VALENTINE, Neb. — Whether homeschool students should be allowed to participate in public school activities continues to spark debate across the country. In Valentine, several homeschool families brought their concerns to Wednesday night’s school board meeting, asking members to reconsider a recent change to the district’s extracurricular participation policy.

As News Channel Nebraska previously reported, the board updated its policy earlier this year, increasing the number of required credit hours for non-public school students from one class to two in order to join non-regulated activities. Non-regulated activities are those not governed by the Nebraska School Activities Association, such as FFA, FBLA, and all middle school athletics.

Under state law, schools cannot require more than five credit hours — or one class — for non-public school students to participate in NSAA-regulated activities like high school sports, speech, debate, and play production.

In a letter read during the meeting, Nebraska Sen. Dave Murman urged the board to reverse course, arguing that homeschooled and public school families both pay taxes to support the district and should be treated equally.

“When the Legislature changed the law, lowering the required credits from ten to five for regulated activities this was, at the time, due to the NSAA's exclusionary policies. If local school boards are now going to adopt the same exclusionary policies, the Legislature can absolutely act again to stand up for those families,” Murman wrote. “To write and enforce policies that treat these families differently sends the message that some members of the community are less welcome in our public schools, a message I am sure none of us wishes to send.”

Another homeschool family read a letter from the Home School Legal Defense Association, which argued the revised policy contradicts the intent of LB705, the 2023 Nebraska law that reduced the credit requirement for NSAA activities.

“The purpose of that change in the law was to make it easier for students in exempt schools to participate in extracurricular activities through the publicly-funded schools of the state,” wrote Darren Jones of HSLDA. “However, it appears that the Policy #5003 (Valentine School Board policy) goes against the intent of the new law and instead puts more restrictions on these exempt school students. Specifically, while the Policy follows the new law in requiring exempt students to be enrolled in five credit hours to participate in extracurricular activities regulated by an athletics or activities association, the Policy doubles the amount of classes and requires the exempt student to be enrolled in ten credit hours (two classes) in order to participate in non-regulated extracurricular activities.”

The board did not take action on the issue Wednesday. During a previous meeting, several board members said they wanted to increase the required classes to two for consistency, noting that public school students are not allowed to be failing two classes in a week and still participate in activities.