishes monthly prices for each format, sells a $65 trial day in an online cart, books consultations through Calendly and says when its reviews happen. Divine Mercy Academy prices its homeschool enrichment at $285 per class period per child, with worked examples, and the Catholic Schoolhouse of Harford County publishes an itemized fee sheet. None of them needed custom software to do it.

What 88 microschools and co‑ops across the country show families and machines

To see whether Baltimore is typical, we drew a random sample of the same kinds of groups elsewhere in the United States. Microschools came from the school directory of the Acton Academy network, which publishes the websites of its affiliated schools, and from web searches in Dallas, Houston, Atlanta and Charlotte; co-ops and support groups came from the long-running state-by-state directories of the Homeschool World site. We took every microschool the searches found and drew the rest at random from the two directories with a fixed seed, 130 sites in all outside Maryland, and read each one on October 12, 2026, on its homepage and on one linked tuition, fees or registration page, without contacting anyone. Eighty-eight were readable, 57 microschools and 31 co-ops or groups, in 38 states. Because Acton schools are 44 of the 57 microschools, the microschool numbers lean toward one network.

The first finding is about the directories. Of the 70 co-op and group links we drew, only 33 led to a live website still run by the group. Thirteen were dead, ten pointed at platforms that no longer exist, such as Yahoo Groups and Webs.com, six had moved to Facebook, two Meetup groups had been removed, two sites sat behind a bot check, and four domains now served gambling, spam or an unrelated business. Homeschool groups come and go with the children who started them, and the web keeps their old addresses long after the families have moved on, which is one reason a parent looking for a co-op in 2026 has to work so hard to find a current one.

The second is about prices. Thirty-one of the 57 microschools published tuition, and for the 27 whose figures reduce to a full-time annual price, the median was $12,000 a year, with half between $9,498 and $13,905 and a range of $3,006 to $19,500; on top of tuition, six listed application fees of $35 to $100 and eight listed enrollment fees of $100 to $1,500. Co-ops publish much less: 13 of 31 listed any fee, the nine that gave an annual family membership charged a median of $35, and not one published a per-class fee on the pages we read. Thirteen microschools named a state education savings account or scholarship they accept, six of them in Texas; none of the 88 sites mentioned 529 plans or the new federal scholarship credit.

The third is about software, and it matches Baltimore’s picture. Only one of the 88 sites sent families to a school administration platform, Procare, and none to Brightwheel, Transparent Classroom, FACTS or Jackrabbit; online applications ran on site-builder forms, Jotform, Google Forms or, for nine of the groups, Homeschool-life. Only 11 sites had a working online checkout, while 16 more carried store or payment code that led nowhere. For machines, 42 sites had structured data of some kind, but only eight described themselves as a School or EducationalOrganization, none put a price in it, and 13 of the 16 llms.txt files had been generated by a site builder or plugin rather than written by anyone. A family, or an AI assistant answering a family’s question, can usually find out that these groups exist; it can rarely find out from the group’s structured data what they cost, when they meet and how to join.

A few sites show how simply this can be done well. Treign Up Academy in Hanover, Virginia, puts its application fee, activity fee, $9,600 annual tuition, technology fee and sibling and pay-upfront discounts in one table on its application page. TREAD in Atlanta publishes one price per school level. Creation Acres Montessori in Mint Hill, North Carolina, prices each program by four- or five-day schedule and names the state scholarship families can use, and B.E.A.M. Microschool in Dallas works through the arithmetic of its $19,500 tuition against a $10,000 Texas education savings account. None of that needs anything more than a clear table, which is the point.

How to sell classes, memberships and curriculum online without losing the paper trail

A homeschool group’s store sells odder things than most. A co-op sells seats in semester classes, one per child, often with an age range, a prerequisite, a supply fee and a duty the parent owes in return. An umbrella sells a year of supervision that only begins once it knows the child’s county and grade. A hybrid school or microschool sells tuition in monthly installments. Almost all of them sell something physical or downloadable as well: books, lab kits, T-shirts, a printed yearbook, or a curriculum PDF, which Maryland taxes as a digital product, as our tutoring article explains. Each of those has a different rule behind it, and the store is where the rules either get captured or get lost.

The catalog: classes with ages, seats and an instructor who qualifies

The first decision is to keep classes as data rather than as a page of text. A class record needs the semester, the meeting day and room, the age or grade range, any prerequisite, the number of seats, the fee and the supply fee, the instructor and, now, the instructor’s qualification. That last field is new because of the 529 rules: tutoring or “educational classes outside of the home” qualify only when the instructor is not related to the student and is a licensed teacher, has taught at an eligible educational institution or is “a subject matter expert in the relevant subject.” For a homeschooled child that may not matter yet, on our reading of the statute, but for a hybrid-school student taking a co-op class, or for any family in a state where the question resolves differently, a class that records who teaches it and why they qualify is a class a parent can document. Sibling pricing, waitlists that offer a seat when one opens, and a family’s volunteer duty belong in the same record, so that the treasurer is not reconciling three spreadsheets in October.

The checkout: memberships that collect what the umbrella needs

An umbrella’s checkout is really an enrollment form with a price on it. Before it takes money it should ask for each child’s name, birth date, grade and county, the date the family filed or will file the state’s notification form, and whether the child is new to homeschooling or transferring from another umbrella or from county reviews; where the umbrella requires families to affirm a statement of faith, the checkout should record which version they affirmed and when. Done that way, the purchase itself creates the record that the umbrella’s three annual lists for each county are built from. Of the Baltimore-area sites we read, only one umbrella sold its homeschool fee through its own online checkout.

The invoice: a tax document for some families, and a specification for others

For a microschool or hybrid program that is itself a school, the invoice now matters to the family’s taxes. It should name the school, the student and the school year, and separate tuition from books and instructional materials, online materials, tests, dual enrollment and classes taught by outside instructors, because those are the categories in §529(c)(7). It is also usually the family’s only proof: Maryland’s own plan says distribution checks for K–12 schools should be made payable to the account owner or the beneficiary rather than to the school, so the money reaches the family and the school’s invoice is what connects it to tuition. For a curriculum seller or hybrid school with families in Virginia or another participating state, the scholarship rules proposed in October 2026 add a stricter specification from 2027: scholarship money reaches a family only as a reimbursement backed by a receipt that shows both the payment and that the expense qualifies, tuition goes directly to the school, and approved vendors may be paid through a third-party “qualified digital wallet.” None of the 88 microschool and co-op sites we read across the country mentioned 529 plans, so a seller that issues receipts in that form will stand out.

Payments: make the bank the default

For tuition, the payment method is worth more than the platform. In our model, a $9,000 tuition paid by card costs the school about $205 more a year per family than the same tuition paid by bank debit at Stripe’s capped rate, so a checkout that offers the bank first and the card second, with the difference explained, pays for itself quickly. Whichever system a school uses, including FACTS, which ten of the Baltimore-area sites we read used for tuition, it should be able to say in one sentence what a family will pay to pay. For small co-op fees the difference is a few dollars, and convenience can reasonably win.

What Google and AI assistants can read about your classes

Search engines and AI assistants can do less to sell a homeschool group’s products than a typical store’s, and it helps to know why. Google’s course rich results are gone: Search Central removed the course info documentation on September 9, 2025, saying the type is “no longer shown in Google Search results,” and FAQ rich results stopped appearing on May 7, 2026. What survives is the course list, which needs at least three courses, each “led by one or more instructors with a roster of students,” and reads little more than their names, descriptions and providers. Google’s shopping system does not accept most of what these groups sell: its unsupported content policy excludes services, which it describes as labor, time, effort or expertise that do not result in a physical product, and bars PDFs and other digital books from Shopping ads, though not from free listings. Google’s new Universal Commerce Protocol, which lets approved merchants sell inside AI Mode and Gemini, runs on Merchant Center feeds, so on our reading a class seat or a membership cannot be bought by an AI agent there today; a box of lab supplies could be, if its seller is one of the merchants Google has approved. OpenAI, for its part, scaled back buying inside ChatGPT in March 2026 in favor of checkouts in retailers’ own apps and websites.

The map is not much easier. Google Business Profile’s eligibility rules exclude an ongoing class or meeting held at a location the organizer neither owns nor has authority to represent, so a co-op that rents a church hall on Tuesdays cannot list that hall as its own address, although, on our reading, a church that runs an umbrella from its own building may be able to list the church. Google appears to offer no homeschool category either; the closest in the published lists of its business categories are private school, learning center, tutoring service and the oddly named study-at-home school. And the answers machines give are only as good as what they can read. While we researched this article, the AI-written summary in one of the search tools we used told us Maryland requires two portfolio reviews a year; the regulation says reviews come at the end of each semester and no more than three a year, and the state’s own pages did not appear among the results that tool returned for whether a Maryland family needs an umbrella, which were led by HSLDA.

What remains is the group’s own website, and it is enough. A page per class with its schedule, ages, seats left and price in plain HTML; Event markup for open houses, curriculum fairs and graduations, which Google still documents and still shows; EducationalOrganization or School markup on the home page with the address where the group meets; and fees and policies stated the same way everywhere. Google says plainly that its search does not use llms.txt files, and Search Console has offered every site a switch to include or exclude its content from AI Overviews and AI Mode since August 31, 2026. Some other assistants may read llms.txt and the page itself, so a short file somebody actually wrote, saying what the group is, where it meets, what it costs and how to join, is cheap insurance; a curriculum seller on Shopify, such as Time4Learning, already publishes the machine-readable checkout profile that AI shopping agents look for, with a human approving each purchase. The test is simple: a parent who asks an assistant which co-op near Towson has a biology class for a ninth-grader on Tuesdays should get an answer drawn from your page, not from a directory listing that has been dead since the group moved to Facebook.

A note for readers in Lithuania

Lithuania came to home education late and wrote it down more tightly. A law of December 3, 2019, No. XIII-2593, added Article 31¹ on ugdymasis šeimoje, education in the family, to the Law on Education, in force from June 1, 2020. It lets a child be taught at home under the national pre-primary, primary, basic and secondary curricula, but only through a learning contract with a school: the parents sign it for a child under 14, and a child of 14 to 18 signs it with written parental consent. Before signing, the school assesses the family’s conditions and the child’s maturity and knowledge, and afterward it consults, supplies learning materials and periodically assesses progress and socialization. The law also says what Maryland’s regulation never does, that an education gained in the family is equivalent to one gained at school. The numbers are still small: 64 children learned this way in 2020–21, 187 the next year and 263 in 2022–23, as Delfi reported, and the family-education association counted 315 in 2023–24, roughly one pupil in a thousand. Most families attach to private schools: in 2022–23, 221 of the 263 did, according to LRT, although only about 100 of the country’s roughly 885 general-education schools are private.

The government’s implementing rules, Resolution No. 504 of May 20, 2020, read even more like a software specification than COMAR does. Families apply to a participating school between April 15 and June 1 for a September start, and each municipality publishes its list of participating schools by April 15. The assessment is concrete: the school inspects the home, which must have at least 1.7 square meters of study space for a school-age child, furniture that fits, daylight, learning materials and an internet connection, records an interview with the parent and the child, and answers within 30 working days. Parents must record what the child learned, what the child can now do and where the learning happened “no less than once every two weeks” in the school’s electronic diary; the school gives the parents, the child, the consulting teachers and a social pedagogue access to that diary and assesses progress twice a school year. If the child misses an assessment without good reason or fails a subject at the end of a period, the school may end the contract on eight working days’ notice and offer a place in ordinary classes. Where Maryland leaves the format of the record to the family, Lithuania puts it in the school’s own system and sets the interval.

That changes where the software lives. A Lithuanian family-learning parent does not need a portfolio builder so much as a quick, honest way to turn two weeks of work into an e-diary entry, and good materials to teach from, and much of that falls to tutors and workbooks. edtalk.lt, a Lithuanian tutoring platform, publishes its tutors’ rates, from €15 to €40 for a 60-minute lesson with a median of €30 in September 2026, and its workbook store sells downloadable mathematics and English sets by grade, among them a second-grade mathematics basics set at €7.99 and a third-grade self-check set at €25: material a parent can teach from and then point to when the diary entry due every two weeks asks what the child learned. For a studio like ours, the lesson runs both ways: in Baltimore the record is the family’s and the software has to make it presentable to two different school systems; in Vilnius the record is the school’s and the software has to make it easy to feed. Software sold to Lithuanian schools has two more rules to respect. The EU’s AI Act treats AI systems that decide admission, evaluate learning outcomes, assess the level of education a student should receive or watch students during tests as high-risk (Annex III, point 3), and the Digital Omnibus on AI, Regulation (EU) 2026/1744 of July 8, 2026, moved the obligations for those systems from August 2, 2026 to December 2, 2027. A tool that helps a parent draft the entry due every two weeks is a convenience; on our reading, one that evaluates the child’s results for the school is a high-risk system. And under Article 6 of Lithuania’s Law on the Legal Protection of Personal Data, a child can consent to an online service alone only from the age of 14, so an app for younger family learners needs a parent’s consent.

What custom actually costs, and when it pays

We price every project at a fixed fee, agreed before we start, and publish the starting points on our pricing page. For a Baltimore homeschool co-op, umbrella, hybrid school or microschool, the packages map onto this article like this.

Most of our projects land between $6,000 and $30,000, and none requires you to give up a form, a payment processor or an accounting package that already works; the demos page shows finished work. In Maryland, the state’s 3% tax on software and IT services applies to a custom build, so the Online Store package starts at $6,180 with tax.

Whether it pays is mostly arithmetic, and for most co-ops the honest answer is that it does not. A 60-family co-op that collects $22,500 a year is well served by Homeschool-life or by a form and a payment link, which in our model cost it about $540 to $1,420 a year in software and fees together, and no custom build would be cheaper to own than that. The case changes with size and with tuition. In our microschool model, each student whose tuition moves from card to bank payment saves the school about $205 a year at $9,000 tuition; if a store and billing setup that makes bank payment the default moved 20 of the 30 students, the school would keep about $4,100 a year, and the Online Store package at $6,180 with tax would pay for itself in about 18 months, before counting the hours it saves. For an umbrella, the return is in volunteer hours and in the lists that go to each county being right, which is harder to price but easy to feel in September.

What we would build for a Baltimore umbrella, co‑op or microschool

If a Baltimore homeschool group asked us to fix the problems in this article without replacing anything that already works, this is what we would build, roughly in this order.

• A family and child record that knows Maryland. Each child with a county, a supervision type (county reviews or an umbrella), the date the notification form went in, a school year, a grade and a history of status changes, so that the 15-day notice, the annual verification and every change of status are dates in a record rather than memories.
• A portfolio that sorts itself. Work uploaded or photographed once, tagged by child, subject and date, with a check that all eight required subjects are covered before a review, a printable binder for a Baltimore City review and an upload package for Baltimore County’s forms, and an online program’s grade report attached where that is what a reviewer accepts.
• An umbrella’s reporting desk. A log of every pre-enrollment conference and every later one, the materials each family received, the teacher assigned to each child where the umbrella is an approved school, and the three annual lists for each superintendent generated from the same data, with change notices sent when they happen.
• A store for classes, memberships and tuition. Classes kept as data, with ages, prerequisites, seats, fees and the instructor’s qualifications; memberships that collect what the umbrella needs at checkout; tuition plans with bank payment as the default; curriculum and kits with their tax; and an invoice that separates tuition, books, online materials, tests and outside classes for the families who will need it.
• Transcripts with the right signatures. Course records that say who planned, taught, graded and may sign for each course, a transcript generated from them, and the fields the NCAA’s core-course worksheet asks for, so that a parent, a co-op instructor and an umbrella administrator each sign only what they are entitled to sign.
• One set of facts for people and machines. Fees, policies, statement of purpose, meeting places and contact details published the same way on every page, in structured data and in a short llms.txt someone actually wrote, with a retention rule and a full export for every family’s records.

For a group that already runs Homeschool-life, Planning Center, school-management software or a set of forms, most of this sits beside it rather than replacing it. The payment processor, the accounting package and the tools volunteers already know stay where they are; the record, the portfolio, the reporting desk, the store, the transcript and the published facts are the parts we would build and hand over to you to own.

Build, buy, or leave it alone

Most homeschool groups should buy, and many should keep what they have. A family needs a planner, and Homeschool Planet, Homeschool Tracker or a well-kept folder of photographs will do. A co-op of a few dozen families is well served by a platform priced per family, such as Homeschool-life, or by a sign-up form and a payment link run by a careful treasurer. On our arithmetic the software is one of the smallest costs a co-op has, and the people behind these products understand volunteer-run groups better than any studio does. Choose by the meter, per family, per student, per registration or flat, and treat the payment processor as part of the same decision, because for anything that collects tuition it will cost more than the software.

Then ask every vendor six questions, in writing, before you sign or renew. Can each child’s record hold a county, a supervision type, a notification date and a history of status changes, and can I report on them? Can the system produce, for an umbrella, the lists of continuing, new and departed students for each local school system, and a change notice when a family leaves? Can families upload portfolio work by subject and date, and can I export a child’s complete record, files included, whenever I like? Can a transcript record who taught and graded each course, and can it be signed by the right person? Do you support bank payments, at what fee, and can a family’s invoice separate tuition from books, materials, tests and outside classes? And what do you do with the children’s data, who can see it, and how do I delete it? A vendor that answers all six well has earned the renewal.

If you run an umbrella, the asset worth protecting is the record of which children you supervise, in which county, since when, and what conferences and materials each family has had. That record should belong to the umbrella, not to a volunteer’s laptop or a vendor’s database, and it should survive the volunteer who built it. If you run a microschool, settle the legal question before the software question: whether you are an approved nonpublic school, a church-exempt school or a group of home-instructing families decides what you must record, what your families may pay from a 529 plan and what your enrollment contract has to say. And if you collect tuition, make the bank payment the easy choice; in our model that one setting is worth more than any software subscription on the page.

Leave alone what is cheap and works: the payment link, the accounting package, the group chat, the shared calendar. Build the few things listed above, which no platform we priced sells to a Baltimore umbrella or microschool in a form the group controls. Our guide to custom software in Baltimore explains how we work, our article on tutoring and test-prep software covers background checks, Maryland’s student data law and the sales tax on workbooks, our article on childcare software covers the licensing side that a drop-off program can run into, and our article on nonprofit software covers donations and the reporting a charity owes. If you want to find out which of these would pay for you, bring us a year of rosters, fees and payments, and we will show you.

Questions Baltimore homeschool families, umbrellas and microschools ask us

Do I need an umbrella to homeschool in Maryland?

No. Maryland gives families two ways to meet its home instruction regulation, COMAR 13A.10.01. Under the first, which Baltimore County calls Option A, the local school system reviews a portfolio of the child’s work at the end of each semester, no more than three times a year. Under the second, Option B, the family homeschools under the supervision of an umbrella: a school or ministry operated by a bona fide church organization, or a nonpublic school approved by the State Board of Education. Either way, the family must file the state’s notification form with the local school system at least 15 days before instruction starts. On October 12, 2026, the state’s register listed 358 umbrellas, 44 of them assigned to Baltimore County and 15 to Baltimore City.

How do homeschool portfolio reviews work in Baltimore City and Baltimore County?

Both systems review portfolios at the end of each semester under the same regulation, but in different ways. Baltimore City Public Schools asks for a tabbed notebook or pocket folder with dated and graded work for each subject, arranged chronologically, and holds a face-to-face review of about 45 minutes, rated acceptable, acceptable but needing better evidence, or unacceptable, in which case the portfolio must be revised and reviewed again within 30 days. Baltimore County Public Schools accepts portfolios through an upload form in its Focus system, a Smartsheet form, the mail or an arranged drop-off, between November and early January and between April and early June, and, for paper portfolios in kindergarten through ninth grade, accepts a description of physical education, art, music and health without work samples.

What must a Maryland homeschool portfolio include?

The regulation requires instruction in English, mathematics, science, social studies, art, music, health and physical education, and a portfolio of “relevant materials, such as instructional materials, reading materials, and examples of the child’s writings, worksheets, workbooks, creative materials, and tests” that shows regular, thorough instruction in those subjects. It does not set a format or a number of samples, and a local school system “may not impose additional requirements” beyond the regulation. College course report cards can replace portfolio material for courses a teenager takes at a college.

What does a homeschool umbrella do in Maryland, and what does it cost?

A church umbrella must provide, at a minimum, pre-enrollment conferences, textbooks and lesson materials designed for use at home, and further conferences at appropriate intervals; an umbrella that is an approved nonpublic school must provide materials and assign a school-based teacher who issues progress reports, marks papers and grades tests. Every year the umbrella tells each local superintendent which of its students are continuing, which are new and which have left. Prices are rarely published: on the websites we read in October 2026, two of nine Baltimore-area church and school umbrellas listed a homeschool fee. Among five Maryland umbrella fee sheets we found, the annual fee for a first child ranged from nothing, at a church that supervises its own members free, to $540, with a median of $350; most charge less for siblings and add an application fee of $100 to $150. Spartek Academy in Columbia lists umbrella supervision with two portfolio reviews a year at $120.

Can I use a 529 plan for homeschool expenses?

Probably not for a Maryland homeschool, on the text of the law. The 2025 tax law widened K–12 529 spending to curriculum, books, online materials, qualifying tutoring and classes outside the home, tests, dual enrollment and therapies, and raised the annual limit to $20,000 from 2026, but only for expenses “in connection with enrollment or attendance at, or for students enrolled at or attending, an elementary or secondary public, private, or religious school.” The House version included a sentence covering homeschools; the enacted law does not. On our reading, Maryland’s regulation treats home instruction, including under an umbrella, as an alternative to enrollment rather than enrollment itself. Treasury has said it will issue guidance on what counts as a school, so take tax advice before relying on any reading, including ours.

Can 529 money pay for microschool tuition in Maryland?

Yes, on our reading, if the microschool is itself a school: a nonpublic school with a certificate of approval from the State Board of Education, or a church-exempt school registered with the state. A student enrolled there is enrolled at a private or religious school, so from 2026 a family can pay up to $20,000 a year of tuition and related K–12 expenses from a 529 plan federally tax-free. A microschool that is really a group of home-instructing families sharing a teacher is a different case, and its families are in the same position as other homeschoolers. Either way, the invoice should name the school, the student and the year and separate tuition from books, materials, tests and outside classes.

Has Maryland opted into the federal tax credit scholarship?

Not as of the IRS list dated September 14, 2026, which names 30 participating states for 2027, including Virginia but not Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania or the District of Columbia. Governor Wes Moore called the program a “tax scheme” in July 2026, and in the 2026 session neither a bill to opt Maryland in, HB 455, nor a bill to forbid it, HB 930, advanced past its committee hearing. A state can still elect for 2027 until 11:59 p.m. on January 1, 2027. Maryland residents can claim the credit of up to $1,700 by giving to a scholarship organization in a participating state, but those scholarships go to students in that state.

Is it legal to start a microschool in Maryland?

Yes, but it has to be one of a few things. Education Article §2–206 says a noncollegiate educational institution “may not operate in this State without a certificate of approval from the State Board,” unless it is operated by a bona fide church organization, in which case it must register with the state as a church-exempt school. The other common form is a group of families who each homeschool under the regulation, with their county or an umbrella, and share a teacher, a space or classes, but the state’s FAQ says such a co-op cannot provide regular daily instruction to an organized group of students from different families without risking being treated as an unapproved school, and an approved school may not operate in the living space of a private residence. A drop-off program that cares for other families’ children at least two days a week for two hours or more may also need a child care license. Which of these you are decides what you must record, what you may call yourself and whether families can use 529 money.

Can homeschooled students play sports at their public school in Maryland?

Maryland has no law that requires it. Bills to let homeschooled students join public school athletics or extracurricular activities, often called “Right to Play” or “Tebow” bills, were introduced in 2016, 2018, 2022, 2024 (as a Calvert County pilot), 2025 and twice in 2026, and none passed. The 2026 bills, HB 1043 and HB 1528, ended the session in committee, as did bills to let homeschooled students in Washington County use the state’s dual-enrollment grants.

How much does homeschool co-op software cost?

On October 12, 2026, Homeschool-life charged $9.95 or $11.95 per family per year, with a ten-family minimum and a cap at 250 families; ClassReach listed plans from $150 or $175 to $1,320 a month; Sycamore School charged $4 per student per month with an 18-month minimum and onboarding from $2,500; Jackrabbit Class started at $49 a month; and CourseStorm charged $99 to $399 a month plus $2.49 per registration. In our model of a 60-family co-op collecting $22,500 a year, software and payment fees together came to between about $540 and $3,390 a year, and for a 30-student microschool, card payments instead of bank payments cost $6,138 a year more.

Who signs a homeschool transcript for the NCAA?

It depends on who runs the program. The NCAA Eligibility Center says a transcript “may be signed by an umbrella program administrator when the student is enrolled in an umbrella program,” but if the program operates as a homeschool co-op, the parent or guardian must sign it. The parent always completes and signs the homeschool administrator statement and the core-course worksheets. For the SAT, every homeschooler uses the College Board’s high school code 970000.

Should a homeschool co-op build custom software?

Usually not. A co-op of a few dozen families is well served by a per-family platform or a form and a payment link, and in our model either costs less than $1,500 a year in software and fees together. Custom software starts to make sense for an umbrella that reports to several counties every year and has outgrown a spreadsheet, or for a microschool that collects tuition, where moving families from cards to bank payments alone can be worth thousands of dollars a year. Our Online Store package starts at $6,000, or $6,180 with Maryland’s 3% tax on software services.