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Hi, my name is Natasha Hicks, and I’m the assistant director here at THEE. Today I’m going to talk to you about what we call the 75% Rule. A few years ago, Alberta Education let the school boards know that with home education, once a family has submitted 75% or greater of eligible receipts, we can reimburse the family the full amount of their family funding. Just some quick, quick general information about how the funding accounts work: the funding is per student, but it goes into a family account, so if you have one student or ten students, all of that funding goes under the parents’ names into a funding account for the family. The 75% is something that needs to be spent for the family, not per student, which is actually nice because then we’d have to track receipts per student and that would be a lot of extra work for everybody included.

So how this works is you submit your receipts to us, and you or you spend 75% of your funding or greater, and you get that last part, we can just send it to you. Now, there are a few different ways that you can receive your funding. You can receive it via purchase order or reimbursement request, or a combination of purchase order and reimbursement request. The simplest way would be the reimbursement request in terms of the kind of the accounting side of it, so I’ll kind of explain that for you first. Obviously, you have to fill out your reimbursement form and collect all of your receipts for us and you send those to us, and once you have submitted to us 75% or more of eligible receipts, we can send the full 100% out to you. Now, that can be anywhere from, I guess, October through May, and you can just submit that at any time. If you want to submit multiple reimbursement forms throughout the year, that’s not a problem at all, but once you do submit one that gets you to that 75%, you don’t have to request that 25%, we just do that automatically. If you have submitted receipts in the fall for your full amount of funding, that’s also fine, we can do the full amount right then and there, so it’s a little bit simpler, I guess in terms of it’s a kind of a one one-step process.

If you want to use purchase orders as well as reimbursement, or just purchase orders, you do still get that 75% payout. It just can be a little bit of a longer process because of the purchase order side of it. The purchase orders do take, I like to say, six to eight weeks to kind of process because of the accounting side of things. You get the purchase order, you go into the store, you make your purchase, and then the process begins. So the store has to send the invoice to us, we have to pay that invoice, and then they have to and then we have to, like once that invoice is paid, then we can we can, I guess, close out that purchase order because purchase orders, if you’ve used them, you know it is like you would. You don’t necessarily, it’s not based on an actual receipt, right? So you’ve requested an amount, you’ve gone to the store and spent a certain amount, maybe not the full amount, so that’s why it has to be until it’s totally paid before we can process your reimbursement. So it does take a little bit longer, but it’s not a problem, we can still do it that way. And if you’ve done all purchase orders, what happens at the end of the year is if you’ve reached that amount of your 75%, we go through all of our accounts to find out who has met that mark and hasn’t been paid out yet, and we just do payout amounts for everybody. If you know that you’ve used your amount with purchase orders and you’d like that payout done before the end of the year, usually what I recommend is just send us in some receipts for reimbursement because that’s where we’re going to see your account. Unfortunately, when we’re in there doing your processing of your purchase order, when we go into to pay the vendor, it doesn’t show us anything to do with your account at that time, so we can’t tell that you’ve met that 75%, which is why we just do that all at one time because we just don’t really have time to be going through everybody’s account multiple times a year because we do have a significant number of students that homeschool with us.

So if you think that you’ve met that 75% and you’d like to get it sooner, you can always send us a reimbursement request as well. If not, then we just do that up at the end of the year. But it’s all it’s all the same for everybody. So whether you submit reimbursements or get purchase orders or do the combination, you still get to take advantage of that 75% Rule and we pay out that 25% or less depending on exactly the the numbers obviously. But we do have to be able to track everything, which is why like I say the purchase orders just take a little bit longer. But yeah, once you spend your 75% or more on those eligible items, we can reimburse you the full amount, and Alberta Education, thankfully they’ve given us that a little bit of freedom there and we don’t have to, you know, ask you for tiny little receipts to kind of add up that extra little bit like we used to. So yeah, if you have any questions about any of this, you can just give us a call or email at our finance email address. Again, if you’re wondering if you’re at that 75%, you can also find all of your funding information on your parent account in PowerSchool, but you can give us a call or send us an email to [email protected] and we would be happy to answer all of your questions. Thank you, have a great day.