Should homeschoolers be allowed to play on public school teams?

yes but no homeschooler can get in the science fair

I'm not sure.

My first thought is the rise of sports clubs -- soccer, basketball, baseball, etc. Athletes these days frequently play for their school and a club, or just one. (There was a recent stink about soccer mucketymucks recommending that high schoolers play in a club instead of for their school, which I disagree with.)

Anyway, my thought there is that homeschoolers have access to those.

But they usually cost significant money, and are also pretty exclusive/ hard to get into. So it's not necessarily an option for all.

Don't private schools have their own sports teams? I'd hate to be paying a fortune to send my little perisher off to a ritzy school only to learn that Junior can't risk his life in a poorly supervised football game.

Re: the "we pay taxes anyway" thing, though, if someone sends their kid to a private school with a crappy football team but lives in a district that is home to a public school with an awesome football team, should they have the option for Junior to play on the awesome public school team?

I almost agree with this. I say almost because public school teams are almost always made up of the cream of the crop to begin with. The high school i attended served such a small population that we usually needed every boy in two or three grades to field a team. There were twenty-two people in my graduating class, although that was somewhat below the average. But schools with hundreds of students have the pick of the litter when it comes to fielding a team.

Well, the question i would have is can Junior make the cut? See my last post.

EDIT: If Junior can make the cut, is it unfair to Secundus and Tertius who aren't that good?

My instinctive response is no. Home schoolers can play on a community team (maybe there should be a team for home schoolers in the community league or in the overall educational district?).

As a kid, I wouldn't have wanted to have people who weren't from my school on my school team.

It may be different in the U.S., but here there are costs involved with a number of school teams that parents/families pay, so the whole taxpayer argument doesn't carry far.

Maybe a guarantee upfront that the homeschooling parent will be in there fundraising for trips and equipment alongside everyone else?

I gotta go air out the little dogs, but i will be back to plague this interesting thread later . . .

^^^^^^^What she said.

So what happens when the home school player gets cut from the team? Lawsuit? The schools here have all sorts of rules for school athletes around grades and attendence. For example, a student cannot participate in a sport if they missed school that day. Do home schoolers have to follow that rule? It seems like a real can of worms.

Right... I'd tend to think it is unfair. Still not sure, but the private school thing doesn't seem right to me. (Being able to choose between the private school team and the public school team in your district if you go to a private school.)

I'm reading up on this a bit, various observations about cherry picking resonate. What if homeschoolers want to take a single awesome creative writing class? Or be in the school play? Or go to the school just for "free period" so they can hang out with the friends they've made in football?

Not to get all slippery slope on this question, but it does seem like at some point either they go to the school or they don't.

I think some sort of Title IX sort of provision could maybe work -- if they have no other sports options, they can try out for the public school team. (Like girls playing on the boys' basketball team if there is not a girls' basketball team.)

The VA bill is evidently temporary -- it would expire in 2017. I can imagine just trying it and seeing how it works out.

This is a tough one. My initial thought is yes they should be able to try out, it would still be the discretion of the coach who makes the team. As far as grades, I believe that homeschooled kids still need to take certain tests and meet certain qualifications as far as teaching and curriculum. I know a couple of home schooled kids that took our MCAS at my kids schools to meet certain state rules. So you could monitor similar.

We also, even being a private school, let a boy play on the team that was home schooled. Granted he wasn’t good at all – and it is middle/grammar aged kids so a bit different.

When I read up on the Virginia law they were talking about a specific thing, "pass five, take five"... here:



http://www2.timesdispatch.com/sports/high-school-xtra/2012/jan/26/homeschoolers-may-be-allowed-join-public-school-te-ar-1642009/

Later in the article it says that the homeschooled kids might have an advantage because they're not as constrained by school work and have more time to practice.

I kinda see that but it's not convincing in and of itself for me.

Sozlet plays with private school kids in her local community team (no school teams until 7th grade), that works fine.

No homeschoolers that I know of.

With respect to schooled kids - they should play for their own school team and that's it. How confusing would it be if kids from all the schools wanted to play on different schools' teams? How would all the coaches know if all those kids met the school requirements? It'd be a bloody nightmare, so...No. No. And No.

Re: the homeschooled kids - I don't see why not. If they meet the requirements and their parents are paying taxes for those schools, they should be allowed to try out. Different from the private school kids cuz these kids don't have a school.

I also like someone's idea of having a homeschool network of sports teams that they could play on. They'd have more in common with those kids to start with, and all would have the same advantages/disadvantages.

But what about the debate team, the chess team, the robotics team and those kind of extra curricular teams?

There aren't really private leagues for that, I don't think.

The big Catholic schools here have their own teams but the hundreds of other, small schools don't.

Most of the (supposedly) public charter schools don't have teams either.

That's an interesting idea -- a team made up of homeschoolers who play against other high school teams in the area.

Although it might encourage a lot of kids to leave public school in favor of "homeschooling" if the homeschoolers had a great team.

Agreed -- it is a real can of worms!

I think they should be allowed to take classes at the school, especially classes that require labs or equipment that a person normally doesn't have access to.