SC private school students could try out for public school sports under bill

COLUMBIA — High school students at small private schools in South Carolina could try out for athletic teams at their local public school under a bill advancing in the Senate.

A panel of three senators voted unanimously Wednesday to send the bill to the full Senate Education Committee. A similar bill passed the Senate in 2022 but it died in the House.

State law already allows students who are educated at home or attending charter schools to try out for teams at their local public school. The bill would add private schools to that list, with limitations.

The school can’t have more than 200 students in ninth through 12 grades. It can’t offer the sport the student’s interested in playing. And it can’t be a member of the South Carolina High School League, an independent, dues-paying organization that sets and oversees the competition rules for participating middle and high schools.

Advocates for public schools don’t foresee a problem.

The constraints, coupled with the fact that public schools aren’t required to put the students on their teams, help explain why it advanced with little discussion.

“At the end of the day, all it does say is they have the opportunity to try out,” Scott Price, director of the State School Boards Association, told the SC Daily Gazette.

But the bill could come into play more in the future, as students use state-paid scholarships to pay for private tuition under a law passed last year.

The program’s inaugural year provides 5,000 low-income students $6,000 each, with the first payments set to start in July. The participation cap will rise to 15,000 in 2026. However, a proposal passed by the House last week could exponentially expand the program.

Under the bill advanced Wednesday, students who use the money to attend a small private school without a sports program would still be eligible to play on teams at the public school they’re zoned to attend.

Ryan Bailey, lobbyist for the Association of School Administrators, also didn’t have a problem with it. But he asked senators to give the same opportunity to public school students by allowing them to try out for private school teams.

Large private schools offer sports not available in most public schools that students might like to try, such as bowling, archery and sailing, Bailey said.

“This is a place where private and public schools should be able to work together for the benefit of their students,” he said.

Sen. Kevin Johnson, D-Manning, said he supported that idea, but the panel didn’t formally take it up.

Transfer limits

A separate bill advanced Wednesday would overrule the High School League’s policy on student transfers.

Generally, students switching schools are not allowed to join any athletic teams for the following year. Exceptions include students whose families moved to a new district or middle schoolers who decide to go to a different high school than the one nearest to them.

The idea is that the rule prevents students from transferring to a new school just to join a different sports team, giving one school an unfair advantage by recruiting the best players from across the state, Jerome Singleton, the league’s commissioner, told senators.

But the policy creates unintended consequences, said Emily Heatwole, a lobbyist for Gray Collegiate Academy in West Columbia. For example, students who transfer to a school with better academic opportunities can’t participate in sports for their first year there.

The bill would create transfer windows at the beginning of each school semester, allowing students to switch schools while remaining eligible to play on their new school’s athletic teams right away. They could transfer either in August or January, just not both in one year.

Senators didn’t want to create scenarios where students could flip-flop between schools, playing football at one during the fall season and baseball at another in the spring, for example.

Singleton said he could accept that compromise, but he’s still concerned about rising 12th graders transferring to a new school their senior year.

“I think that’s when it opens the door where there’s an opportunity for those, for lack of a better term, elite players to try to gather at one school to create a championship opportunity,” he said.