Illinois
High School Sports?
A number of Home School Legal Defense Association member families have called us to ask whether Illinois home schoolers may play sports on local public school teams. One former public school administrator, who is now a home schooling mother, recently won a school board seat in her district. In that role, she has had an opportunity to explore what home schoolers may or may not do in this regard.
The Illinois High School Association (IHSA), which governs interscholastic sports, has a policy on home school instruction, IHSA Bylaw 3.025. This bylaw states: “Work taken in junior college, college, university, or by correspondence may be accepted toward meeting the requirements [for interscholastic competition] provided it is granted credit toward graduation from high school from the local board of education.” The IHSA treats home education as if it were a “correspondence” course. For any home schooled student to participate in public school sports under these rules, the local school board must adopt a policy to accept work done at home for credit toward graduation from the local high school. The home schooled student would need to pass “a minimum of 20 credit hours of high school work per week” to be able to play. “Under these conditions,” so far as IHSA rules are concerned, “a home schooled student may practice and/or participate in competition on an interscholastic athletic team in the high school which serves the school district in which the student’s parents reside.”
HSLDA takes no position on the advisability of enrolling home schooled children in public school sports teams, but we note that Illinois makes it difficult, although not impossible, to do so.
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Illinois
Admitted to statehood:
December 3, 1818
Origin of name:
French for the Illini or “land of Illini,” an Algonquin word meaning “men or warriors.”
Motto:
State sovereignty, national union.
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