COLUMBUS, Ohio — A month after the fallout over Bishop Sycamore playing IMG Academy on ESPN, educators are now talking about private school regulations versus public school regulations and the impact on K-12 public schools and families.
Josiah Turner attended Rutherford B. Hayes High School in Delaware, Ohio. He said he had good grades before he left the school, but the opportunity to play football for Christians of Faith Academy came along.
Looking at it as a way to get into college sports, Turner and his family decided he would leave his high school back in 2018. This was on a promise that he'd continue with school and play football, but Turner said once he made the shift, players never went to class, let alone practice.
He said they went to an orientation and that was it.
“That was the only time we even ever got to be somewhere close to education. We all just went to go see where the building was, what classes we'd be doing, how they'd be taken, how we'd be graded for everything.”
He said things went downhill from there.
Turner played just a few games with COF and then quit before it was shut down by the Ohio Department of Education.
While Turner questioned if COF was a real school, there are similar concerns now as ODE investigates Bishop Sycamore. It gained national attention on ESPN after commentators questioned if its credentials were real.
Regardless of what ODE finds, when private schools pop up that are not legitimate, the impact on kids and Ohio’s public schools can be great.
“When I wanted to go back to school. There was no support system from the school. I had to figure out things on my own. I had to do my junior year with my senior year all in a matter of a semester and it just like it blew me down to where I honestly just had to drop out my junior year,” Turner said.
Turner said he got his GED instead.
Superintendent Romules Durant of Toledo Public Schools said in his district they've had kids with similar stories.
For public schools across the state, Durant said for those who choose to get their GED, it’s considered as part of a district’s dropout rate and counts against their graduation rate.
For those who decide to stay and finish school, “we end up having to create a plan on how to really, you know, create compound intervention and getting that kid in summer school during vacation months and at the same time to get all those credits back,” said Durant.
Durant said part of the challenge is regulations of public and private schools when it comes to academics or sports. Public schools have many more layers of accountability than private schools do.
“There’s an inequity in accountability,” Durant said. “I’m all for school choice, but what I'm not for is equality, as well as equity in essence of how you go about evaluating and labeling one compared to the other, and both are not being evaluated under the same accountability system.”
Senate President Matt Huffman said religious freedoms and non-receipt of tax dollars limit the regulations legislators can put on these types of schools.
When asked if he thought any amendments should be made to make sure schools like COF or potentially Bishop Sycamore don’t keep popping up, he said: “We don’t just want to simply be reactionary and say well this bad thing happened. Let's lay a whole layer of things on these non-chartered schools. The vast majority . . . are doing what it is that they're supposed to under state law.”
Even so, for those like Turner who have been impacted already, hope parents will vet programs carefully, so kids don’t have the same experience he did.
Currently, Turner is working to get his barber’s license.
In the meantime, Durant said legislation should be reviewed and new legislation drafted so that Ohio’s kids and public schools don’t have these negative experiences in the future.