On the Move
June 8, 2012
Two members of the MHSAA’s executive staff live on the same side of the same town. Each lives less than a five-minute drive to the MHSAA building; and yet they live in differently named neighborhoods, taking the names of the public elementary schools which serve their sections of town and the school district.
Students of those two elementary schools feed the one and only public middle school of the district, which feeds the one and only public high school of the district. Historically, there would not be too much to deter the children raised in these two homes from attending the same schools.
However, if one of the families is Catholic, it might choose to send its children to the Catholic grade school located across the street from the public high school. And it might decide to send its children to high school at the Catholic high school in the town which neighbors to the west.
If one of the families were inclined, it might choose to home school its children before sending them to the district’s high school or to one of two Christian high schools nearby.
Or perhaps one of the families would choose to send one of their children to a charter school near the location of the mother’s employment. Perhaps another child would be a school of choice student at a traditional high school convenient to the father’s place of work but in a different school district. These are common occurrences today that were rare just 15 years ago.
A multitude of other factors could affect the choice of school:
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One school might be better known than others for a particular curriculum strength, or it might have a strong reputation in drama or music or sports, or in one particular sport.
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Children are more likely today to have mingled on non-school youth sports teams and to decide to stay together for high school teams.
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High school students might attend the same summer camps and be attracted to a different group of kids or a coach, and transfer to join the new group or coach.
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As families relocate more frequently, students are required to transfer; and as the nuclear family becomes less stable, students are more often forced to change domestic settings, and change schools.
These and other factors – some worthy or unavoidable, some unhealthy and contrived – add up to the following:
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During the entire 1986-87 school year, the MHSAA Executive Committee processed 96 requests by member schools to waive eligibility rules, and 58 of those requests were for student transfers.
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25 years later, the total requests for the school year were 462; and of those, 337 were to waive the transfer section of the eligibility regulation.
This demonstrates in numbers what we have observed to be true: that during the past quarter century, the clientele of high school athletics has become five times more mobile. It’s one of school sports’ greatest challenges.
Tipping Point
April 11, 2014
During the 2010-11 school year we began working on new rules that might address the likelihood that (1) international students would begin to prefer the F-1 visa route to enrollment in our schools over the J-1 route, and (2) that our schools would with increasing efforts turn to foreign countries to recruit students to replace the declining population in Michigan and to replenish the funding that would allow those schools to operate at funding levels sufficient to maintain facilities, faculties and programs.
We got hung up and slowed down during these deliberations because of uncertainty about the future roles of the Council on Standards for International Educational Travel, the US Department of State and the US Department of Homeland Security, and hesitancy over the potential legal problems we might be creating by implementing practical solutions to real athletic-related problems that the influx of unvetted F-1 visa students had created and would continue to create with greater frequency as their numbers increased.
In 2012, there were more J-1 visa students enrolled through CSIET-approved programs in Michigan secondary schools than in any other state; and the total number of J-1 and F-1 students combined was also greatest in Michigan. And, having such a hospitable environment for J-1 students, we have predicted that a slowly growing percentage of the rapidly growing number of F-1 students in the US (80,000 in 2013) would begin enrolling in Michigan secondary schools.
The 2013-14 school year has brought things to a head, with certain high profile situations creating enough attention that hesitations were overcome and the adoption of new rules for 2014-15 became a foregone conclusion. You can find those changes here in Appendix B of the March Representative Council Minutes.
Very briefly, here are the key components of the new rules:
- Only those international students (J-1 or F-1) who qualify for one of the residency exceptions to the Transfer Regulation or are placed through an MHSAA Approved International Student Program can have varsity eligibility.
- J-1 and F-1 visa students have identical opportunities. If they are enrolled through an MHSAA Approved International Student Program, they are immediately eligible for one academic year, followed by one year of ineligibility before they could be eligible again. This is the “Play One, Wait One” rule that has previously applied only to J-1 foreign exchange students.
- Local schools may, if they wish, provide other international students subvarsity eligibility regardless of grade level, without MHSAA Executive Committee approval.