Interscholastic Competition Standard for Home-Education Programs, Teams, and Students

Status: Working normative opening provisions. These provisions have not been adopted by a governing body.

Name and scope

The name of this document is the Interscholastic Competition Standard for Home-Education Programs, Teams, and Students (the Standard). It is a proposed voluntary standard for schools that organize and operate interscholastic participation by home-educated students.

The Standard can govern participation by teams, ensembles, groups, and students representing an adopting school across athletics, academics, journalism, robotics, dance, music, theater, and other interscholastic activities. Rules for students entering without an adopting school are reserved for later consideration.

Objectives

The Standard aims to:

1. support students’ educational experience through fair interscholastic competition;
2. establish common requirements for schools, teams, and students that other schools can evaluate;
3. provide a basis for accountable contest administration, including obligations to officials and processes for resolving complaints; and
4. provide a model that UIL or TAPPS could consider if either organization chooses to establish a membership category or path for schools serving home-educated students.

Definitions and construction

For purposes of this Standard:

• School means an identifiable organization that adopts the Standard and organizes, rosters, and represents home-educated students in interscholastic activities. This use of school is limited to the Standard’s competition framework. Designation as a School under this Standard does not determine who provides the student’s general elementary or secondary educational program or who holds institutional responsibility for it. Those questions are determined under HS-BASE by the actual educational arrangement.
• Student means a person proposed for or participating in an activity under the Standard. Eligibility to represent a school requires satisfaction of the applicable student-eligibility provisions, including HS-BASE; the defined term alone confers no eligibility.
• Team includes any organized group of students representing a school in an interscholastic activity, whether athletic, academic, artistic, or otherwise. Rules for an individual student representing a school do not require that student to be part of a team.
• Contest means an interscholastic competition or event governed by an applicable activity rule. The term is not limited to athletics.
• Conformance track means one of the school’s declared options under the schools and tracks provisions: UIL-aligned, TAPPS-aligned, or core-only. A track is a category within this Standard, not external membership or approval.
• Signatory means a school whose authorized representative has executed an adoption agreement for an identified version of this Standard, whose agreement has been accepted by the body authorized to administer it, and whose signatory status remains in good standing. A school is not a signatory merely because it reads or uses the Standard.

Other terms are defined where their rules are developed. The Standard does not import all UIL or TAPPS definitions merely because its subject order resembles their governing documents.

Restrictive conformance principle

Where a module uses a status or eligibility category established by Texas law or governing athletic rules, conformance to that underlying category is a prerequisite. A module may impose narrower requirements, but no provision of this standard shall be construed to expand or liberalize the underlying category or to override applicable law or governing rules.

HS-BASE applies this principle to Texas-law home-school status. Qualification under Texas law is necessary but not sufficient for HS-BASE; satisfying HS-BASE cannot establish Texas-law status where that status is absent. See HS-BASE § 1.

Open and durable stewardship

The Standard shall be capable of adoption, implementation, verification, and continued use independently of its original author or any single participating organization.

Published versions of the Standard and its modules shall be immutable and permanently identifiable. A subsequent revision shall create a new identifiable version and shall not alter the meaning of a previously published version. Changes to this working draft before publication do not create a published version.

Conformance shall be stated against identified versions of the applicable Standard and modules so that the requirements represented by a conformance assertion remain independently ascertainable.

The Standard shall not require any particular technology for publication, authentication, certification, or verification. Implementations may employ digital signatures, verifiable credentials, transparency logs, distributed ledgers, smart contracts, or other mechanisms, provided that use of such technology does not alter the substantive requirements of the Standard.

Module boundaries and external authority

The signatory provisions address the organizations that roster students and formally undertake the Standard’s obligations. HS-BASE determines whether a student meets the Standard’s home-education classification. Neither signatory status nor HS-BASE, on its own, establishes eligibility for a particular activity. Student eligibility, UIL or TAPPS academic conformance, and season definitions are separate modules.

This Standard does not confer membership in, or approval by, UIL, TAPPS, SPC, or TASO.