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A
streatorsports.com editorial
published
7/17/08
According
to the July 16th WSPL
morning news, the Streator High School board of education is
considering adopting a policy that would prevent homeschool students from
participating in extracurricular activities, including sports, music, drama
— the whole works.
Before we go any further, let us make the point that the Illinois High
School Association already has
strict rules in place to ensure that if a homeschool student is allowed to
participate in any IHSA competition, he/she must be eligible for competition
in the same way that a public-school student is. In other words, a
homeschooler must meet same academic and behavioral requirements that a
public-schooler does in order to play on a team, play in the band, act in a
play, etc.
Therefore, the IHSA has provisions to allow homeschoolers to participate in
IHSA events.
These are the reasons given for drafting the new policy, according to the
WSPL report:
• "It's just easier to go this way," according to board member
Karen Ricca. (Always a great reason to make a decision.) In the WSPL
interview, she basically said
(paraphrase) that the IHSA guidelines were too stringent to follow, and
therefore the board should adopt its own rules — ones that go farther than
the IHSA does in excluding homeschoolers from extracurricular activities.
• WSPL news director T.J. Carson quoted board member Marc Cheffer as
saying Cheffer would not want to be responsible for making sure all of the
homeschoolers' hours counted at Streator High. (In other words, that would
be too much work.)
What bothers us most about this drafted policy is that it not only excludes
the homeschool kids from extracurriculars, but it also strips a certain
number — anywhere from one to five percent of the district's taxpayers —
of their privileges. These
people live in the district, pay taxes in the district, vote in the
district. Parents have the constitutional right to homeschool their
children, and it just makes sense that they should be able to choose to
participate in the extracurricular activities that they personally
subsidize.
Proponents
of this policy change may ask, what's the big deal? This couldn't
possibly apply to more than a handful of people. And there is no law that
forces Streator High School to accept homeschoolers into extracurricular
activities.
Both of those statements are correct.
However,
we see this issue as a matter of principle. It's
not about how many kids actually participate. It's not about whether or not
the homeschoolers have a desire to participate. What this is about is
whether or not they have the choice to participate, and whether or not
Streator High School wants its extracurricular programs to benefit from
keeping the door open to homeschoolers. It's outright presumptuous of SHS to take
that choice away from many of its own taxpayers inside its own district.
It's both nearsighted and ignorant to turn away children who can potentially
bolster the extracurricular programs and potentially set the bar higher for
Streator students.
Many
of you have come across Streator-area homeschool children before, if you
aren't one yourself or the parent of one yourself. Demographically speaking,
the vast majority of them stay out of trouble, and some
rank among the top in their age group when it comes to playing ball or
playing the clarinet. Having homeschoolers involved at Streator High would
benefit the district! What is SHS afraid of?
Given that the IHSA has rules in place to allow homeschool kids to
participate, we think it's outrageous that a board member would not feel compelled to represent all of the district's
taxpayers and all of the district's voters. We also think it's
possible that the policy change is merely the product of laziness on the
part of the board's policy review committee, which realized that SHS would
have to modify the way it handles homeschoolers in order to comply with IHSA
rules.
If the State of Illinois were to exempt homeschool families from property taxes, a policy like
this might be able to be justified. But as is, these families should be given the same
choices that every other taxpaying family in the district has. And SHS would
be foolish to exclude potential talent from its extracurricular programs.
To
read the latest feedback and find out how to contact the SHS board members, view the message
board discussion on the issue.
This
has been a streatorsports.com editorial
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