The Missouri Senate passed a bill Monday that would create a secondary appellate body for Missouri State High School Activities Association's athletes.
According to the Missouri Independent, the bill is less expansive than a previous proposal.
State senator Jason Bean, a Republican from Holcomb and the sponsor of the bill, said the legislation he pitched last week “dramatically scales back the (previous version) in a more positive, productive way.”
A previous version of the bill would have created a board that would have been in charge of hiring MSHSAA's executive director and would act as an intermediary for payments between the association and public schools.
According to the Independent, the proposal was spurred by an investigation into one of the association’s policies which established two board positions reserved for members of an underrepresented gender or ethnicity. After a white man was deemed ineligible for one of the spots, some state officials decried the policy as discriminatory.
Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway is suing MSHSAA over the rule, and earlier this month the U.S. DOJ filed a motion to intervene in the case.
However, Bean's impetus for the bill was centered around the association's appeals process.
“People felt like they were not getting fair treatment,” Bean said last week.
The legislation approved Monday would establish a third-party appeals board called the “Interscholastic Athletic Oversight Commission” with five governor-appointed members.
That's exactly what Bean wanted to do all along.
Senator Maggie Nurrenbern, a Kansas City Democrat, said that while she wasn't happy with the legislation, she wouldn't try to stop it.
“I wish that we could spend our time working on other issues that are really impacting education today,” she said. “I don’t know if it’s the state’s place to create the interscholastic athletic oversight commission.”
The bill now goes to the House for consideration. The House has a similar proposal, which was approved at the committee level but has not been debated by the full chamber.
