chalker wrote:I've done a little research into this and have a bit better understanding of the situation.
According to the NMAA website, "private/non-profit organization whose principle purpose is the regulation, direction, administration and supervision of interscholastic activities in the State of New Mexico"... "comprised of New Mexico public, private and parochial middle/junior high and senior high schools that pay membership dues on an annual basis" (
http://www.nmact.org/about-nmaa).
Science Olympiad is listed as an official NMAA activity (
http://www.nmact.org/science-olympiad) based out of New Mexico Tech. It is NOT part of NMAA, just 'sanctioned' by them as an allowable activity.
The bylaw change you refer to was to remove certain references to Home School eligibility (see page 3 of
http://www.nmact.org/file/Results_092515.pdf) in order to abide by State laws. The resulting language states: "As per New Mexico State Legislation, home school students are permitted to participate in NMAA activities ONLY at the public school in the attendance zone in which they live" (see page 3 of
http://www.nmact.org/file/Section_8.pdf)
The crux of this appears to be as follows: the schools in New Mexico have decided to voluntarily join together in an organization (NMAA) to regulate interscholastic activities amongst themselves. The New Mexico State Legislature has passed a law requiring home school students participating in these regulated activities to join the team of their local public school.
New Mexico Science Olympiad is not legally obligated to abide by these rules, however in all likelihood if they don't NMAA will declare them to no longer be a sanctioned activity. As a result, the majority of the member schools will prevent students / teachers from forming SO teams or participating in the tournaments. Thus NMSO would end up effectively just consisting of home school / private teams, which would be a significant decrease from the 100+ teams that currently participate.
NMSO is between the proverbial rock and a hard place here, and the obvious answer is to do what benefits the majority of the participants - which is to abide by the NMAA requirements. Note they aren't LEGALLY obligated to do this. While the National Science Olympiad does have a home school policy, the state organizations have quite a bit of autonomy. And while this decision goes against the NSO Home School Policy, I suspect NSO would support the NMSO decision as the 'lesser of 2 evils'. It's doubtful they would want to intervene in any way in this situation.
Hence I think my original advice still remains - you should take this up with your local state officials. You also might want to see if you can work out any arrangements with the local public schools to form a hybrid team of some sort.
Sorry that you are in this situation, as I wish every student that wanted to participate in SO had no obstacles to doing do.