A Simple Homeschool Co-op Budget, With a Table You Can Copy

A homeschool co-op budget fits on one page. List everything the group will spend over the year: the room, insurance, supplies, festivals, snack and printing. Put a little aside for the unexpected, then divide the total between the families. Carol Topp is a CPA who writes for homeschool groups, and her method has three steps. Start before the year does. Estimate your income cautiously and your costs generously. Then adjust until the budget balances or leaves "a small surplus as protection for the unexpected." Below is a table you can copy, and a made-up example to show how the sums work.

How do you start a homeschool co-op budget?

Sit down with one or two other parents before the first meeting of the year, with last year's receipts if you have them. Topp's advice is to start early and to "plan for income also," not only spending. Then go through the year in your head, week by week, festival by festival.

Picture the co-op day. Families arrive, children hang up their coats, and circle begins with a verse. Someone tells the main lesson story. Then the painting boards come out, the jars of water, the paper soaking in the tray. Later there's finger knitting with wool from the basket and a shared snack. Every one of those things has a cost, and so does the room it all happens in.

Then picture the year. The Michaelmas bread, the Martinmas lanterns, the Advent spiral, the May Day flowers. Our seasonal crafts article has ideas for each season, and each one goes on the list.

The budget table

Copy this into a spreadsheet or a notebook and fill in your own numbers. Cross out the lines you don't need and add the ones you do. There are no amounts here on purpose: rent, insurance and supplies vary too much from place to place for any figure to be useful.

What the co-op spends in a year

Line	What it covers	How to work it out	Per year
Room or hall	Rent for your meeting place	___ weeks × $___ a week	$___
Insurance	Whatever your group has chosen to carry	The quote from your insurer	$___
Painting	Watercolor paper, paint, sponges	___ children × $___	$___
Drawing	Crayons, main lesson book paper	___ children × $___	$___
Handwork	Wool, needles, modeling beeswax	___ children × $___	$___
Festivals	Lanterns, candles, flour, flowers	___ festivals × $___	$___
Snack	If the group shares one	___ weeks × $___	$___
Printing and website	Handbook, sign-up forms, any website	Add them up	$___
Thank-yous	Host, volunteers, end-of-year	Add them up	$___
Subtotal			$___
Reserve	For surprises (see below)	Subtotal × ___%	$___
Total to raise			$___

Where the money comes from

Line	How to work it out	Per year
Family fee	___ families × $___	$___
Per-child supply fee	___ children × $___	$___
Anything else	Gifts, a bake sale	$___
Total income		$___

When "total income" is at least "total to raise," your budget works. If it doesn't, Topp says you have two choices: "cut expenses or increase income." That can mean a higher fee, a few more families, or a cheaper room for part of the year.

For the supplies lines, our Waldorf supplies list shows what a family buys at home, which is a good starting point for a group order.

A worked example (made-up numbers)

To show how the sums fit together, here is an invented co-op. These numbers aren't prices. They come from no real group. Use your own.

Say 6 families, with 10 children between them, meet one morning a week for 30 weeks in a church hall.

Line	Example	Per year
Hall	30 weeks × $20	$600
Insurance	Example quote	$300
Painting, drawing, handwork	10 children × $30	$300
Festivals	6 festivals × $25	$150
Snack, printing, thank-yous		$150
Subtotal		$1,500
Reserve at 15%		$225
Total to raise		$1,725

Split two ways: a supply fee of $30 per child brings in $300. The other $1,425 divided between 6 families is about $238 per family for the year, or roughly $119 a semester. Round it to $120 and you have a small cushion.

Or, as Topp suggests, keep it simple for families and charge one fee. Her view is that "the budget is the place to list the expenses," and parents don't need every line.

How much to keep in reserve

A reserve is money you don't plan to spend. It covers the week the hall's heating breaks, or the term a family moves away and their fee goes with them.

In her Questions and Answers for Homeschool Leaders, Carol Topp gives a few guidelines for homeschool groups:

• Keep at least 10%, maybe 15%, of your income in reserve for emergencies.
• Keep one or two months' rent, in case you need to move.
• Keep enough to cover the deductibles on your insurance.

She adds that the tighter your cash flow, the more you need. A co-op that collects fees for the whole year in September needs less cushion than one collecting month by month. It's also worth deciding now, and writing in your handbook, whether fees are refunded if a family leaves. Several co-ops say plainly on their fee pages that theirs aren't.

What real co-ops put in the fee

Two co-ops show on their own pages what their family fee pays for. A co-op in Washington says its family fee "covers rent, insurance and other administrative costs." An enrichment group in Minnesota breaks its fee down as about 45% rent, 40% liability insurance, 10% website and 5% other costs. Neither is a Waldorf group, but the pattern is worth noticing. In both, the room and the insurance come first, and supplies are billed separately.

That's why the first two lines of the table matter most. If you're still choosing a place, our guide to where a co-op can meet compares homes, halls, libraries and parks. For the insurance line, see co-op insurance in the US, and for what other co-ops charge, see homeschool co-op fees.

Who looks after the money

Give the budget one keeper. In a small co-op it's usually a parent who likes a tidy spreadsheet, and the job can go on your parent job schedule like tidying the painting boards or bringing snack. Carol Topp did this job herself as treasurer of her own co-op. Ask a second parent to look over the numbers with the treasurer each term, so no one carries it alone and every family can trust the sums.

Check it halfway through the year

Put a date in the calendar at the midpoint of the year, perhaps the week after the winter break. Lay the receipts next to the budget and look at each line. If your children paint every week, that line may run over. Festivals can too. If one line is high, you have half a year to adjust before it matters.

One line you can leave off: the program itself. Running a co-op on Starpath is free, and families who want the curriculum buy it for their own children, so it sits in each family's budget, not the co-op's. For the wider picture of starting and running a group, see our co-ops and pods guide, and for what Waldorf-inspired homeschooling costs at home, see how much Waldorf homeschooling costs.

Money and tax rules differ by state and by how your group is set up. If your co-op is growing, or handling larger sums, talk to an accountant or your state homeschool association.