How to File Your California PSA in 20 Minutes
If you're homeschooling in California under a Private School Affidavit (PSA), there's one date worth putting on your calendar every year: October 1st, when the state's annual filing window opens. It stays open through October 15th.
The filing itself is more approachable than its reputation. Most parents finish it in about 20 minutes once they know what they're doing. Here's the shape of it:
- You're registering your home as a private school with the California Department of Education.
- You'll need basic information about your school (yes, your home) — name, address, the ages/grades of enrolled students, and a few other standard fields.
- It's filed online, once a year, during that 15-day window.
The mistakes that trip people up almost every year aren't complicated — they're usually small things like registering under the wrong school name format, missing a required field, or filing a day after the window technically closed. None of it is hard to avoid once you've seen it done correctly once.
If you want a field-by-field walkthrough so you're not guessing, grab the PSA cheat sheet — it's built around the exact mistakes that generate the most follow-up questions from the state.
And if this is your first PSA filing and you're not sure what comes after it, Module 2 of the Homeschool Course for Parents covers PSA alongside every other legal path, so you know what you're building toward.
