As my homeschooled sons get older, and are excelling at sports more and more,  I've started looking into the sports situation in public schools. Looks like UIL rules prohibits homeschooled kids from being on public school teams,  but there's a push to get that rule changed.

https://www.dallasnews.com/news/education/2021/05/05/will-tim-tebow-bill-finally-pass-in-texas-home-school-advocates-push-for-students-to-compete-with-public-schools/

Admittedly,  Im not too well versed in this issue,  but I see it as a positive,  and we pay taxes so why shouldn't we have access? What are your thoughts on this? And how can I follow status of this?

Do away with public schools.  Make all kids pick their school and participate in clubs they want to.  

Private football,baseball, basketball, soccer, etc clubs.  

Do away with school taxes and spending money on outrageous stadiums.

But that's just like my opinion man.

If you want to follow the progress of the bill, you can do so via the Texas Legislature's web site for looking up bills.

Now the article doesn't list the bill numbers or anything useful like that.  So I would contact the co-author's office, Rep. James Frank, and ask for the House bill number, and what the companion bill number is for the Senate.

The article was from the 5th, so almost two weeks ago, so it may have passed out of the House by now, and also out of the Senate committee.

So, call Rep Frank's office, say this impacts you and you support it, and ask for bill numbers and such.

https://www.texastribune.org/directory/james-frank/

If you type the bill number into the upper right section on this page, you can lookup the status of it:

https://capitol.texas.gov/MnuCommittees.aspx

Once you find out where the bill is, and the status, you can start contacting elected officials to ask for their support in moving the bill out.  If you know of others who also homeschool, and are interested in this bill, get them to work with you on contacting reps - best way I've found is to take the lead on emails to reps, copy all your friends as the CC, then just ask them to Reply All, with their comments on the issues.

Let us know if you need any other tips on working with the Legislature - a lot of us on here have gotten pretty good with our hobby lobby efforts for Constitutional Carry, and we can help you out.  It's pretty late in the session, which ends this month, so things need to be moving or just about done to have a chance to pass.  So time is of the essence.  

Good luck.

Its not just your opinion man....

I have made alot of money off of stadium construction and I fully advocate for saying fuck organized tax funded foolsball.

More information inbound from the wife unit but this bill has the capacity to be BAAAAADDDDDDD for homeschooling. Broadly speaking it is a way to set up a feedback loop with public schoolers that drives legislatures to mandate curriculum for homeschooling. Evidently some version of this effect has been the outcome of the bill as passed in Alabama.

This is the type of hidden crap I was worried about. Interested in more info regarding this.

Completely agree

Thanks for this info

Its allowed in others states, figured it would be here.

Unfortunately the opposition is not well organized. This is the bookface group that my wife follows:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/texasnsforhomeschoolfreedom/

The information is not well centralized so be prepared for some scrolling.

There are some good videos in these threads but you have to look for them.

Some points:

1) There are also private organizations that provide team sports opportunities to homeschoolers. While our family doesn't participate, several of our friends do. So if you are a homeschooling parent you already have access.
2) Texas Home Schooling Coalition (THSC), the organization pushing the Tebow bills has a vested financial interest in the testing that will eventually be required (because they market test materials). They are very organized and are curating their public facing pages to remove all comments negative toward the bill.
3) The danger of bills like these is that they move move the generally apathetic public schooling parent from a slightly unfavorable opinion of homeschooling to white hot hatred, radicalizing public school parents against homeschoolers. When little Johnny public schooler gets bumped from the football team by a homeschooler the Johnny's parents begin looking into how this happened and they focus in on "fairness". They will say its not fair that homeschoolers don't have to study the same things, and it's not fair that they don't have to attend classes 5 times a week like public schoolers do. Every session, participation in athletic programs by homeschoolers will require greater and greater oversite from the state. First it's testing, then it's curriculum, then state oversight, and finally attendance... you know, for fairness. Setting up this polarization could just be a bug of the Tebow bills. But this push is not happening in a vacuum:
https://www.theepochtimes.com/attacks-on-christian-homeschooling-are-no-longer-subtle_3805174.html
4) House member Frank, a coauthor of the bill, has specifically marketed the Tebow bill as a way to reduce homeschooling and get kids back in public schools.

Our family began homeschooling to get our kids away from the state. We've been doing it for 10 years and watching what has been going on in institutional schools has only strengthened our confidence in that decision. If you support this bill, don't be surprised to find that in a few years you will need to be teaching the so-called "1619 Project" to your kids to make sure your little angel can continue to play ball with the other collectivist drones. At that point, will you pull them out of sports or just send them to pubic school and be done with it?