The Missouri Senate peeled back its plans to establish broad state oversight of the Missouri State High School Activities Association, passing a less expansive bill Monday that would create a secondary appellate body for the association’s athletes.
State Sen. Jason Bean, a Holcomb Republican and the bill’s sponsor, said the legislation he pitched last week “dramatically scales back the (previous version) in a more positive, productive way.”
In February, state senators considered a version of the bill that would have created a board that would be in charge of hiring MSHSAA’s executive director and would act as an intermediary for payments between the association and public schools.
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.
But this controversy was not Bean’s motive for the bill, which he has filed since 2024. He was focused on complaints he has heard about the association’s appeals process, in which an internal board hears arguments over in-game decisions and athlete eligibility.
“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.
Establishing the commission is “what we wanted to do all along,” Bean said, explaining why he dropped some provisions.
Even with the changes, the bill has its critics.
State Sen. Maggie Nurrenbern, a Kansas City Democrat, said she didn’t like the legislation but wouldn’t try to block it, saying senators “got it to about as good of a place as we could get this bill.”
“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.”
State Sen. Joe Nicola, a Republican from Grain Valley, said he didn’t like that the new commission would be overseen by the state’s education department.
“I don’t even understand the purpose of this whole thing to begin with,” he said. “Creating a whole other board and putting it under (the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education), I am just not a fan.”
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.
