The Virginia Senate narrowly approved a bill Feb. 13 that would
allow home-schooled students across the commonwealth to play high school
sports.
HB 1578, commonly known as the “Tebow Bill,” would eliminate a
statewide ban prohibiting home-schooled students from participating in high
school athletics and other interscholastic activities.
The Senate voted 22-18 in favor of the measure. Democratic Sen.
Lynwood Lewis of Accomac joined the 21 Republican senators in voting for the
bill, which had been approved by the House last month.
The bill, introduced by Del. Rob Bell, R-Charlottesville, will be
sent to Gov. Terry McAuliffe for his signature. Sam Coleman, an aide to the
Democratic governor, said McAuliffe plans to veto the legislation.
The bill is nicknamed for former NFL quarterback Tim Tebow, who
was allowed to play football for a high school in Florida while he was being
home-schooled. Bell has introduced similar legislation each year since 2005.
In 2015 and 2016, Bell’s bills were passed by the General
Assembly only to be vetoed by McAuliffe. The legislation’s supporters were
unable to override the vetoes.
Opponents of HB 1578 say home-schoolers don’t have to meet the
same academic standards as public-school students, so it would not be right to
let them play alongside regular students in high school sports.
McAuliffe cited that rationale when he vetoed Bell’s legislation
last spring.
“Opening participation in those competitions to individuals who
are not required to satisfy the same criteria upends Virginia’s extracurricular
framework and codifies academic inequality in interscholastic competition,” the
governor wrote in his veto message.
Bell counters that this is not the case with his newest iteration
of the bill.
Under the legislation, any student who wants to participate in a
local high school’s athletic programs would have to pass standardized tests and
demonstrate “evidence of progress” in their academic curriculum for at least
two years. Bell said the students also would have to meet the same immunization
standards as their public school counterparts.
Sen. Chap Petersen, D-Fairfax, argues that, in his experience, it
wouldn’t be fair to students who already participate in their high school’s
athletic programs.
“I played high school athletics,” Petersen said. “I know a little
bit about it. I know you have to have a certain GPA to play on Friday nights. I
know you had to basically comply with classroom conduct rules in order to play,
and I think those are good rules. They’re good rules for kids, and that’s what
this is about.”
Bell’s bill also states that each local school district would get
to decide for itself whether to allow home-schoolers to participate in high
school sports. Districts that consider such a policy as unfair would not be
forced to allow home-schoolers to participate.
Petersen argued that this caveat would create more problems than
it would help solve.
“The bottom line is, once Virginia High School League changes its
policy, every school division is going to have to match up with it, because
nobody is going to want to compete with half a loaf,” he said. “I’ve got some
coaches in the audience that are here for state-winning championship teams, and
I know what they would say, not on the merits of the bill, but simply that
everyone has to play by the same set of rules.”
“You can’t have one set of rules downstate, one set of rules in
Northern Virginia and one set of rules in Hampton Roads,” Petersen added. “The bottom
line is, if we’re going to have this, it’s got to be a state-wide policy. It
can’t be halfway.”
Bell argued his bill would simply allow home-schooled students
who might not fit the typical public school mold the same freedoms as all other
students.
“If you are a parent and your kid doesn’t fit into the public school
curriculum right now, you can go private or you can go home-schooling, except
many places, including a county I represent, have very limited private school
options,” Bell said. “Yet we’re forcing parents to say, ‘You can have football,
or you can have the education that you want.’”
