Should homeschool kids be allowed to play school sports?

Look, think about your example, and consider it within the context of what I put in bold. Suppose your "one student" has a twin brother or sister. By how much do costs go up?

 

My area has a gigantic military base and, as a result, students are always coming and going at that school.

Planning for shifting enrollment is a huge headache because it isn't just teachers. You have cafeteria workers and a food service company you order from along with teacher aides, support staff, counselors. All manner of folks.

While far from a perfect comparison, the influx of home schooled kids showing up, would make every school like a mini-military base school. Planning goes out the window.

Current structures, like teacher and food vendor contracts, become very large sticking points. So, in my local district, student projections are done in June. Contracts are extended in July. It always leaves a few teachers in limbo because they don't if they'll get a contract.

 

If every parent who home schooled in America decided to send their children to public education in the fall it would tax the system considerably. No one would debate that. But if you really wanted to save some real money, stop giving kids free rides to school. Each child costs the taxpayers about $700 each just to get that free ride. Go find your school budget and look at the budget line for transportation. Divide that number by the number of actual students in the division and see what number pops up. And that number is not the true number because the building they work out of might be part of your debt service number and the technology they have could be part of the technology budget line.

TEA party and GOPers bitch like crazy about tax dollars being spent, but the second someone suggests cutting a that would inconvenience them, they STFU. Buses are a perfect example.

You need buses that badly? Privatize it and put the cost on the parents.

 

I typed you either look at it as each student costs a small amount in the long run or each student is free until you hit that magic student that pushes you to hiring another staff member. You are the one not understanding this process.

 

As RickStain alluded to, school districts are moving to an a la carte model. Kids can take some classes at home and go to campus for a few others. What if a kid takes all classes online through a program offered by a public school? Does anyone really think kids in that situation wouldn't be allowed to play sports?

 

The GOP/teabag plan is they ain't paying a dime to send any kid to any public school.

 

This isn't a political thread.

 

I'm not interested in a "You don't get it," "No, you don't get it" little tete-a-tete here. But your understanding of marginal costs is completely out of whack, and I don't want other members of the board to be confused by it.

The cold hard fact -- not an opinion, not a judgement, not a perspective -- is that the marginal cost of an additional student is essentially zero. This is true regardless of policies regarding classroom sizes and teacher-to-student ratios. That a school or district might desire a ratio of, say, 27:1 does NOT mean that the 28th student increases costs by the amount of an additional teacher. How can that be? Because the school or district is not obligated by some law of nature to increase the number of teachers to serve that additional student. We know this because districts/states have procedures in place to accommodate departures from desired classroom maximums.

You're treating a school/classroom like a commercial airliner. An ERJ135 has seating for 37 passengers, and the only way we can serve 38 passengers is to buy another ERJ135. But a school/classroom is not like a commercial airliner; we can choose to put however many students in front of a given teacher that we want to. The only step cost we incur is when we go from 0 students to 1 student, because that's when we shift from needing no teachers to needing one teacher.

Further, in practice schools/districts have substantial flexibility to ameliorate short-term teacher/student imbalances and remain consistent with policies. Classes in higher grades can be enlarged (as policies are more lenient in those grades), freeing up teacher capacity for the lower grades. Attendance zones can be re-drawn. Teachers can be borrowed/lent across schools. There are plenty of other ways that don't require the hiring of an additional teacher.

I could, but will not, note the number of times you've moved the goalposts here only to, when challenged, suggest that I don't understand what I am writing about. Rest assured, however, that I have a thorough grasp of the process by which enrollment drives school costs. And this understanding leads me to write, with complete confidence, that the marginal cost of an additional student is essentially zero.

 

Adding an extra student is not a cost.

But a home-schooled parent (at least in my state) costs the district considerably, as they receive a state stipend for each enrolled student at a certain point of the school year. Obviously they don't receive a stipend for a child who is not there.

So I don't think any portion of the school district's already limited funding for coaching, transportation, officials, medical insurance, etc., for school sports should be spent on kids who don't even go to school there in the first place.

To me, it's pretty simple. You're all in, or you're out.

 

You do understand that there are rules, set by the state, that force you to hire another teacher once a class size reaches a certain amount, right?

Maybe in Texas they allow you to cram 42 students in a classroom, but thankfully most states have some rules when it comes to class size.

If the cost of a student was essentially zero, them if all home schooled students decided to go to public school tomorrow, it should not cost tax payers anything extra. This is what you are typing.

 

If this is the base for your reasoning, you are wrong.

I will show my work.

http://leg1.state.va.us/cgi-bin/legp504.exe?000+cod+22.1-253.13C2

http://www.doe.virginia.gov/support/facility_construction/school_construction/regs_guidelines/guidelines.pdf

http://www.veanea.org/home/676.htm