Currently, home-schooled students cannot participate in high school athletics, but a bill before the Missouri Senate would allow them to play sports at their local school. The Columbia Missourian covered a hearing on the bill yesterday:
During the roughly hour-long hearing, Senate Education Committee members heard from Sam Williams, 14, an eighth-grade home school student from Neosho. Williams said he wanted to continue his wrestling career past the club team he had been on for eight years and play for the team that went undefeated to a Class 4 state title but didn’t want to give up his home-school education.
“I’d rather not have to choose between two things that are good for me,” Williams said.
I would prefer to completely decouple athletics from schools entirely, and turn them over to sports clubs, which would allow schools to focus on education and sports teams to focus on competition, but this bill would certainly be an improvement over the status quo. If a student is allowed to attend a public school and use all the resources that come with it, why shouldn’t he be allowed to use just some of those resources while pursuing his education through an alternative method? Education works best when it is tailored to meet the needs of every individual, so we should be encouraging numerous alternatives to the standard public school model. As long as extra-curricular activities are nearly monopolized by schools, locking out home-schooled and other alternative students only limits the educational options for Missourians.
