High school is a period of unparalleled change and growth for youth, and extracurricular activities can contribute greatly to this preparation. Students who participate in activities outside of the classroom, such as music, sports, drama, and student government, often develop valuable skills and attributes. For example, they are more likely to learn to cooperate with their peers, respect authority, develop responsibility, work hard, and become leaders.
For youth to gain the full benefits of general education, academics and extracurricular activities need to be tailored to their unique needs and interests. Students, under the direction of their parents, should have every opportunity possible to determine which activities and level of participation will best prepare them for adult life. In all aspects of education, parents should be free to act in the best interest of their children.
In Utah, this is not always the case. One glaring example is the conflict between Utah’s open-enrollment law and how the Utah High School Activities Association treats student-athletes. Specifically, the UHSAA has created rules and procedures for athletic transfers and eligibility that discourage parents from making choices that would benefit their children.
Utah needs to fine-tune its approach to regulating high school athletics in order to transform this dissonance between open enrollment law and UHSAA policies into harmony. This common-sense objective has been difficult to achieve because of the ambiguous nature and role of the UHSAA.
Frankly, it’s a legal and administrative enigma – it’s a private organization with governmental powers. As a private entity, the UHSAA is obligated to serve its dues-paying member schools, and as a “state actor,” as the United States Supreme Court has defined it, it also has a duty to serve the people, particularly student-athletes and their families.
This quasi-government role departs from standard structures of public accountability. To construct a similar scenario, the Legislature could give the Sutherland Institute authority to create and enforce rules under the jurisdiction of the Utah Transit Authority or the Alcoholic Beverage Control Department. Even with elected representation on Sutherland’s board of trustees and legislative oversight, such a scenario would be unacceptable to most Utahns; and yet, the UHSAA, a private organization, has unilateral authority to affect state education policy. This unusual regulatory structure is designed to serve a “system” instead of parents and students.
Under current UHSAA rules, when a student-athlete transfers from one high school to another, he or she loses twelve months of athletic eligibility if the UHSAA understands that the student intends to participate in athletics at the new school. This policy discourages parents from transferring their children to the school that will provide them the best overall high school experience available.
The process used to determine a student’s athletic eligibility is unfair to students and parents because it is subjective, inconsistent, and complex. In trying to promote its brand of fairness, the UHSAA pits students and parents against coaches and school administrators, creating a culture of mistrust, and producing outcomes more favorable to schools than to student-athletes and their families. The UHSAA should abandon attempts to discover intent, simplify the transfer process, and provide parents with more avenues to influence transfer and eligibility rules.
The best idea would create a new statutory “transfer window” with mid-year and exigent-circumstance exceptions. For instance, any student should be able to transfer, for any reason, to any open-enrollment school, from June 15 to August 15 each year without losing athletic eligibility. In addition, a mid-year transfer exception takes into consideration normal family circumstances without jeopardizing a student-athlete. And, lastly, all of us can think of exigent circumstances that would require a change of school for student due to some immediate hardship.
There is a way to make this work. All we need now is the political courage to stand up to an unjust system.
I’m Paul Mero. Thanks for listening.
