My grandmother supporting my daughter with an assignment. How to Start Homeschooling in Minnesota: A Step-by-Step Guide for Parents Deciding to homeschool your child is a big step—one that brings both freedom and responsibility. In Minnesota, families have the legal right to educate their children at home, but there are a few important requirements you’ll need to follow. Whether you’re just getting started or moving districts, this guide will walk you through each step, share important deadlines, and give you direct links to the forms and resources you’ll need. Step 1: Know Who Must Be Homeschooled In Minnesota, homeschooling is for children between ages 7 and 17 . If your child is younger than 7 and not yet enrolled in school, you aren’t required to register. But once they turn 7, the law applies. Read more on Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) Step 2: Understand Who Can Teach Most parents qualify automatically! Minnesota law allows parents to be the primary instructor ...

As parents and homeschoolers, we often strive to give our children the best education—one that nurtures their minds, spirits, and sense of self. We teach them math, reading, science, history. We guide them through social skills and personal growth. But there are parts of our culture that we carry in silence—lessons that are rarely found in textbooks, yet shape the way we move through the world. These are the unspoken rules and taboo topics —the things we don’t always say out loud, but our children still feel. And at some point, if we want to raise whole, wise, and conscious human beings, we have to bring those things into the light. In many African American families, unspoken rules have historically served as tools of survival. Don’t draw too much attention. Speak properly in certain spaces. Don’t challenge authority. Keep your emotions in check. These rules were often passed down with love—meant to keep us safe in systems that were never built for us. And in some ways, they worked. ...

As homeschooling parents—especially those raising African American children—we have a powerful opportunity to nurture not only academic excellence but something far more transformative: our children’s ability to think for themselves. In traditional systems, this kind of independent thinking is not always encouraged in Black children. In fact, the opposite often occurs. Black children are more likely to be disciplined for challenging authority, more likely to be viewed through the lens of adultification (treated as older or more responsible than their peers), and less likely to be seen as needing emotional or intellectual support. These realities, supported by research from the Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality (2017), limit opportunities for our children to develop confidence and autonomy in how they learn and engage the world. The history of African Americans and formal education is complex. Throughout the 20th century, scholars like Carter G. Woodson critiqued traditio...