A homeschool co-op is not a small nonprofit with different vocabulary. Service hours are owed by the family rather than the individual, fees stack instead of arriving as one tuition number, and the thing that breaks a co-op day is a parent teaching in one room while rostered as a helper in another. Generic nonprofit templates miss all three, so we built eight workbooks that do not.
They are free, they need no account, and every one is a real .xlsx with live formulas — not a picture of a spreadsheet. The hub at volunteerbadge.com/homeschool-co-op-toolkit lists all eight alongside a six-month launch sequence, or find them under Homeschool Co-op Toolkit on volunteerbadge.com/tools.
The eight workbooks
- Enrollment & Roster — linked Families and Students tabs joined by a Family ID, with the allergy and photo-consent columns your teachers need on a class roster, plus counts by grade.
- Tuition & Fee Tracker — bills the full stack: registration fee per family, semester fees, a building fee where you lease space, and per-class supply fees. Nets off scholarships and shows balances, arrears and your collection rate.
- Service Hours Tracker — logs every shift and credits it to the family, whichever adult showed up. Measures each family against your requirement and calculates the buyout owed on unserved hours, after any grace allowance you set.
- Schedule Builder — lay out periods, rooms and classes. The Conflicts tab flags a room booked twice, a teacher rostered in two places in one period, and any class over capacity.
- Teaching Assignments — who leads, assists and covers, what they are actually good at, and which periods they cannot take. The Load tab flags anyone leading three or more classes.
- Annual Budget — pre-filled with real co-op lines including facility rent, liability insurance, background checks, nursery supplies and buyout income, with budget-versus-actual variance, cost per family, and a monthly cash-flow tab.
- Screening Tracker — every adult with student contact, when their check cleared, and when it expires. Status colors itself Cleared, Renew soon, Expired or Not screened as dates pass.
- Field Trip Planner — permission slips, adult ratios, driver seats and payments, with a readiness summary to read the night before.
The five documents
The paperwork a co-op adopts once and then lives with. Each downloads as editable Word or PDF.
- Bylaws — nine articles covering membership, dues, board and officers, meetings and quorum, finances with dual-signature control, child protection, dissolution and amendment.
- Parent handbook — the co-op day, enrollment and fees, service hours, behavior and discipline, health and illness, safety, and how your co-op communicates.
- Family agreement — a signable one-pager with commitments running both ways, plus optional photo consent.
- Teaching parent role description — honest time commitment including prep, and explicit boundaries on discipline, medication, transport and one-to-one contact.
- Child protection policy — the two-adult rule, contact boundaries, screening intervals, how to raise a concern and how to respond to a disclosure.
Two deliberate choices in these. Blanks stay blank: where your co-op has to decide something — quorum, fiscal year, required hours, buyout rate — the template leaves a fill-in rather than inventing a number that would read as our recommendation. And they state no law: nonprofit requirements and child-protection reporting duties both vary by state, so the child protection policy prompts you to confirm and record yours rather than summarizing them. Have the bylaws and the policy reviewed locally before you adopt them.
How to use them
Open a tool, fill in as much or as little as you like — every co-op field is optional — and download. Naming your co-op puts it in the workbook header; setting your fees or required hours pre-fills the tabs that calculate from them. Tick Include a few example rows if you want to see the format before clearing it out. The sample rows say they are samples so nobody ships a roster with our fake families in it.
The workbooks are yours. Rename tabs, add columns, delete what you do not use — nothing phones home and nothing you type is stored.
State requirements
Whether a co-op has to incorporate, and whether it must register before collecting money, is state law — and the answer is usually an exemption with conditions rather than a yes or no. We publish per-state pages at the toolkit hub, and each claim carries a badge saying where it came from: statute means we read the cited section, agencymeans it is the regulator’s own published guidance, and unverified means we could not confirm it and the page says so rather than guessing.
Only states we have actually read the law for get a page — an unresearched state returns a 404 rather than a generated stub. If your state is missing, that is why. Formation and registration are also kept separate from volunteer screening requirements, which have their own cited dataset, so the two can never quietly disagree.
Where screening fits
The Screening Tracker works whoever runs your checks. If you would rather not maintain the dates by hand, VolunteerBadge screens teaching parents, tutors and helpers for $5 per adult with no per-seat fee and no contract, and tracks renewals for you — see background checks for homeschool co-ops. A name-only check clears a name, not a person, so every check pairs the criminal search with photo-ID and biometric verification.