Subramanyam DENIES Homeschoolers Access to Taxpayer-Funded Interscholastic Sports

If you are a loving parent who chose to put your career on hold in order to teach your son or daughter at home, be advised that Suhas Subramanyam is not your friend.

Subramanyam is endorsed by the National Education Association (NEA) – an organization that has been fighting for years to deny services to those who homeschool their children. Suhas has worked tirelessly in the Virginia General Assembly to advance the NEA’s harmful agenda. For example, HB 1475 was narrowly defeated in committee last year, with no other than Subramanyam to blame! This legislation would have enabled home schooled kids to participate in interscholastic sports.

According to the National Press Foundation, there has been a 51% net rise in homeschooling since 2017-18. There are many reasons for this trend. As a parent, maybe you assumed that your local public school was focusing on math, science, and English, only to discover during the COVID pandemic while your child was “distance learning” from home that these priorities are being overshadowed by a social agenda pushed by radicals on your local school board. Perhaps you are outraged that children are now routinely encouraged at your public school to fantasize that their sex can be changed on a childhood whim, while stressing that you, as the parent, need not be informed. Maybe your child has been a chronic victim of bullying during recess, and the only way to stop the psychological damage is to pull him or her out of that horrible environment. It seems appropriate that if you take on that responsibility as a parent, at the very least the school system should allow your child to engage in extra-curricular activities, considering that homeschool families are expected to pay taxes to support the school whether they use these services or not.

Is there evidence that homeschooled kids are somehow incompatible with those children who remain in the public school and participate in interscholastic activities? No. Homeschoolers, like their counterparts in the public school, come from a wide variety of socioeconomic backgrounds, including conservative, liberal, and libertarian households with low, medium, and high incomes. All religions, as well as families that practice no religion at all are well represented.

Does including homeschoolers in extracurricular sports create a financial burden on taxpayers? Absolutely not. Taxpayers spend an average of $16,446 per pupil annually in public schools not including capital expenditures. Taxpayers spend nothing on the vast majority of homeschooled students while those families are spending an average of $600 per student annually out of their own pockets. The roughly 3.1 million homeschooled students during the 2021-22 school year represented a savings of over $51 billion for taxpayers. It seems appropriate that the public schools could, at the very least, financially support homeschooled kids’ involvement in sports, but the legislation that Subramanyam shot down in committee didn’t even provide financial support for these families. HB 1475 required homeschool parents to pay for the variable costs associated with their child’s involvement, and in spite of this, Suhas still killed the legislation.

There is absolutely no reason to exclude homeschooled children from interscholastic activities. Suhas Subramanyam doesn’t see it that way, and he has no reasonable explanation for this position. He simply takes his direction from the NEA. We need to prevent Subramanyam from advancing his NEA-endorsed radical vision to the U.S. House.