What state affiliates have rules governing homeschool teams that differ from the USCF Regulations? What are the different rules that are used?
Currently there is a team of home schooled students that do not constitute a team under the USCF Regulations. They feel that the Regulations are too strict and are appealing to the state affilate to adopt our own rules to govern home schooled teams.
I am trying to find out what alternatives to the USCF Regulations are out there. The concern by the Affiliate is that if the rules are too lacks, that a “Super Team” can be formed by picking and choosing players from all over the state. It is my understanding that this team currently consists of players from different school districts as well as cities (although they’re all in the same metropolitian area).
The Texas Chess Association has homeschool rules that were developed before the USCF rules, so they are different. These apply only to TCA events, which include state championships and regional championships. Here are a couple of critical differences from the USCF rules.
(1) In Texas, homeschooled students can NEVER play for the local public school. TCA members have spoken clearly on this issue and have voted against allowing this as an option.
(2) In Texas, homeschool associations can field teams just as public and private schools can. A homeschool association is a group of families that join together for various group activities, such as sports, drama, supplemental classes, etc. These associations may include kids in different districts, just as private schools may draw from schools in neighboring districts that are within commuting distance.
(3) If a question arises about the composition of a homeschool team (or any other team), the specifics of the situation are referred to the TCA Scholastic Committee. The committee members consider the evidence and determine how to apply the spirit of our rules to that individual situation.
(Note: I am no longer Chair of the TCA Scholastic Committee, so I am speaking of what has happened in the past, and I am not speaking for TCA officially.)
What determines an “association”? Is it a formal group (a national/state chater) or would families that just get together be considered an association?
In Ohio we allow the associations to self define, as long as the primary purpose isn’t for chess team competitions. Thus, if they meet daily, weekly or even monthly for some group activity they can compete as a team in state events.
As long as the association meets on a regular basis, we have no limitations. My guess is that most homeschool associations will only have children from a certain area, so here in Columbus there might be multiple homeschool groups that represent the metropolitan area.
With regard to the USCF homeschool regulations, wasn’t there some discussion a few years back with regard to one particular homeschool group in Arizona? I believe the USCF regulations were constructed with this group in mind. I assumed this issue would have been settled in Arizona by now as well.
This has been the practice in Texas. Note the homeschool associations that Texas allows to field teams are NOT statewide associations, they are LOCAL. Local means that people live close enough that they commute to meet for various activities. (Statewide associations have different purposes, like supporting legislation, running online forums, etc.)
When I ran a homeschool chess club in Austin, we had kids from several adjacent counties who drove Austin for homeschool activities. There are several private schools in Austin who also draw from the greater-Austin area.
I’m not sure which it is, since I just became a member of our affiliate board. I know that the group doesn’t count as a team under USCF rules and they’ve been trying to get the affiliate to adopt less strict rules for our state tournaments.
While this specific team might not be a problem, we don’t want to create a rule that could later be exploited.
In Oklahoma we currently also allow homeschool teams to be formed by players in the same association. We have no geographic constraints like the USCF. A problem stated about this is the inability to verify association affiliation, and on the other hand that the student body available to form a team from is much smaller for the homeschoolers.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics publication at nces.ed.gov/nhes/homeschool/ , the national trend for homeschoolers is up, with 1.7% homeschooled in 1999 and 2.2% in 2003. We could project out to a few years from now and reach a 3% level for ease of calculation.
My town of about 20,000 people has about 300 students per grade level, which is a pretty average sized school.
There are 50 million school children in the USA, with a total population of 290 million in 2003. That’s 17.2% of the population that are K-12 school age.
An average US Congressional District is about 700,000 people. With 17.2% school age and 3% of those homeschooled, we’re looking at a homeschool population of 3,612 students. Assuming 12 grade levels, that’s very close to 300 students per grade level.
So, one could argue that using US Congressional District boundaries for homeschool team members would result in a very fair population of homeschoolers to build a team from, and comparable to the student body of an average sized public school. This could be verified by address, and it would only be subject to tinkering by national politicians that are unlikely to be building a ringer of a scholastic chess team.
Congressional Boundaries as homeschool districts would be a TERRIBLE idea for Texas. The boundaries are clearly drawn for political reasons. Sometimes the politicos drew lines clearly designed to drop a popular elected official’s home into a district where few people knew him/her.
Scroll down to Texas, then check out District 10, which includes part of Houston and stretches across to north Austin. For those of you who are not familiar with Texas, that is a LONG distance with LOTS of people in between.
There are many other badly drawn districts, and the courts are constantly reviewing legal challenges and making changes. Unfortunately, it seems to be legal in Texas to draw weird boundaries that are clearly for political reasons, as long as they don’t dilute the voting power of minorities.
I think homeschool kids should be able to play on teams with other kids with whom they share other academic activities. That is what happens for public and private school kids. Kids cannot commute from Austin to Houston for daily or even weekly group activities.
Other states might have more rational congressional boundaries, so it might work some places, but not here.
Brenda Hardesty
Retired Chair
Texas Chess Association Scholastic Committee
I see what you mean. At the same link you’ll see that the OK politicians are a lot less “creative”. Maybe some other fair way of establishing boundaries would work better in TX to create reasonable areas of about 700,000 residents. My opinion is still that an approach like this is more fair and manageable than teams based on homeschool associations which don’t publish member lists, or even worse, using an unfairly small population like a single school district.
It’s sure easy to see why this has been such a difficult issue over the years.
Cheers,
Mike Swatek
Secretary, Oklahoma Scholastic Chess Organization
What is the latest on the homeschool rules? I understand the uscf is against homeschool teams because of the potential to create a team with star players. Fair enough.
I noticed that the idea that homeschool associations, which are not formed for the sole purpose of winning Chess tournaments, was raised here. This idea was handled very well in Texas from what I read.
Where would I start to have the uscf rule align with the TX rules, such that Homeschool associations be allowed to form teams?
I don’t think it’s accurate or fair to say that the USCF is against home schooled or virtual schooled teams, the Scholastic Regulations go into both possibilities in detail.
What they also try to do is keep people from using those rules as a way to create an unfair advantage.
thanks for the info. The word “against” was poorly chosen. However, I wonder if the original idea of home schooling took into account the idea of home school associations when the original rules were written? Perhaps the rules should be reexamined in light of the changes in how such organizations are run. Does that sound fair?
In Kenutcky we go by the USCF rules. Ky schools do not allow home schooled students to play on school teams, so the home school chess players cannot join a school team. They can form teams by school district if they choose. Many of our counties have county wide districts with specific attendance zones for individual schools. A few have open enrollment across multiple schools int he distrcit. We have not dealt with the issue much yet. Our position so far has been they can form teams by district, but none have so far. More often we have siblings who play together as a team.
We also have certain private schools where the students attend for specific classes and are home schooled the balance of the time. Those schools are recognized by the state and we would treat those students as attending that school - not as being home schooled.
We have a different problem becasue the high school sports association allows middle school students to play on high school sports teams if they attend a feeder middle school for that high school. IT is a fairly common practice. That is not allowed by USCF rules unless all the grades are on the same campus and run by the same administration (yes I am simplifying a bit here). So we do not allow those students to play on the high school ches team while they would be able to play on the hs basketball team. We do have some combined public jh/hs buildings and private K-12 schools in which the kids can play on one high school team together.
In North Carolina, we allow homeschooled teams that encompass school districts - usually county-wide. We have few homeschooled teams - although over the past decade we’ve had homeschoolers win the K-12 and K-5 state titles. Usually, they were led by siblings who joined up with some others.
The USCF rules are too restrictive – basically anti-homeschool. In return, they don’t allow homeschoolers to frequent with their local school. You need to allow some leeway one way or another.
The Oklahoma Scholastic Chess Organization approved the above change for homeschool teams soon after this post last fall, with one additional stipulation. The players must also be meeting as an OSCO affiliated club. The homeschool team rule now states:
So far the new rule seems to be working out well, with a couple of homeschool teams (same club living in different districts) now winning a few awards.
Once again, I recognize that the politicians in some states have distorted congressional boundaries so much that this may be less practical there.
I believe the USCF rules allow for home schooled students to participate on school teams IF the state allows/requires that public schools allow such students to participate in all other extracurricular activities.
On an different note, when one has a smaller more rural district figuring out what school a student may be able to join is a little clearer. However we are in a large urban area which permits a level of school choice or open enrollment. One could argue that, were it allowed in Ky, a Louisville area student would be able to choose to play with any of the 27 public high schools in the district or one of the many more middle or elementary schools. Sorting that out would be interesting.
I really don’t understand why the USCF cares about what the government does with its school districts? Is the USCF accountable to the US Government for how it runs its organization? I assume not. So what is the motivation behind observing school district boundaries? It is simply the concern of creating “star player” teams for the purpose of winning all the events, right?
Home school associations are not created for the purpose of winning Chess events. And that’s the whole point. They don’t violate the primary concern of creating ad hoc star player teams. So what’s the problem? The USCF created the rules and that’s the end of it?
The question is: why not change the rules to allow home school organizations that have LLC status (by way of example) to form Chess teams and compete? I’m just not hearing an answer to this and it definitely feels like an anti home school bias, whether it is intended or not.