NEWSFLASH – October 4, 2011
From: Family Protection Ministries (FPM)
Change in Filing Private School Affidavit
Every year the Private School Affidavit (PSA) must be filed between October 1st and 15th. If you are enrolled in a PSP or ISP, the school’s administrator files one affidavit for the whole group.
The Private School Affidavit (PSA) is now available on the California Department of Education’s web site at www.cde.ca.gov/sp/ps/rq/affidavit.asp. Private schools with five or fewer students can proceed to file their affidavits as usual, ignoring new questions 41 and 42, since they do not apply to these schools.
We have reviewed the affidavit and are passing on the following recommendation from HSLDA regarding changes to the affidavit:
To private school administrators of schools with 6 or more students:
The private school affidavit for the 2011-2012 school year is available, but has been changed to include two new questions (questions 41 and 42). These questions ask for the number of enrolled immigrant students and the number of enrolled students who are not proficient in English. Neither of these pieces of information is required by law to be reported.
Unfortunately, the online version of the affidavit form will not allow the form to be submitted unless questions 41 and 42 are answered.
Note that the online affidavit form states that questions 41 and 42 do not apply to schools with fewer than six enrolled students. This means that those small private school with only five or fewer students can legitimately leave the answers set at the default of zero. However, if schools with six students and above leave the default answer of zero, that is a response that the school have NO immigrants or non-proficient-in-English students.
Since questions 41 and 42 clearly exceed the CDE’s authority related to private schools and the CDE requires these questions to be answered in order to file the affidavit online, we suggest an alternative: the filing of a paper copy of the affidavit this year.
Thus, our recommendation is that those schools with six or more students simply write “N/A” in the space on the hard copy form for both questions 41 and 42, then mail the form.
For your convenience, the affidavit form follows this article. Be sure to keep a copy of your completed affidavit for your records, then mail the affidavit on or before October 15, with proof of delivery so that you will be able to prove that you did mail it.
The affidavit form mentioned in the above paragraph can be down loaded here.
For assistance in completing the PSA, and to get answers to some frequently asked questions concerning filing, please read our paper entitled “Filing the Private School Affidavit for 2011-2012 School Year“. We will be updating the article on our website to reflect the changes to the affidavit in the next day or two. Any HSLDA members who have related questions should contact HSLDA at www.hslda.org or (540) 338-5600.