Mailbag: High School Transcript Help

Dear Jennifer,

We’ve had a time, trying to get our “home schooled” kids set up for work, or drivers licenses, because the businesses want a school ID that is “legal like a public school ID” or our documents do not have an official seal, etc. Have you ever had this problem? Do you make ID’s for your kids? I used your free printable high school transcript, which is great, but since I didn’t type the copy and there was no official public school seal, they shied away from it.

Help!
Yvonne

Dear Yvonne,

We haven’t had any trouble of that sort, but my transcripts are typed rather than penned in by hand. See if using this one will help:

I converted my original transcript file to this editable PDF — that way, you can fill out the form on your computer before printing, and it will look more “official.” Just download the file to your computer, adjust the display size to 100%, fill in the information, and save the completed form under a different name — that way you’ll still have the blank master to use for future students.

We haven’t had to do so when applying for driver’s permits, but for college admissions, we normally do have our transcripts notarized. You might try that, too, if the DPS or potential employers still shy away from the printed copy of your student’s transcript. It isn’t difficult to do this. If you don’t already know somebody who can notarize the transcript, do a Google search to find a notary public in your area.

This is totally optional, but I also ordered a seal embosser with the name of our homeschool on it, which I used on both transcripts and diplomas. It adds a nice touch, and with the number of children we have, it will see a good amount of use by the time we finish this homeschool journey! You can get them for about $25 on Amazon, and it can be used over and over again. (I bought extra plates for stamping books from our home library and monograming envelope flaps — they can be easily interchanged, so that you can imprint different seal styles using the same embosser.)

As for student IDs, after 25 years of homeschooling, I finally printed and laminated “official” IDs for the first time last year — primarily so we could use them when buying movie tickets for school aged children over 12 and not have to pay adult prices for them.

I designed our IDs myself using Pages on my Mac, and included my student’s name, a photo, and the logo from our local homeschool support group, along with the school year. If I can figure out how to make an editable template for those, I will upload that to this site, as well.

In the meantime, if you haven’t already done so, I suggest you read this post on making the most of the high school years — and have your high schoolers read it, too! It’s full of lots of great information on making the most of the high school years and helping your students earn college credit for as much of their coursework as possible. Using these tips, some of our kids have earned as much as 60 hours of college credit before they ever graduated high school — at a huge savings of both time and money.

Hope all that helps!