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.
Correctable Error?
May 30, 2017
A decade has passed since the court-ordered change in several sports seasons for Michigan high schools. Ten years has brought resignation more than satisfaction; and yet there remains hope in some places that the new status quo is not permanent, at least for those sports seasons changes that were and are seen by many people as collateral damage in a fight over seasons for girls basketball and volleyball.
Actually, the lawsuit sought to place all girls seasons in the same seasons as boys, like college schedules. The federal court did not require simultaneous scheduling; but the court did bring the intercollegiate mindset to the case. It determined, regardless of other facts, that the intercollegiate season was the “advantageous” season for high school sports. And the principle upon which it approved the compliance plan for high school sports in Michigan was that if all the seasons were not simultaneous for boys and girls, then there should be rough equality in the number of boys and girls assigned to “disadvantageous” seasons.
So, for example, from the federal court’s perspective, fall is the advantageous season for soccer, winter for swimming & diving, and spring for tennis. As for golf, the court opined that, even though it’s not the season of the NCAA championships, maybe fall was the better season. The court began with tortured logic and ended with hypocrisy.
As a result, in the Lower Peninsula, regardless of the preferences of the people involved, girls and boys had to switch seasons in two sports to even up the number of boys seasons and girls seasons in what the court had determined were disadvantageous. Schools thought the switch of golf and tennis for the genders was less injurious than switching soccer and swimming.
In the Upper Peninsula, because swimming and golf are combined for the genders in the winter and spring, respectively, the court’s option was to switch boys and girls seasons for either soccer or tennis. The schools chose soccer as the least disruptive change.
As people count the damaging effects and think about challenging the court-ordered placements a decade later, they must understand the court was looking for balance, for having the genders share the burden of participating in disadvantageous seasons. Moving Lower Peninsula boys golf to join girls in the fall and/or switching Lower Peninsula boys and girls tennis back to what was preferred and in place before judicial interference would recreate the imbalance the federal court conjured up and sought to remedy.
Those of us involved see many advantages to conducting fall golf for both genders in the Lower Peninsula and switching Lower Peninsula tennis seasons for boys and girls, no matter when colleges schedule those sports or how impractical the court’s logic and how inconsistently it was applied. Nevertheless, correcting the court’s errors could be both contentious and costly.