Hour Connect
Hour Connect
A teacher opens the class, everyone is already marked present, and they tap off whoever isn't there. At the end of the year every family gets a printed record of the hours their child was taught — and how those hours sit against your state's rules. Families already using Homeschool Hour Tracker can have those hours land straight in their own log.
That matters more than most groups realise. Missouri asks for 1,000 hours a year, 600 of them in core subjects, and at least 400 of those core hours at home — which leaves 200 core hours that may be taught anywhere else. Co-op is anywhere else.
A family doing two core classes a week crosses that line in March without noticing, because nothing they use is counting. A general attendance app can tell you a child came to class. It cannot tell you that 11 of their hours are left.
The whole roster at a glance, so the Hollis family hears about it in February rather than May.
Many of your families already track their own hours in Homeschool Hour Tracker. A family can link their child to you, and the hours you record arrive in their own log automatically — already marked as taught away from home, already counted against the right limit.
Nobody retypes anything off a sheet of paper in May, and the family finally sees one number instead of two halves they have to add up themselves.
The family approves the link and can end it whenever they like. You never see what they teach at home — only the hours it taught itself travel across. And families who don't use the app aren't left out: they get the printed record, same as everyone.
This works today. You create a link code on the child's record and give it to their family. They enter it in their own app once, and from then on a tap brings the hours across — corrections included, nothing ever counted twice.
Of those 148 co-op hours, 54 are core — against the 200 that may be taught away from home.
You open registration and share one link — a Facebook group, a flyer, an email to last year's families. They fill in their children and pick classes from what you actually offer, and it lands in a queue for you to approve, waitlist or decline.
Nobody is added to anything until you say so. Approving creates the children and their enrolments in one go, so the roster you'd have typed in August is already there.
Classes can have a size, and a full one stops being offered. Grades are yours to name — if you teach 2nd and 3rd together, that's simply what the grade is called, with the ages written underneath so families stop asking.
The link shows your classes and whether they have room. It shows nothing about the families already with you.
Medical notes come in with the registration and stay with whoever runs the group — teachers are told a child has one, not what it says.
What is taught, who teaches it and which day it meets. Families register themselves from a link and you approve them, so the roster fills itself in. You sign in with an email and password; each teacher gets a four-digit code instead, so there is nothing for them to create and nothing to install.
Their classes, on the right day, with everyone already marked present. They tap off whoever is missing and save. Someone arrived late or left early gets their own hours. Teachers see only their own classes.
One for a family that asks, or everybody in a single print job, each child starting on their own page.
A page with your co-op's name and logo on it, stating plainly where the hours were taught and what that means for the family's own record-keeping.
It is early, and that is the point — the co-ops talking to us at this stage are shaping what it does. If you run one, or you are thinking about starting one, we would like to hear how you handle hours today and what would actually help.
Have a look at the sample first. It is a made-up co-op with ten children in it, and everything works: take a register, print a record, see the whole thing.