Home schooling today — School at home, play with others
Thirteen-year-old Austin Brown, beads of sweat gathering on his forehead, squeezed the metal bars with his hands and strained against the weight. It was part of his self-imposed summer routine, he said. Before lifting weights, he would sprint up and down the hill outside his home in Glencoe. Afterwards, he would watch videos of his idols — Walter Payton, Shaun Alexander and Bo Jackson — and try to memorize every move. “I have never seen a child work so hard,” said his mother, Gina Brown, watching him collapse at the kitchen table after his workout. “He loves football. That’s what makes his heart sing.” Brown is among a growing number of parents who say they want their children to play on the football fields and basketball courts of schools they do not attend. They envision an evolved home education system that allows parents to take what they need from the public school system while also maintaining the flexibility and freedom to define their children’s education. In a survey conducted for The Anniston Star of 296 home-school parents at the Christian Home Education Fellowship of Alabama’s 2007 State Convention, 79 percent of parents said they felt they should have the right to access public school extracurricular activities. Yet, some home-schoolers fear parents such as Brown are moving dangerously close to what they call a Godless system and worry that access will lead to state regulations. Public school leaders view access laws as a Pandora’s box. For the past two years Brown has spearheaded a movement in Alabama to pass legislation that would allow home-school students to participate in public school extracurricular activities. The bill is named for Tim Tebow, the University of Florida quarterback who was touted as one of the top college recruits in the country in 2005 after playing on a Florida public school football team as a home-school student. Twenty-three states support some type of public school access for home-school students, Brown said, and 16 states — including Florida — force school districts to allow home-schoolers access to classes or sports, said Dee Black, a lawyer for the Home School Legal Defense Association. Laws that grant home-school students access to public schools for classes and extracurricular activities are a growing trend in the U.S., according to a policy analysis by HSLDA published in 2006. State courts have routinely denied home-schoolers the right to participate in public school activities. However, state legislatures have been more open to the possibility. And the HSLDA argues that the schools with access are gaining more state and federal funds by increasing their enrollment with part-time students. “School districts in some areas are beginning to feel a decrease in funds due to the increasing number of students leaving public schools for private and home education,” according to the report. “Schools may try to compete with private education by luring those students back with sports and academic classes, in order to regain at least partial funding for those students.” In 2007, home school access laws were introduced in Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi, and, while some legislators say school districts can benefit financially from home-school participation, most say they are supporting the bills to provide more opportunities for their states’ growing home-school populations. “I think it’s time they are not discriminated against,” said Georgia state Sen. Nancy Schaefer, a sponsor of the Georgia bill. “Their parents are paying taxes. They are footing the bills. “Some people feel that a home-school student may excel and push a public school student out of a spot. I think that’s a selfish way of looking at it.” Access bills allow parents to tailor education to meet their children’s needs, she said. Home-school access might have a good chance of passing in Georgia, said Brenda Dickinson, director of the Home Education Foundation in Florida. However, Alabama is another story. Dickinson, who is a full-time home-school lobbyist in Florida, helped pass Florida’s extracurricular access law in 1996. Unlike Florida and Georgia, which have home-school statutes and regulate home schooling as a state-sanctioned educational option, Alabama is one of 12 states where home schooling is not recognized by law, and home schools are legally considered private schools. |
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In other states, such as Florida, home schoolers are individually registered with the public school system and function as independent educational units. It is because of the state’s connection to home schoolers that legislators in Florida were more apt to feel they had a responsibility to create more options for home-school students, said Dickinson. Also, she said it was easy to argue that the Florida High School Athletic Association was controlling all sports in the state. Similarly, Alabama’s High School Athletic Association, which allows private, public and parochial schools as members, holds a monopoly, she said. However, because home schooling in Alabama is actually church schooling, many consider it the responsibility of the church school to provide extracurricular activities. What they don’t know is that many Alabama church schools have no buildings or football fields and have little more than a single administrator, often a home-school mom, with a telephone number, said Danielle Drew, an 11th grader at Hope Christian School, a home-school organization in Pelham. Hope Christian School — one of the largest home-school organizations in the state with about 700 families — is part of a small fraternity of home-school organizations that offer extracurricular activities, including sports. Students who play on these teams compete with each other and with students at small Christian schools. Yet Drew said she knows that many home-school students want more competition and especially the chance for their talents to be seen. “I really wish (the law) would pass,” she said. “Home-school sports are wishy-washy. I want to get a scholarship, but I can’t get a scholarship if I can’t play on a public school team.” For nearly a year, Drew has been practicing with the Calera High School track team. She can’t race with the team — barred by AHSAA rules — but she comes to the track every weekday to meet the coach and other runners. “The coach wants me to run with them,” Drew said. “The kids want me to run with them.” In her spare time Drew has been trying to start a home-school track team called All for Him, to compete with public and private school. But so far its been a pipe dream. The idea, she said, makes a lot of people uncomfortable. “I suspect that home schoolers don’t want their kids to be around public school kids,” she said. Dan Washburn, executive director of the AHSAA, said he does not want home schoolers to participate in public school athletics. Only accredited schools are allowed in the association, and if home-schoolers were allowed, non-accredited schools could be as well, he said. “If it is a monopoly, so be it,” Washburn said. The bylaws of AHSAA are approved by member schools, and, though no schools have expressed interest in accepting home schoolers into sports programs, school leaders could change the organization’s bylaws. “We need to have this debate,” said State Rep. Cam Ward of Shelby County, a sponsor of the bill. “For a while we have had a false stigma about home schooling. These kids fall in the cracks. They are a niche that is being left out.” Ward, who said the number of home-schoolers in his district has tripled during the past 10 years, says he supports the bill because home-school families are paying into the system. Ward said he thinks the proposed legislation is fair to home schoolers and public schoolers. It requires home-school students who participate to pay the same fees and meet the same academic standards as public school students. “I think it can work, but in the long run, if they choose to participate, they will sacrifice some of the autonomy they have,” he said. Ward said he thinks the bill has only a small chance of passing in Alabama, because home schoolers have been so far removed from the system. Paul Hubbert agrees. Hubbert, the executive secretary of the Alabama Education Association and education lobbyist, considers most of the arguments for home school access laughable. “Athletics is not a right,” Hubbert said. “There is a right to education in the state of Alabama. There is no right to play football. “High school sports is an amateur game, and if home-school students go in, it would be cannibalism.” Hubbert says he considers public school athletics to be a privilege, one that many public school students don’t qualify for. If a home-school student isn’t taking the same tests and attending the same classes as other students trying to meet the academic requirements of school teams, there is no way to prove eligibility, he said. There are also concerns about legal liability if a child is injured on school grounds and the questions of counting students for state funds, he said. “A public school could not exist if students could pick and choose what they wanted,” he said. “If you allow a student to pick what they want to take, they will pick all the easy courses.” Hubbert said supporters of the bill are also ignoring the social relevance of high school sports. Part of athletics is building school spirit, he said, which is meaningless for home-schoolers who don’t attend. Yet, ‘school spirit’ is exactly what home-schoolers such as Conna McHenry say they fear. “The ungodly influences that are rampant in these government schools are on these sports teams,” McHenry said. Also, McHenry said extracurricular access laws provide a way for the state to regulate home schoolers. If the state begins to monitor home schoolers who play sports, what’s next? “When you get government money you get government strings,” she said. “I don’t want them to tell me I can’t teach Godliness. I don’t want them to tell me what curriculum I have to use. I don’t want them to tell me when to home school.”
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