Ledyard ― A Ledyard Board of Education Policy Committee discussion Monday about an existing policy prohibiting magnet school students living in Ledyard from joining Ledyard High School clubs and activities ended at an impasse as Chair Joanne Kelley proposed extending the ban to athletics while member Laurel Wiers suggested expanding access.

With the committee’s third member, Mike Brawner absent, discussion will resume at a special committee meeting Monday at 5:30 p.m. Members of the public wishing to speak must be present at the start of the meeting.

Ledyard High School allows magnet school students residing in Ledyard on its sports teams if the magnet school does not offer any sports, but does not allow magnet students in other clubs or activities.

This policy is not unique.

Superintendents in North Stonington, Waterford and East Lyme confirmed Tuesday that magnet students can play sports but not join other clubs. East Lyme Superintendent Jeff Newton said the district has not had a request for participation in non-athletic extracurriculars and would not allow it.

Norwich Free Academy spokesperson Mike O’Farrell said clubs, activities and athletics are only open to NFA students. Conversely, New London Superintendent Cynthia Ritchie said athletics are open to magnet students and “all students are welcome to request to participate in our after school clubs and enrichments.”

The issue is coming up in Ledyard because resident and Marine Science Magnet High School sophomore Malloch Allison is looking to join the Ledyard High School robotics team. He has now spoken at six board and subcommittee meetings, as have his mother, Ding Allison, and brother, Ronan Allison, a senior at the school and a member of its robotics team.

Also speaking in support of Malloch on Monday were robotics team member Brady Moorehead and Maze Stephan, who ran Young Engineers and Robotics, a nonprofit afterschool program from 2011 to 2020 that was based at Gales Ferry School but also served non-Ledyard students.

Kelley, the policy committee chair, said the school board attorney emphatically advised against providing exceptions on a case-by-case basis, due to potential charges of discrimination.

Hurting Ledyard High athletes?

“Our current policy directly disadvantages our student athletes who do attend Ledyard High School,” Kelley said.

She said because magnet students are counted in total enrollment for athletic purposes, the softball team got moved to a classification with larger schools and was “robbed of their opportunity to go further.”

Kelley said magnet schools are not an extension of Ledyard Public Schools, and the “concept of choosing to do your academics in one place and everything else ― sports and extracurriculars ― feels like a model that isn’t going to work.”

She also questioned if magnet students were competing with Ledyard High athletes for playing time, and Principal Amanda Fagan said a choice-school student could displace an Ledyard High student as a starting athlete or top-ranked player.

Superintendent of Schools Jay Hartling requested that if the board goes in this direction, the policy change not be enacted until the class of 2027, so that current student athletes are not impacted.

Neither of the two Ledyard policies currently in question explicitly allows athletic participation or prohibits other club involvement: One states the board’s responsibility for Ledyard students attending magnet schools is limited to providing tuition and special education funding, and another states in part, “Extracurricular activities are open to all students attending Ledyard Public Schools.”

The Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference (CIAC) leaves choice-school participation to the discretion of the neighborhood school’s principal, and Kelley said in an email this “decision is not in the Policy itself but has been the policy (small p) since 2012.” Fagan said she doesn’t remember much about why the decision was made.

Connecticut Association of Athletics Directors Executive Director Fred Balsamo said Tuesday that CADD’s last survey, in 2021, showed that 64% of schools allowed charter and magnet school students to play sports for them and 36% did not. (The Day previously reported, per a CIAC spokesperson, that about 75% allowed participation.)

A proposal in the other direction

Wiers said she thinks the discussion went “very extreme here, from trying to help somebody being allowed to do something because it wasn’t covered under athletics, to suddenly we’re cutting athletics as well.”

She instead proposed not only making an exception for CIAC, but also making an exception for Connecticut Student Activities Conference activities. CSAC regulates non-athletic activities, such as robotics, cheerleading, dance, debate and more.

“We cannot just carve out an exception for athletes,” Wiers said. Activities in the music program would still not permit magnet students, as they are not covered under CSAC.

Wiers acknowledged it would not be clean or easy to write her proposed policy but thinks it is doable, and said it is “hard to imagine we’re going to have an influx of 30 kids wanting to join these extracurriculars.”

Hartling voiced concern about the administrative burden of keeping up with behavior, school attendance, and grades for additional students.

Addressing Kelley’s point about the softball team, Wiers said correlation does not mean causation. She wants to know if this effect is happening across the board for athletics, and would “need to see more overwhelming evidence … to feel like this is a big enough problem to undo policy that I think has had benefits for students as well.”

Wiers brought up how residents of other towns can attend the Agri-Science & Technology Program at Ledyard High School. Fagan said there is a “distinction between Ledyard residents who elect not to attend Ledyard Public Schools and residents of other towns who elect to attend Ledyard Public Schools.”

Ding Allison told The Day that Monday’s meeting does not change her goal of Malloch being allowed to join the robotics team, and she likes Wiers’ recommendation about CSAC activities.

Ding feels people in the meeting ignored the benefits of having more athletes join and asked “If a magnet school student athlete takes a starting position but helps the team win a state championship, is that really a harm to Ledyard Public Schools?” Malloch plays tennis for Ledyard High School and said he helped the team win its division.

“Sports are competitive. Even without outside students joining, the reality is still the same,” Ding said. “To maintain your starting line position, you just have to improve and be better!”

New London has a particularly potent example of benefiting from a magnet school student. India Pagan, who played basketball at New London High School, played for Puerto Rico in the 2020 Summer Olympics. She went to Marine Science Magnet High School.