Practice guide
How microschools track and report attendance when the schedule is flexible and project-based
A project-based day resists the register: there are no periods to mark, and the work that proves learning happened arrives days later. The answer is not a cleverer attendance system. It is two plain records kept side by side, and knowing which one your state actually asks for.
Written by the Pearspark team · updated · about 8 minutes
In short
Microschools keep attendance and evidence of learning as two separate records. Attendance stays an ordinary dated register — present, absent, tardy or excused, marked once a day per group by the adult who was there — because that is what compulsory-attendance law and most funding programs ask for. Project plans, observations, photos and standards ratings sit beside it as evidence of what was learned. A finished project is not a day attended, and reconstructing a register from portfolios afterwards is how schools fail audits.
The question is really three questions
"How do we take attendance?" in a project-based school is three separate records wearing one name, and most of the difficulty comes from trying to keep them in one place. Attendance is a dated statement that a child was in the school's care and under its instruction on a given day. Seat time is a quantity of instructional hours or days, which some states require and many do not. Evidence of learning is what the child actually did, and in a project-based school it is the interesting record — but it is not the first two, and it is not accepted in place of them.
The reason to keep them apart is that they answer to different readers. A compulsory-attendance question, a scholarship or ESA audit, and a truancy inquiry all want a chronological register with a mark per child per day. A parent, a board, and an accreditation visit want the evidence. A register that is derived after the fact from project milestones satisfies neither: it is not contemporaneous, which is the property that makes an attendance record worth anything.
This is also where a microschool's legal status decides the answer. The National Microschooling Center's sector census finds a slight majority of microschools operating as learning centers under their state's homeschool rules and under a third as nonpublic schools — two classifications with different duties, sometimes administered by different agencies. Work out which one you are before designing the record, not after.
The two layers, and what goes in each
Keep the first one boring. All the flexibility your program needs lives in the second.
- Layer one, the register: one mark per child per day, made on the day, by the adult who was there. Present, absent, tardy, or excused is enough vocabulary for almost every school. Do not invent statuses for how the learning happened — "off-site", "independent", "project day" are descriptions of the programme, not of whether the child was in your care, and a register with fifteen states in it cannot be totalled by anyone.
- Decide, in writing, what makes a day a school day for you, and put it in the handbook before the year starts. A project-based programme still has a calendar: the days you claimed to be open. That written answer is what an auditor compares your register against, and it is the document most microschools do not have.
- Mark the day even when the day is unusual. A field-research day, a mentor day, a day the group met at a park: still a school day, still one mark. If the circumstance matters, it belongs in the note on that row, not in a new status.
- Layer two, the evidence: dated, attributed, and attached to the child. Observation notes, photographs of work, project plans and milestones, the standards a lesson touched and how each child was rated against them. This is the layer that shows a project-based programme is a programme, and it is where your unconventional schedule is allowed to look unconventional.
- Tie the evidence to a curriculum map, not to the clock. "Taught, assessed, mastered" per standard answers what a sceptical reader is really asking — did this child learn the things you said they would — far better than a count of hours ever does, and it survives the fact that projects run at different speeds.
- Count hours only if a rule you can cite requires it. Many microschools are under no hours obligation at all. Some are: Florida's scholarship rules state both a day count and net instructional hours, and Minnesota reports project-based learning as a ratio of instructional hours against a fixed annual figure. If a rule binds you, record hours deliberately in whatever you already use for it — no attendance register produces them as a by-product.
- Report from the register, not from memory. What an oversight body almost always wants is per student, over a date range: days recorded, days present, days absent, tardies, and a percentage. Anything more exotic than that is usually your own curiosity, which the evidence layer answers better.
What Pearspark holds, and what it does not
The gaps are the honest half of this table. Two of them — instructional hours, and a field for where learning happened — are exactly the things a project-based school tends to go looking for.
| What you need | In Pearspark today |
|---|---|
| A daily register with no class periods | Yes. Attendance is taken per class per day, so a self-contained microschool with one multi-age group takes one register a day. A class does not need a timetable to hold a day's work. |
| Marks: present, absent, tardy, excused | Yes — those four, plus an excused/unexcused axis on tardies and absences, so an excused tardy is representable. There is no half-day mark. |
| A register that doesn't cry absence on a day you don't meet | Yes. Each class carries its own meeting days; the "no attendance yet today" chase-list and the attendance-gap report only expect a sheet on a day that class actually meets. |
| "Three tardies make an absence", per your handbook | Yes, and off until you set it. The number is a school setting, and you choose whether excused tardies count toward it. Converted and effective absences then appear as their own report columns, never silently folded into the raw counts. |
| Per-student totals over a date range | Yes: a CSV with days recorded, present, absent, late, excused, attendance percentage and campus, per student, for a term or any two dates. The percentage counts present and late over days recorded, so an excused absence still lowers it. |
| Instructional hours or minutes | No. Nothing in Pearspark counts them, and no report produces them. A school under an hours rule tracks that elsewhere. |
| A field for where the learning happened — on-site, off-site, virtual | No. An attendance row carries a free-text note, which is not a column you can total or filter a report by. If distinguishing modes is a reporting requirement for you, this is a real gap. |
| Evidence of learning, dated and attributed | Yes. Observations carry a note, an optional photo, an optional standard or subject, the author's name and the date observed, and can be shared to the family portal individually. |
| Proof a project covered the curriculum | Yes. Lesson tags record that a standard was taught, assignment tags that it was assessed, and ratings show current mastery per student — one report, per standard, across the school. |
| Students handing project work in online | No. There is no submission or portfolio module. Evidence is entered by staff as observations and photos; schools that need students to upload work use something like Google Classroom alongside. |
| An audit trail of attendance itself | Partly, and know the limit: every view of a student record is logged, but an attendance row records when it was created, not what the mark was before someone changed it. If a correction matters, write why in the note. |
| Something to hand an oversight body | Yes: a scholarship verification CSV plus printable per-student letters stating enrollment standing and attendance for the period, on your letterhead. Pearspark files nothing with any state — you send it. |
What your state actually asks for
Attendance duties are set by your state and by your classification within it, not by your schedule. Each guide cites the statute or rule behind every requirement, and says plainly what could not be verified.
FloridaFL
One annual survey to open, a daily register whose absence is a criminal offense, and a four-date calendar the moment you take scholarship money.
Read the Florida guide 10 cited requirements · 6 dated deadlines · sources as of 20 July 2026TexasTX
No state registration and no education-agency oversight — and then an ESA program that locks out any school under two years old.
Read the Texas guide 7 cited requirements · 3 dated deadlines · sources as of 20 July 2026ArizonaAZ
The enrollment affidavit is the parent's job, the immunization file is yours — and the ESA and the homeschool affidavit cannot both exist.
Read the Arizona guide 8 cited requirements · 4 dated deadlines · sources as of 20 July 2026OhioOH
Three statuses, and the one you pick decides everything — including whether you can take EdChoice at all.
Read the Ohio guide 10 cited requirements · 6 dated deadlines · sources as of 20 July 2026IndianaIN
A homeschool is legally a nonaccredited nonpublic school, so both run on one statute — and the duty is one line: keep daily attendance.
Read the Indiana guide 7 cited requirements · 3 dated deadlines · sources as of 20 July 2026UtahUT
The 2025 overhaul moved the homeschool record-keeping duty onto the school board — and Utah Fits All splits its rules at 150 enrolled students.
Read the Utah guide 10 cited requirements · 5 dated deadlines · sources as of 20 July 2026GeorgiaGA
Monthly enrollment reports to every district you draw from, a 5:00 p.m. records clock, and a learning-pod statute that forbids the state from regulating you.
Read the Georgia guide 14 cited requirements · 9 dated deadlines · sources as of 20 July 2026North CarolinaNC
The most explicit of the eight — notice of intent, attendance and immunization records, grade-banded testing, and the only stated retention period in the set.
Read the North Carolina guide 11 cited requirements · 6 dated deadlines · sources as of 20 July 2026All state guides — and an honest note about which states aren't covered.
The parts of Pearspark this guide describes
Each page states what the feature does today and what it does not.
The two layers, on video
Taking the register, logging an observation, sharing one with a family, reading standards coverage, and running a compliance report. A minute each.
Common questions
How do microschools typically handle attendance tracking and reporting when the schedule is flexible and project-based?
By keeping two records instead of one. Attendance stays an ordinary dated register — present, absent, tardy or excused, marked on the day by the adult who was there — because that is the form compulsory-attendance law and funding programmes ask for. Project plans, observations, photographs and standards ratings sit beside it as evidence of learning. The schedule can be as flexible as the programme needs; the register stays plain, chronological and contemporaneous.
Can a completed project count as a day of attendance?
No, and treating it that way is the most common mistake. Attendance is a statement that a child was in the school's care and under its instruction on a given date; a project is evidence of what was learned. Some states do let credit rest on mastery rather than seat time, but that is a separate question from the daily register, and no state accepts a portfolio in place of a contemporaneous attendance record.
How do you take attendance when there are no class periods?
Mark the day, not the period. A self-contained microschool with one multi-age group takes one register a day against that group. In Pearspark attendance is stored per class per day and a class needs no timetable, so a single class can hold the whole day; where a school does run several classes, the reports collapse a student's day to one status, and the more serious mark wins.
Should a microschool track instructional hours?
Only if a rule you can point to requires it. Many microschools have no hours duty at all, particularly those operating under homeschool statutes. Others do: Florida's scholarship rules state both a minimum number of actual school days and net instructional hours by grade band. Find the rule before building the habit — and note that Pearspark counts no instructional minutes, so a school under an hours rule tracks them elsewhere.
What attendance reports does a microschool actually need?
Per student, over a date range: days recorded, days present, days absent, tardies, and an attendance percentage — plus the ability to produce it for one term or one class. Pearspark exports exactly that as a CSV, adds converted and effective absences where a school has set a tardy rule, and can print per-student letters stating enrollment standing and attendance for a period on the school's own letterhead.
What counts as evidence of learning in a project-based microschool?
Anything dated, attributed to a person, and attached to a child: observation notes, photographs of work, project plans and milestones, and ratings against the standards a lesson touched. The strongest version ties evidence to a curriculum map rather than to the clock, so you can show that a standard was taught, that it was assessed, and how each child is currently rated against it.
If a parent reports an absence, does that mark the student absent?
It should not, and in Pearspark it does not. A parent's report is a note to the teacher — "Ella will be out Thursday, dentist" — and staff still write the attendance row on the day, from what they saw. Keeping the two apart means the register records what the school observed rather than what it was told in advance, which is the property that makes it hold up later.
Sources
Every figure on this page is read from the source linked below. Where no source could be found for a claim, the claim is not made.
- National Microschooling Center, American Microschools 2025: A Sector Analysis
- Education Commission of the States: Policy Approaches to Competency-Based Education
- Education Commission of the States: Instructional Time Policy 101
- KnowledgeWorks: Evidence of Learning — states' instructional time and attendance policies
- Minn. Stat. ch. 120A — education code: attendance and school calendar
- Rule 6A-1.09512, F.A.C. — 170 actual school days and net instructional hours by grade band
The full comparison behind each row
Each one is sourced feature by feature, last reviewed August 2026, and says plainly where the other system is the better choice.
See it before you decide
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