Introducing iGradePlus Homeschool

About iGradePlus Homeschool, a new product. Separate from the free iGradePlus Gradebook and from the iGradePlus SIS.

Homeschool families have been using iGradePlus for years, and they have been telling us the same thing for just as long: the gradebook works, but it stops at the end of the year. What they need is the part that comes after — the record that spans all of it, and the transcript at the end.

That is what iGradePlus Homeschool will be.

How it works today

The free iGradePlus Gradebook is built around a gradebook: one teacher, one set of students, one stretch of time. For a classroom teacher that is exactly right. Their students change every September, and last year’s gradebook is genuinely finished.

A family is not shaped like that. The same child is in the gradebook this year, and last year, and the year before, and will be next year too.

Each year stands on its own. A gradebook holds the year it was made for. Your daughter in your 2024 gradebook and your daughter in your 2025 gradebook are, as far as iGradePlus is concerned, two unrelated students — so there is no place for anything that spans them: no course history, no credits earned to date, no cumulative GPA.

The transcript is assembled by hand. When a college application needs four years of coursework, grades, credits and a cumulative GPA on one page, that page gets built in a word processor or a spreadsheet, from records kept in several places, by a parent doing the arithmetic themselves. It is the single highest-stakes document a homeschool family produces, and it is the one iGradePlus has never helped with.

The only step up is a whole school system. Everything described above does exist in the iGradePlus SIS — the cumulative record, the credits, the transcript. But it comes as part of a product built to run a school, alongside enrollment and registration, master scheduling, staff roles and permissions, campuses, and school-issued reporting. A family that wants a transcript has to take all of that with it, and then work out which nine-tenths to ignore.

None of this is a defect. The gradebook is shaped around a teacher’s year and the SIS is shaped around a school, and both are shaped correctly. What has never existed is something shaped around a family.

One record per child

In iGradePlus Homeschool, a student will be a person, not an entry in a particular year’s gradebook.

Each child will have one record that follows them from kindergarten through graduation, carrying everything that accumulates along the way:

• Their course history — what they have taken, in which year, at which grade level
• Credits earned, per course and in total
• Cumulative GPA, weighted and unweighted, rolled up across every year
• Their grades, year by year and term by term

Years you have finished with can be set aside so they are not in your way day to day — and they stay completely readable, and keep counting toward credits, GPA and the transcript. A child who graduated in 2022 keeps their full record for as long as you have an account.

The transcript

This is the reason the product exists.

iGradePlus Homeschool will produce a parent-prepared transcript — courses grouped by year and grade level, credits per course and per year, GPA by year and cumulative. That is the document homeschool families actually submit to colleges, and it is what admissions offices expect to receive from a homeschooling parent.

It is deliberately not the same thing the SIS produces. A school issues a school-of-record transcript, with a school profile, class rank, and a registrar’s signature. A homeschool transcript is prepared and signed by the parent who taught the courses. Both are legitimate; they are simply different documents, and this product issues the one families need.

Courses you didn’t teach

A homeschool transcript is rarely all one parent’s work, particularly in the high school years. There is dual enrollment at the community college, an online provider for chemistry, a co-op class taught by another parent, a foreign language taken somewhere else entirely.

Those courses belong on the transcript with their grades and their credits, even though iGradePlus never held the assignments behind them. You will be able to enter a course and its grade directly, without a gradebook behind it, and it will count toward credits and GPA exactly as your own courses do. A transcript that could only show what you graded in iGradePlus would be incomplete for precisely the families who need it most.

All of your children, one price

iGradePlus Homeschool will cover up to twelve students on one account, at one flat annual price. Not per child, not tiered by how many you teach.

Large families are normal in homeschooling, and paying per child penalizes exactly the households doing the most teaching. Twelve is set high enough that essentially no family will meet it.

People who need to see, but not change

Alongside your own account, you will be able to give up to five people read-only access — they see your students and their records, and change nothing.

The one that matters most is compliance. Many states require a periodic review of homeschool records by an evaluator or a cover school, and that becomes a matter of granting access rather than assembling a paper package. The other seats fill themselves: a spouse who is not the one teaching, a grandparent who takes on a subject, a tutor who needs to see how a student is doing.

Access will be yours to grant and to revoke, by named invitation rather than a shared link, with a visible list of who currently has it.

Coming up from the free gradebook

Families already using the free gradebook will arrive with several years of gradebooks, each holding its own copy of the same children.

Upgrading will begin by sorting that out: iGradePlus will recognize that the Emma in your 2023, 2024 and 2025 gradebooks is one child, and ask you to confirm it. Once you do, three years of separate gradebooks become one student record — with a course history, credits, a cumulative GPA, and a transcript that did not exist five minutes earlier.

Your records stay yours

A transcript can be requested years after a student has graduated — a college transfer, a job application, a change of plan at twenty-five.

So: if your subscription ever lapses, your data is kept and your transcripts remain exportable, permanently. The account becomes read-only; nothing is deleted, and nothing is held back. You should never have to keep paying to get at your own child’s record, and you will not have to.

For families who stay subscribed, the price you start on is the price you keep.

What this will mean for you

• If you are homeschooling a high schooler, the transcript stops being a document you build by hand the week an application is due, and becomes something your records already add up to.
• If you are teaching younger children, the work you do now accumulates rather than resetting each year — so the record is already there when it starts to matter.
• If you are already using the free gradebook, your existing years come with you, and become the beginning of each child’s record rather than a set of separate files.
• If your state requires review, your evaluator or cover school can be given access directly instead of being sent a package you assembled.
• If you run a school, this is not the product for you — the iGradePlus SIS remains the one built for enrollment, scheduling, staff, and school-issued records.