Well, welcome to another Q&A session. This will be a short video. I have five questions that I would like to answer, so let’s jump right in.

School Records and Enrollment
First question: Do I have to let the school that my son is registered in know that I will be withdrawing him and notifying with you?

The answer is no, you don’t have to because we will notify or inform your previous school through the official cumulative file request. That is an official term; it’s an official method that one school uses to tell another school that the child has transferred from that former school to the new school. Again, that’s called a cumulative file request, and we will do that. We have to do that for every child. You can notify the school of your decision to move, but you don’t have to. We will do that for you as part of our notification or registration process for you. So, moving to question two…

Funding and Purchases
Question number two: Am I eligible for the $850 for the resources or not because he already has registered at the other school?

This mom, and I’ve seen this question in other places, the parents have registered their son or daughter at a school, maybe the same school where they were before, but this would apply to any school, whether they kept the child at the same school, said, “Yeah, we’re returning, we’re coming back,” or maybe they already made the decision to go to another home ed program but then changed their mind and now they’re coming to to us. But this question really relates to any home ed program, not just ours. The answer is yes, you will still receive your $850 of home ed funding even if you’ve registered at four different schools. It doesn’t matter because the funding will go to the student where that student is registered as of September 30th. So you can change your mind right up to September 30th and still get your funding. I advise not to be moving moving around toward the end of the month for a lot of reasons, but the basic answer here is that you don’t give up your funding just because you’ve changed your mind before September 30th. So yes, you would get your $850 from home ed funding.

Forms and Logistics
Question number three: When sending the notice into the school board of my choice, meaning when sending the notification form to the school board, do I send in the curriculum plan as well or just the forms?

So what she’s asking is, do I just send the notification form by itself and I can wait till later to send in the program plan? And by regulation, the answer is no. You need to send in the notification form and your education program plan together, or at least by September 30th. That does cost some administrative extra work because some families will send in their notification form, let’s say, in April or May of a current school year before school years are even out, right? They’ve notified early just like any other school would conduct their registration early, they don’t wait till the next school year to do that. So the parent would send in the notification form let’s say in April or May and say, “Well, I’m not quite ready to send in that program plan yet, I’ll get to it.” Well, the “getting to it” doesn’t happen. Then all of a sudden it’s September, mid-September, late September, and your home ed program facilitator and office is contacting you saying we need that program plan because by regulation, we need both the notification form and the program plan together by September 30th. If you notice on the back page of four, page four of the notification form, part D, you’ll see instructions about the program plan and it says, “Please accompany the notification form with that program plan.” So Alberta Ed expects you, the parent, to get to your home ed program two documents: home ed notification form and program plan, along with an ID document as well, like a birth certificate, permanent resident card, things like that.

Question number four: Do I mail the forms in or can I talk to someone in person or through email?

So, you’ll need to certainly, well, you can mail the forms hard copy, and/or sorry, you can mail them in hard copy, you can fax them, you can scan and email them in. We do have a new online program, and it offers an online experience as much as we are currently allowed to offer. Alberta Ed is not allowing you, the home ed parent, to have a fully online notification process. Alberta Ed is requiring you to have a PDF document or even a paper document for the notification form, and then the program plan can be online. So that’s what we’ve done. We’ve created an online registration process that will allow you to upload your notification form as a PDF document, and then you would complete the program plan as an online form. You can’t just, you know, or cannot talk to someone in person. You can’t talk to somebody and conduct or finish your registration or your notification by just talking to somebody on the phone or just by sending in an email. You have to complete the forms, and again, the forms can come through paper, fax, scan and email, or our new PDF or our new online system. Our preference is that you would use our new online system. I think it just makes things easier for you and for us.

Funding and Resources
Question number five: If resources, if learning resources are bought before acceptance is issued to my child, are those non-refundable?

So what she’s asking, and I’ve seen several other people ask this too, because well she’s saying, “If I buy a learning resource before I join your home ed program, will you, THEE at Elk Island Catholic, will you honor that and that receipt and reimburse me for that learning resource even though I bought it before I joined your program?” And our answer is yes, yes, yes. There are some home ed programs that say to the home ed parent, “We will only accept a receipt from you for reimbursement if it’s on or after the date of joining us,” and I don’t know, that’s their internal decision. They have the right to make that decision. Here at THEE at Elk Island Catholic Schools, no, we don’t have that rule. We will honor a receipt, well, a receipt from the previous school year at any time during the previous school year. We recognize that families will buy their learning materials months and months before the next school year starts because they’re being prepared, they’re getting ahead of the curve as it were. Many of the families will buy their materials at the AHEA convention in Red Deer. Well, that’s well before notification happens for the next school year. So yes, we we don’t have any such restrictions on when or how old a receipt can be or how young a receipt needs to be. Again, we will recognize a receipt from any time during the previous school year, and this policy works well going into this new school year where Alberta Ed has changed the funding policies that now enable a home ed family to roll over unspent funds from one year into the next. So if you happen to have had a receipt from one year from an older year, well, you have funds from one year roll into the next. Now you have a receipt from the old year rolling into the next year. So it all makes sense to us, it’s a logical way of handling receipts. So, no, we don’t have any rule like that at all.

Alright, well, that’s it for this short five-question video. Thanks for watching.