Spencer board reviews, approves school athletic code

By Valorie Brecht In the process of acting on several other items to get ready for the upcoming school year, the Spencer School Board approved the middle/high school athletic code for the 2024-25 school year at its last meeting. But the approval did not come before District Administrator Jason Gorst answered some questions about the ins and outs of the code. Board member Becky Gorst said the policy listed grade checks every three weeks, but she wanted to know what was the standard for students getting benched.

Jason Gorst said at the high school level, the school district had to follow WIAArules, which are as follows. If a student is taking six classes or less and has one or more Fs per quarter; or if he or she is taking seven or eight classes and has two or more Fs, that student is ineligible.

“If you’re ineligible at the end of a quarter, you have a 15-day window that you’re ineligible. At the end of that window, we’re going to be checking all of your grades and that’s when they all have to be passing. If you’re not passing all of them at that point, then you’re out for the remainder of the quarter. And even if it’s a different class then the one you were failing (initially). So that’s the WIAA standard,” Jason Gorst further explained.

For fall athletes, the WIAA policy goes off the grades from the last quarter of the last school year, so it would apply to sophomores and older.

School districts can be more restrictive than the WIAA rules; they just can’t be less restrictive. The Spencer School District decided to add in more frequent grade checks.

“The part we added in last year was doing grade checks every three weeks, and this is something that Nick (Viegut) as the dean of students and also athletic director got involved in. When we do the progress report grade checks and we get to our F list and even D list at that point, one of the things he was doing would be to call a kid in and if they’re in athletics at the time, and basically put them on academic-athletic probation, meaning ‘Hey, you need to get this taken care of.’” He said sometimes Viegut would also get the coach or parent involved to ideally motivate the student to get their grades up.

“Our purpose in doing that (the probationary period) was to prevent the ineligibilities from happening by kind of giving that heads-up warning of ‘Hey, you could be ineligible.’ The way we have that written up, we could make that student temporarily ineligible if all of a sudden, we see a kid with six Fs, we could say, ‘You’re not going to practice tonight. You need to meet with your teacher and get this taken care of.’

“Overall, it was pretty effective to stay away from the end goal. There were fewer games sat out last year due to grades then there had been in a while, because of those extra checks and balances.”

He said the school’s policy goes beyond the WIAA requirements with the goal of getting the students to address the issue sooner.

Middle schools sports are not WIAA controlled, so for those student-athletes, Jason Gorst said the school district had been using the three-week grade checks as well and working students through that process.

Becky Gorst also questioned how Spencer’s athletic code stacked up to other local schools.

“I know of one school — Columbus is significantly tougher,” said Jason Gorst. “I like the idea of using athletics to intervene with a kid; I don’t like the idea of quickly taking athletics away. In a lot of those cases, I would be worried about losing the kid — and I’m not talking about in athletics, I’m talking about losing the kid.”

“No, I agree. Like, they won’t even come to school then because, ‘There’s nothing to go to school for if I can’t go to practice. That’s my thing.’ I totally agree. I’m just trying to wrap my head around it. It’s a tough situation,” said Becky Gorst.

“It is, and there was some really healthy discussion around that because there was some staff members who said, if we get sports more involved in the process, we think we can get some ground with that. And I agree with that. So that’s where I like the probationary status and meeting with the athletic director because we can accomplish what we want without just creating additional punitive things,” said Jason Gorst.

He did clarify though that if the student chose not to try and improve their grades, Viegut and Middle/High School Principal Bill Otte still had the authority to tell the student they were out until further notice. He said there were instances in the past where students were told that if they didn’t fix their grades by the end of the week, they would have to sit out the next week, and that was enough for the students to change.

Becky Gorst made a motion, seconded by Jim Kelnhofer, to approve the middle and high school athletic codes. That motion was approved unanimously.