A poor policy

The Maine State Secondary School Principals Association meeting today in Bangor can do a service to itself and to all Maine public schools by rejecting a change in MSSPA policy that would too abruptly and dramatically alter the way local school systems resolve issues relating to home-schooled children and their participation in extra-curricular activities.

Last year, the MSSPA was faced with the problem of a young Fort Fairfield boy whose eligibility to play basketball and baseball for Fort Fairfield High School was technically eaten up while he was being taught at home.

When he returned to public high school, the boy was the same age as his classmates. He met all other requirements for student athletes, but it took months of wrangling before the MSSPA gave the student even a half a loaf and allowed him to play basketball as a senior.

In the aftermath of this controversy, the association sensibly looked at its outmoded policy regarding home-schooled students. The MSSPA realized that the rules begged review and refinement. Unfortunately, the new policy that has been recommmended threatens to be more disruptive than helpful.

The new policy takes the MSSPA, which had taken a very conservative approach to the issue of home-schooled students, and wildly swings it to the other extreme. Suddenly, home-schooled children would be eligible for admission to public school extra-curricular activities so long as they could obtain the consent of local school boards.

It sounds great in theory. But in the real world it is clearly an unreasonable burden to place on local school boards. Boards currently function as de facto rubber stamps for a state education bureaucracy that is terrified of the home-schooling issue.

Educators in the public school system argue that the state handles home school applications as if they were made of nitroglycerin. No one in state government wants to say no to prospective home schoolers because the action could blow up in their political faces. As a result, people who request home schooling for their children invariably get it.

Given this experience, boards reasonably are asking how, in the context of this MSSPA policy, they are supposed to police the standards that govern all students, including their grades, subject loads and program quality, when the state has failed to establish any meaningful criteria by which boards can measure the performance of one class of students: those schooled at home.

Through this policy, the MSSPA will be telling home-schooled pupils they can play football or flute for the local high school if the school board approves, but no one has given these boards either the standards or the authority to make key decisions on academic achievement by home-schooled pupils. They state has that authority, but isn’t exercising it.

In addition, the MSSPA rules don’t begin to address dress codes, drinking and drug policies, practice attendance and other demands schools make on full-time students who wish to participate in extracurricular activities.

The principals association found itself locked in a very awkward situation last year with the Fort Fairfield issue. It resolved a difficult eligibility question to no one’s complete satisfaction. But the association will be compounding a mistake if it rushes precipitously into this policy.

A better solution: Take more time. Get superintendents and school boards involved in these deliberations.

The MSSPA should come up with a policy that is fair, that makes sense and that is enforceable. This policy is none of the above.