[baseball1974]

When I was coaching in Florida I ran across this in several instances. Unless Florida has amended their law, they do allow home-schooled students to participate in ALL extracurricular activities including athletics. They are not allowed to go wherever they want. It must be within the same georgraphical guidelines that everyone else follows. All home-schooled kids are apart of an organization that sets curriculum, maintains their progress, and sets overall guidelines the person overseeing the home-schooling must abide by. The public school can also have an administrator oversee any student that wants to participate in their sports, and make sure everything is on the same level as the other students. They are referred to as "dual enrollment" students. So they have to abide by the same things any student that wants to play has to do. For example, a 2.0 GPA, certain amount of credits earned each year, etc. somebody mentioned something in an earlier post about the insurance situation when this happens. When they are classified as a "dual entollment" student and approved by the administration, they are then covered by the same insurance. I did see a situation where a home-school student made the premium higher, and the parent had to pay the difference of that premium. So as far as travel and all that, thy are covered.

Unfortunately, this seems to be happening more and more with kids being home-schooled, and with so many of them, more states are starting to adopt laws like what I seen in Florida. There are actually 3/4 of the states in the country that do have laws like this. The sad truth is that public school education is not what it use to be. Now days, teachers teach to the state tests instead of normal curriculum. They put so much pressure on the results of those tests that teachers don't have a choice but to do that. There has also been a major drop-off in the caliber of teacher that is coming into the schools. Most of your top intellectual people going through college can't except paying more for a year of school than they'll make when they get out. By what teachers are paid annually, they make it impossible for the smartest kids coming out of college to chose teaching as a profession. Over the last 20 years, the cost of living has risen significantly, but the amount a first year teacher makes has not. It's not fiscally responsible for anyone with college debt to chose teaching as a profession. All of this is a huge reflection on why we have more and more parents choosing to home-school their kids. I'm not sure what a solution is, but I don't think there is any harm in letting them participate in athletics. It may not sound right to some people, but if my child was not being challenged academically then I would find alternate ways of getting them to where they need to be. Sometimes athletics is the only possible way some kids are able to go to college, and regardless if their home-schooled or not, I would never take that away from anyone.