Utah made major moves in offering families education choice this year with the Utah Fits All scholarship program. As creating education options becomes the norm in states, policymakers will inevitably need to make policy tweaks to ensure equality for students taking advantage of education alternatives – avoiding penalizing them in other ways. 

This includes needed policy changes for students who want to pursue sports and extracurricular activities. 

Cambri Robinson is a Utah student enrolled with My Tech High, an online school, and is also a talented soccer player. She was told she could try out for the Copper Hills High School soccer team and chose to do so because it was the school closest to her (even though she lived outside the geographical school boundaries). But after making the team and being offered the opportunity to be goalkeeper, she was told she couldn’t join the team. Playing sports is important to her, and so is staying at My Tech High, since she has already advanced to earning her associate degree in high school.  

The reason she couldn’t stay with Copper Hills soccer team was that according to current statute, online students can’t play for a school outside their geographically assigned school. 

However, if she were a student enrolled in a public district school, Cambri would not be facing this choice, thanks to the state’s open enrollment policies. 

HB 209 – Participation in Extracurricular Activities Amendments seeks to inject equality into this issue by extending the same opportunities currently afforded to district school students to home-school, private school and online students if their school doesn’t have USHAA sports in which to participate. This bill would address similar policies to other extracurricular activities as well like music and art programs.  

At its core, the bill seeks to treat students of all types of education the same. This is a natural outgrowth of a paradigm shift that has grown in recent years: Our education system includes – and should be viewed as including – public district schools, public charter schools, online schools, private offerings, home education, etc. 

Making these changes would sort out logistical headaches and send a message that all students in the state are a priority.  

Extracurricular activities, including sports, are not peripheral issues either. Studies show that student athletes graduate at record rates, and that participation in extracurricular activities is particularly helpful in combating dropout rates among at-risk youth. To limit extracurricular opportunities because a family makes a different education choice negatively impacts students, parents and the public education system.  

On one hand, it creates incentives for students and parents to choose an academic environment that might not be the best fit for students – putting them at higher risk of not succeeding academically and requiring more resources from the public education system. Or, on the other hand, it asks students to forgo the extracurricular interests that are an important part of their experience and success in both education and life. 

HB 209 also goes to lengths to ensure equality in the other direction by making sure it doesn’t offer unwarranted benefits to students in these alternative settings that don’t have UHSAA athletics. For example, the bill says that the opportunity to choose a school out of boundaries for sports or other activities is limited to “first entry,” which depending on the school is 9th or 10th grade. This means, ultimately, that students cannot hop around from school to school, but must choose a school and stick with it.  

Furthermore, since public district school students are not allowed to choose a team if the school’s enrollment has reached maximum capacity, neither can online or home-educated students, even though they would not technically need to take any enrollment space.  

There have been questions around funding and fees for these extracurricular activities, which may be addressed in coming committee and floor debate. While refinements over the years may be necessary and prudent, this bill takes an important step in addressing an equality gap between students in different schools. Addressing this issue with HB209 shows a good faith effort on the part of the Legislature to make good on their philosophy that all students deserve an education – including non-academic aspects of education – that best fits them and their individual needs.