The face that launched 1,000 pieces of legislation. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)About half of U.S. states require public schools to allow homeschoolers to participate in the district’s sports and activities in what are known as Tim Tebow laws, after the homeschooled high schooler who benefited from the first such law, passed in Florida in 1996 as the Craig Dickinson Act, what with Tebow being only 9 years old at the time.
Alabama is one state that has not passed such a law, despite attempts since 2005 to do so, and despite having the sort of Republican and religion-friendly legislature that might lead one to believe it would be Tebow-bill-friendly. Again in 2012, Tebow-bill backers in Alabama are trying again, but I don’t think stories like this one, which appeared on WAAY-TV in Huntsville, are helping the cause. It’s about a poor, deprived child who had to play football in a home-schooled league because he was, in fact, home-schooled. Better grab a hankie.
In Huntsville, Reggie Spivey says his son and several teammates would have jumped at the chance to follow in Tebow’s footsteps: “They’re solid young men, and I think they would have been good for the etam much like Tim Tebow was for his team.”
In Alabama, state education officials oppose the bill, and year after year it’s failed to take hold in the legislature. But Reggie Spivey hopes this year will be different. He explains, “Where you sit in the classroom, whether it’s in your home or at some government building shouldn’t have anything to do with whether or not you can play football.”
While it’s too late for James [Spivey, Reggie's son], the Spiveys hope Alabama lawmakers will give other homeschoolers the same opportunities that public school athletes enjoy, including the ability to go after college scholarships.
James Spivey says, “I’m always going to look back and wish that maybe I could have gone to a bigger high school and done a little bit better and work a little bit harder, and make one of those teams, and you know, make that big play in the Iron Bowl and win the game. But that’s just not going to be able to happen.”
Well, James, you can hold that regret against your parents, who, Reggie says in the story, “wanted to focus our son’s education on Jesus Christ. We wanted that to be the centerpiece of his education and we wanted to have academic excellence. To get the combination we needed, we just really needed to homeschool to be able to do it.”
As parents, we all make choices in our children’s education, and sometimes those choices involve compromise. The fact Reggie Spivey refers to playing football at a “government school” gives you an idea of his ill feelings toward public schools. And that’s a feeling he most certainly has the right to have. However, the Spivey family, and others, shouldn’t get unfettered access to what their homeschooling environment can’t provide just because their son feels bad he didn’t have neighborhood kids cheering him on a Friday night.
While Alabama is a state of religious people, that religion also includes football, and I’m sure there are plenty of public school parents who don’t cotton to homeschoolers, especially those whose families seem to think they and their children are better than the local schools (see Spivey’s quote about on what homeschoolers will bring to the football team), waltzing in to try to take their boys’ starting positions, and potential scholarships. (This same debate is happening over a Tebow in another state that loves God and football, not necessarily in that order — South Carolina.)
As I mentioned when a Virginia Senate committee (barely) rejected a Tim Tebow law for that state — a bill also pushed on the sell of giving homeschooled kids the chance to have cheers from heretofore nonexistent schoolmates — I think there is a way to allow homeschoolers to participate in public school activities. It requires the homeschooling families to have respect for how schools are funded, and the mission of public schools, and it requires the schools to respect that, particularly in rural areas, schools may be the major source of extracurricular activities for children. And it also requires the schools to think of Tim Tebow laws as a potential chance to gain deeper connections with skeptics in their community — to take families detached from public schools and give them a stake in say, the next school levy request.
The guts of my model Tim Tebow legislation would require homeschooling families to pay a fee for participation (the formula could be set in the bill) to make up for the state money the school is not receiving for the homeschoolers’ attendance in classes. Also, the bill wouldn’t allow only homeschoolers the chance to participate in public-school activities. Those in private schools, but who live in the district boundaries, are also covered. This goes to my theory that a homeschooler does attend a private school. It might have one student and meet in the kitchen, but it is a private school as much as a Catholic school, for example. In a sport that has limited rosters, the family must pay the fee, but it should be refunded if the student does not make the team (homeschoolers and private-schoolers would not have guaranteed spots). And, if the school district or state is not already involved in reviewing homeschool curriculum or tracking progress, the school must be able to do so, in order that the student (homeschool or private school) meets the district’s academic requirements for participation.
Despite what you might think given what I wrote above, and what I’ve written about Tim Tebow bills, I have grown warmer to the idea of homeschoolers participating in public activities. However, what leaves me cold when homeschooling families contend they have some sort of innate right to participate, as if paying their taxes was enough. I pay taxes to my local park district, yet I still pay to put my kids in activities. I pay my taxes to the military, yet I have to join the Army to drive a tank.
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