Photo Credit: Meredith Geaghan-Breiner

Tennis is one of many sports M-A students choose to play outside of school. In the future, these out-of-school athletic activities may be granted sports credit along with school teams, making it easier for club athletes to substitute extracurriculars for PE.

When the Board of the Sequoia Union High School District meets tonight, its trustees will settle a debate affecting every member of the M-A community: the question of how students should obtain PE credit.

Confronted with the issue of PE substitution, the Board faces four possible options. It can maintain the status quo, allowing only school sports and out-of-school individual sports to serve as PE substitution. But, as student trustee Tyler Finn explains, “The system we have is unfair to students playing outside-of-school team sports” – members of club teams, for example.

Hypothetically, the Board also has the option of enrolling all students to take PE for two full years, without exemptions. But the $200,000 cost of establishing mandatory PE I and PE II classes dismisses this alternative as a realistic one for the school.

This leaves the Board with “only two real viable actions,” according to Finn. It can allow only school sports to replace PE; or permit school sports, out-of-school individual sports, and out-of- school team sports to serve as substitution.

Of these two paths of action, Finn supports the latter, which provides students with the greatest range of choices in fulfilling the PE requirement. “It is my fundamental belief that every student is different, and has different hopes and dreams,” he states, “and should therefore be given as many opportunities as possible … to achieve what they want to achieve.”

Finn does not feel that permitting club sports to provide sports credit would pull elite players from school sports teams. “Students want to play sports at school for a variety of reasons,” he says.

In any case, “if our top athletes were to play solely club sports, it would open up the teams for kids to play that otherwise would have been cut,” he argues. “An unintended side effect could be opening more opportunities for all types of kids at all skill levels to play school sports.”

As to that consequence’s impact on the quality of M-A athletic teams, Finn asserts that “neither education code nor district policy states that fielding competitive sports is a goal of the district.”

“I was previously in favor of [allowing out-of-school team sports to carry PE credit],” said trustee Olivia Martinez, “but upon further review and wider input, I’m convinced that option would be bad for our students.”

“Monitoring [all the different out-of-school sources of PE credit] would be costly and difficult,” she says; and removing the demand for four seasons of school sports “would enable aggressive club coaches to pressure athletes into not playing for their high school.”

Dishing out PE credit with a liberal hand would also “disparage physical education classes,” Martinez says. “Nobody would suggest allowing students to substitute English classes. Physical Fitness is already too minimal in the curriculum.”

New trustee Allen Weiner, sworn in last December, is “generally in favor of maximizing flexibility so that our students who are engaging in activities outside of school that are comparable to what they would experience in PE class can be excused from the requirement of a second year of PE – as long as it’s permitted by the law and doesn’t involve so much administrative burden that it ends up interfering with the educational opportunities for other students.”

“I have looked at the Education Code,” he said, “and have some questions as to whether there are legally permissible options in addition to those that have been identified in the School Board’s discussions to date.”

Weiner wants to “see whether there are not additional — and better — options than the ones currently on the table.”

His words will be heard along with those of his fellow trustees this evening, when the board will attempt to resolve the issue once and for all. Assuming it reaches a consensus, the decided policy will take effect in the 2012-2013 school year.