Should homeschool kids be allowed to play school sports?

Kansas allows high schools to play against groups of kids who are homeschooled and have their own teams. The first one (that I knew of) was the "Wichita Defenders," and teams didn't know if they could count the games they played against them on their records.

The KSHSAA can give non-member schools "Approved status," meaning games against them can be counted on your record (without that, the game would count against your season total but not in your record). That status has been extended to homeschool teams that apply. Now Wichita has at least two homeschool teams (There also the "Wichita Angels") and Derby and Lawrence have their own. All of them field girls' and boys' basketball teams. Sometimes they have other sports. One of them (I think the one in Lawrence) has an eight-man football team.

 

In principal I think home schooled students should be able to play sports in a public school. But how can you enforce academic standards with a home schooled student? If a kid stops going to class and flunks out of a public school program can his parents just declare him home schooled and said athlete is once again eligible?

 

First, back to what da man was saying about taxes -- your argument would naturally flow to kids at private schools of all kinds being able to play public school sports. Also, your argument assumes that all sports is paid for with tax money -- it isn't. Some of it comes from boosters and private funding. I guess I would be more amenable to home-schoolers (and private-schoolers) in public school sports if there were a state or district-computed assessment that basically accounted for the state tax money that wasn't coming in related to that student, and how that much of that money would be needed to cover the cost of sports participation, including paying coaches, insurance, etc.

Lancey, regarding your point about eligibility, the academic standards are enforced, under most Tebow laws, by the homeschool family submitted a curriculum to the school (to make sure they're taking core courses), and some record of grading, and how it's accomplished. It's not the hardest thing in the world to do if you're a family that's pretty serious about homeschooling, because presumably you're doing this for the purposes of college prep. However, this aspect is why there are homeschooling families who have no interest in taking advantage of Tebow laws whatsoever -- because they don't WANT to have to submit to the public school bureaucracy. That's why you see homeschool leagues instead.

 

If you are against home school kids playing for the school teams of their home district then you should also be against public schools having to (a) pay for busing for kids who go to Catholic or private schools and (b) pay for the tuition for public charter schools.

Both items schools are mandated by law to do.

So as long as you believe that those two things are wrong, too, then you have a leg to stand on.

Further, we have a rule around here that kids who attend a private school that doesn't support a particular sport can participate in that sport (it is usually football, obviously) at their home school.

I have far less of a problem with people who actually pay taxes receiving this benefit of the doubt than people who don't pay taxes yet get the same benefits as everyone else.

 

Public schools get hurt because the cost of educating an additional student or two who was home-schooled to a class is generally lower than what the school gets from per-pupil funding due to sunken costs.

Does that outweigh the fact parents of home-schooled kids still have to fund local schools through property taxes? Depends on one's perspective.

 

Come on. It doesn't depend on one's perspective. The amount of funding that's available is either: A) lower than it would have been had the home-schooled kid come to school; or B) not. The school's costs are the same either way since, as you point out, the marginal cost of educating an additional student is virtually zero.

Schools typically are funded based on average daily attendance. If family X decides to take the homeschooling route, school Y (to which family X's kids would go) does experience a drop in average daily attendance. But that is only part of the picture. Unless you assume that school Y is the only school families eschew for homeschooling, then the pool of funds from which Y will draw is necessarily larger (because other schools with their homeschoolers will also draw smaller amounts). School Y could actually be better off, because the pool from which it draws will be larger.

The only way you can make the case that homeschoolers hurt the finances of public schools is by assuming that the overall pool of school funds is reduced by homeschoolers. Prove that and then you've got something.

 

I'm in the "no" category on this.

You hear a lot of chatter about "being fair to the kids" who are home schooled but never any talk about "being fair to the kids" who attend a high school and lose a roster spot to a home school kid who parachutes in.

 

I agree with you.

 

quant, what pool are you talking about? What a state budgets for per-pupil funding?

 

The state, or if schools are largely locally funded, the county/district.

 

In you example, how can School Y's take from the pool increase if enrollment deceases? State per-pupil spending is not based on a "pool" of funds that is static.

Let's say a state has 10 students enrolled in public schools. There are two schools in the state and each has five students. The per-pupil formula is $1, so each school gets $5, with the total pool being $10. Let's say one school loses a kid to homeschooling and the other loses two kids. The totals pool doesn't stay at $10. It decreases to $7 with one school getting $4 and the other getting $3. How is the school now getting $4 better off than before?

 

OK, so what about for schools and sports where roster limitations aren't an issue?