A State College area family is among the plaintiffs in a new lawsuit against the Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic Association claiming that its policies unlawfully prevent parochial school students from participating in public school sports.
The family and the Centre County-based Religious Rights Foundation of PA — who recently settled a similar lawsuit against the State College Area School District — along with families from Huntingdon and Butler counties sued the PIAA on the grounds that prohibiting parochial students from participating in public school athletic activities not offered by their own school is unconstitutional, violating the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment and Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.
“The PIAA is a state actor and must abide by the Commonwealth’s laws and respect the constitutional rights of Pennsylvanians. That means allowing parochial school students the opportunity to participate in sports offered at their home school district when the sports are not offered at the student’s parochial school,” Thomas Breth, attorney for the plaintiffs, said in a statement. “Educational experiences, be it in the classroom or on the field, are integral to the development of young students, and those opportunities cannot be denied to students based solely on their families’ faith-based educational choice.”
PIAA rules state that students are eligible to participate only at schools at which they are enrolled, but carves out exceptions for charter and home school students to play at the public school in which they otherwise would be enrolled.
“Despite numerous exceptions for other students, Defendant PIAA has failed and refused to provide students who attend parochial schools with similar exceptions,” Breth wrote in the filing.
The plaintiffs “have made a good faith effort to resolve this issue” with the PIAA, but the association “has failed and refused to provide Student Plaintiffs and other parochial school students throughout the Commonwealth the ability to participate in PIAA governed interscholastic athletic activities in their home school districts,” according to the lawsuit.
The lawsuit asks for the practice to be declared unconstitutional and an order allowing parochial students to participate in PIAA-governed athletic activities at their home school districts if the same sports are not available at their respective religious schools. It also seeks reimbursement of attorney fees and court costs.
In a June 10 settlement of a lawsuit brought in 2023 by the Centre County family and Religious Rights Foundation, with support from the Thomas More Society, the State College Area School District agreed to allow eligible parochial students residing in the district boundaries the opportunity to participate in public school extracurricular activities.
Similar to the lawsuit against the PIAA, it contended that the district’s policy of allowing home-schooled and charter-schooled students but not those who attend parochial schools to participate violated the First and Fourteenth Amendments.
Under the terms of a consent decree, the district agreed “to make available to parochial students the same extracurricular and co-curricular activities (including athletics) and educational programs offered to homeschooled students and charter school students.”
Students who attend parochial schools that sponsor interscholastic athletic sports are not eligible to participate in those same sports through the district. If their parochial schools do not offer a particular interscholastic athletic sport, however, the students are eligible to participate in that sport through a SCASD team, though the district can impose its general selection criteria in the same manner as for other students.
If the PIAA declares a student ineligible to participate in a sport through SCASD because of the student’s enrollment in a parochial school, the agreement states that the RRFP is responsible for resolving the issue with the PIAA.
SCASD also agreed to pay legal fees and costs.
