Board reverses decision
By Suzanne Werre
Editor
It didn’t take long for Turtle Lake-Mercer school board members to start re-thinking their recent decision to require sixth-graders to choose between playing elementary basketball or junior high basketball. After recently passing a motion requiring the students to choose at their regular school board meeting on a Wednesday, the board members and school administration started getting a lot of phone calls from upset parents. By the following Monday, the board was convening a special meeting to revisit the issue, resulting in a unanimous decision by the board to rescind the earlier motion.
Several parents of Turtle Lake-Mercer students attended the meeting, commenting and asking a few questions as the board discussed the issue.
The overriding thought among those in the meeting was that the board shouldn’t have made the decision to make the students choose which season they wanted to play on this late in the year, especially since the junior high season has already started.
In making the case for the board to rescind the earlier approved motion, Casey Anderson, whose son is a sixth-grader who chose not to move up to junior high this year, noted that most of the sixth-grade boys have already opted to play the junior high season, which would mean they couldn’t play the upcoming sixth-grade season.
That also means the remaining sixth-graders wouldn’t get to be playing with their classmates, and would be playing with just the fifth-graders, added Anderson, and that’s not fair to the sixth-graders. The original vote would in effect be making the choice for this year’s students because the junior high season has already started. Some of the kids might have made a different choice if they had known this was going to happen, added Anderson.
School Board President Brent Christensen interjected that the student athletes’ participation should never have been a school board issue, and that the board agrees the policies need to come from the administration/athletic director working with the varsity coach down through the elementary coach/es.
