Leading off today: As sure as the swallows return to Capistrano each year, a New York state assemblyman has reintroduced a bill that has no chance of making it out of committee -- let alone being passed into law.
Last week, downstate Republican Matt Slater again submitted his proposed legislation requiring the separation of high school championship competitions between public and non-public schools. It's the third straight year that Slater has pushed for the legislation.
Whatever the merits might be -- and there are obvious flaws in it -- the bill has absolutely no chance of being enacted into law without him enlisting at least one Democrat in both the State Assembly and the Senate as co-sponsors, and it would be an uphill battle even then. Anyone with even a casual knowledge of New York politics understands that the odds of a red-shirted Star Trek extra surviving after beaming down to a hostile planet are infinitely higher.
The Assembly has referred the bill to the education committee, where it will again gather dust. Thus, I wouldn't have even bothered mentioning Slater's annual folly if not for the debate that has engulfed the high school sports community -- well, mostly the football community since that's just about the only sport that matters there -- in Alabama.
The emotional question of whether public and private schools should compete in the same state tournament is receiving an airing ahead of the scheduled biennial classification updates to be released on Jan. 23.
It was already a thorny issue before elected officials got involved, and now ita's worse because it's become increasingly difficult to separate scholastic sports governance from state education laws -- a mistake Slater wants New York to replicate.
Not unlike New York and several other states, the issue of whether private and public schools belong on the same playing field has been batted around in Alabama for quite some time. The Alabama High School Athletic Association applies a multiplier to enrollment figures for private schools to address some of the concerns about potential competitive advantages.
That seemed to be working until last year, when Gov. Kay Ivey and House Speaker Nathaniel Ledbetter sued the AHSAA over the CHOOSE ("Creating Hope and Opportunity for Our Students' Education") Act, which allocates funding to eligible families toward educational expenses -- including private school tuition.
That's where the law of unintended consequences kicked in, because the AHSAA has a rule that students who transfer and receive financial aid must sit out from sports for a year. The AHSAA considers the CHOOSE Act money financial aid.
That triggered the lawsuit, which led a judge to impose mediation upon the two sides. In response, the AHSAA postponed its biennial reclassification from December to Jan. 23, and that target date has been further complicated by the fact that the Alabama legislature, itself split on the issues, returns to session tomorrow.
The convergence of the lawsuit-triggered mediation that could amend or nuke the multiplier rule, the new deadline for classification, and elected officials potentially introducing new bills pertaining to scholastic sports is a recipe for chaos. AL.com just published a three-part series examining all aspects of the situation, and it could probably have been a six-part series given the complexity.
Among the questions:
• Will elected officials who've proposed taking over the privately funded AHSAA pursue that course of action? Would sponsorship deals then die as corporate boards distance themselves from what would become a government-run agency?
• Is there even a workable plan for separating the public schools from 58 private members, a question the NYSPHSAA just spent the past two years addressing and may soon be facing again?
• What would stop the big-city public schools from dominating the postseason if they no longer faced competition from private schools? It's a question that doesn't apply to New York in nearly the same fashion as it does in Alabama.
Even with all that on the table, it's worth remembering that other nearby states -- including Florida, Georgia, and Tennessee -- have developed models for separate playoffs. The double-barreled issue for Alabama is that they're being asked to consider multiple questions all at once at that same time that elected officials have become very actively involved.
