rejones,

I like your post although I do not agree with very aspect of it. I believe you are giving both sides of it unlike the article in the Kansas City Star yesterday. I also felt this about another post you made on this issue in another topic. I wish the KC Star reporter could read your posts on this subject.

You say that private schools have a bigger pool to draw from which implies to me more students to draw from and realistically I do not believe that is true. Private schools do have a bigger area to draw from and that would be a more fair statement. The reason I say it is not more students to draw from is that not all families can afford to send their students to private schools and that severely limits the pool that private schools can draw from. It has more to do with the high tuition that private schools charge. There are other costs too like the travel and time parents need to invest to transport their kids longer distances to school. Not all families would qualify for financial aid at a private school and even if they did there is a stigma for some in accepting it and they do not consider it for that reason. Another thing that takes a lot of families out of the consideration of a private school is that many families would not send their children to a religious schools because they do not want their child exposed to that religion.

I am not positive about this but I thought that besides Olathe that the students in the Shawnee Mission and Blue Valley school districts also had the option to choose the school they wanted inside their school districts. Perhaps someone within those districts could either verify or correct me on that.

Direct recruiting of an athlete by a coach or other school official that involves an offer of a financial athletic scholarship or other type of financial incentive is no doubt a violation of KSHSAA policies and if proven should be sanctioned. I would be fine with that type of sanctioning of a private school if they gave a scholarship or other financial incentive to an athlete that was strictly based on his or her athletic skills by the school or booster of the school. I also think a public school should be sanctioned if an athlete or their family was given some financial incentive for their son or daughter to attend the public school by the school or booster of the school.

The indirect recruiting by parents and others happens at both public and private. It will always be there at both. Personally I do not think that it is that big of a deal and I really don't know how you can legislate it or why you would want to. If some wrestling parent from SM West tried to talk me into sending my son to SM West and if I tried to instead convince him to send his son to Aquinas, is that really something that the KSHSAA should be trying to prevent as long as we were not offering money to do that? Is that type of conversational recruiting between parents something that the KSHSAA should be sanctioning the respective high schools for. I really do not think so.

The majority of students at the Catholic private schools are from the Catholic high schools in the immediate area of the school. I think you would find that to be true on most of the teams at the Catholic high schools too. Catholic schools do let non Catholics enroll and it is definitely not just athletes. Catholic students do sometimes attend a Catholic school that is not as close as another Catholic high school so that they can be on a particular team. I know that happens but it is not a violation of any rules and I know it happens at public schools too. There are a couple of recent examples in wrestling in the Kansas and Kansas City Missouri area of it in public schools. The point is that this type of thing definitely happens at both private and public schools.

You are doing very good posting on the subject even though we are not in complete agreement.