Friday, April 15, 2011

 
Charter School Student Athletes Deserve Better from Grown-ups

Not being a sports writer, I've never followed sports below the professional level, especially high school athletics. I do, of course, follow charter schools, particularly the political conflicts that spring from this decade long public school competition in New York State. What occurred this week in the Albany area, however, was about as low as this battle can sink.

Most charter school fights boil down to two things: money (outside NYC) and building space (inside NYC). As a result, adults that are opposed to charters have shown themselves capable of some real hardball tactics, even to a gratuitous level, as witnessed by the denial of private-sector financing by the Albany Capital Resource Corporation earlier this year.

Charter School Sports Teams Unfair Classifications
This week, we have the spectacle of the Section II Athletic Council voting to rubber stamp previous athletic committee recommendations to place the Green Tech High Charter School boys football team into a AA classification. This same group also designated the Albany Leadership Charter High School for Girls basketball team as class A.

To understand the absurdity of these unfair classifications, it is worth reading the accounts of this unfolding story by James Allen, a sports reporter for the Albany Times Union.

Both charter high schools would have been more appropriately designated as Class B, or perhaps C, which is commensurate with other area high schools of similar size, and is appropriate even if you assumed (falsely) that charters should be thought of as private schools that could recruit students. Instead, the Athletic Council has forced these small public charter high schools to compete with the region's largest school district high schools, two to four times larger in size, and with oodles more in resources for athletic programming.

Direct, Negative Impact on Charter Students
Green Tech and Albany Leadership charters, to their credit, have established competitive, admirable sports programs for such small, fledgling schools. But, to hear the rationale of this Athletic Council, one would think they're a bunch of self-selecting Philistines enrolled in the charter schools - Goliaths who will make other teams quiver on the sports field. This preposterous notion makes the council members either woefully ignorant, or just plain unkind to the point of nefarious.

Why such a harsh description? Because this council, and the committees beforehand, are deliberately consigning charter school students from smaller schools to a lopsidedly losing season against far superior teams from large school districts. In doing so, it makes a mockery of the whole classification system and the multiple committee levels that deliberated on this question.

Why are these committees, including people like Gary VanDerzee, the Section II football chairman, setting up these students to fail?

Council Members Worse Than Pols
It's bad enough we have politicians and school district types, especially in the Albany area (and you know who you are) that are out to stop charter schools and cripple their operations. While that certainly affects the financial and academic health of a charter school, the students themselves can mostly be shielded from the bad political behavior and animus of grown-ups.

In these cases of a deliberate mis-classfication of a school's athletic program, students who participate in the sport are directly impacted at their emotional and productive levels, and for the worse. This is a terrible injustice by these Section II committees and council to attack students so directly like this.

What is wrong with those people at Section II? If they hate charter schools this much, at least leave the students out of their crossfire.

Peter Murphy
for The Chalkboard
Twitter.com/PeterMuphy26
Facebook: Chalkboard Nycsa
posted by Andrea Rogers at PermaLink 2:23 PM