For Home Students, Chance to Join the Club in Public School, 5 July 2007, Washington Post, Washington, D.C.

Beginning in the fall, the Prince William County school system will be the first among major school districts in Northern Virginia to allow students in private or home schools to enroll in extracurricular activities such as clubs, although not competitive sports teams. The Prince William School Board, which approved the measure last week, could not extend the access to sports teams because their competitions are governed by the Virginia High School League, which prohibits anyone not fully enrolled in the school system from playing, school officials said.

School board members in other parts of Northern Virginia have debated whether to approve a policy that is similar to Prince William’s, but they have not resolved debates about whether giving home-schoolers such a right is fair. Jane K. Strauss, a Fairfax County School Board member representing Dranesville, said the issue has come up in conversation among her counterparts across the region, but no significant consensus seems to emerge.

“Let’s say you’ve got a handful of kids who have been talented in drama and they’ve worked real hard, and you only put on one musical whose lead positions are coveted,” Strauss said. “What would happen if a home-school kid displaced other kids who in good faith had worked their way up the ranks?”

The way to resolve this situation is to divorce extra-curricular activities from school and make them community activities instead. The extra-curriculars are often used as enticements for good grades in school, or as perks for … showing up?

If the activities are the kind that should be open to all community members, then there isn’t a firm connection to the function schools are supposed to fulfill.

The worst example rationalizing homeschooled kids needing access to public schools was at the beginning of the article:

Say you’re a home-schooled student, but you want to learn about photography, and think the best way to learn, barring lessons on dad’s bulky Polaroid, is working on the high school yearbook.

Impossible, right? Home-schoolers in high school clubs?

Why would a homeschooled kid even know about high school yearbooks? And why would they have meaning for the kid? And “dad’s bulky Polaroid?” In my opinion, you have to know photography before you can work a Polaroid camera well, because there are so few choices to make with the camera that the ones you can make are critical.

This article’s writer is writing from the perspective of someone firmly enculturated by School. The idea that working on the high school yearbook is a good way to learn about photography is odd. Candid photos are used in yearbooks, but not enough to make the collecting of them something relevant to grasping what photography is about, which is usually the manipulation and capturing of light. The wide, wide world provides many more interesting photographic subjects than does the limited world of school and its activities.

School News, 3 July 2007, Prince William News, Gainesville, Virginia

This modification to Policy 722, “Home Instruction by Parents and Partial Enrollment of Home Instruction and Private School Students,” … clarifies language stating that these students can enroll at the middle and high school levels in up to two credit-bearing courses per semester.

… Additional information will be provided before the beginning of next school year. For information about partial enrollment, contact the Office of Student Services at (703) 791-7257. For information regarding specific activities, call individual schools.

School Board members noted … that it is not their intent that private school or home-school students will displace any public school students. Also, no additional classes would be created solely for private or homeschool students. …