Texas Association of Private and Parochial Schools
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The Texas Association of Private and Parochial Schools, or TAPPS, is an organization headquartered in Salado which creates rules for and sometimes administers almost all athletic and academic contests for non-public high schools in the American state of Texas. (Texas, unlike most states, has separate organizations for public and private schools, but public and private schools may schedule each other in competition.)
Activities range from football to fine arts competitions. Unlike its public-school counterpart, the University Interscholastic League (UIL), TAPPS sponsors Academic Decathlon competitions.
[edit] Groupings
Like the UIL, TAPPS aligns member schools into districts by geography and enrollment size for various contests. Each contest has a slightly different alignment based on the participating schools, but most follow the same basic framework. The districts are mostly decided behind closed doors by TAPPS every even year, and are an attempt to keep schools within a certain distance of their home town when attending competitions. Like the UIL, the districts are the first progression to the state championship.
Schools are further broken down with a letter classification to separate them from other schools of varying sizes. The purpose is ensure that schools compete only with others with similar size talent pools and resources. TAPPS' general classifications are 1A, 2A, 3A, 4A, 5A, and 6A; unlike the UIL, whose official designations are strictly alphabetic, TAPPS officially uses alphanumeric designations for its classifications. The largest schools are classified as 6A, and the smallest are known as 1A. However, TAPPS uses different classification schemes in some other competitions (also by enrollment; lower numbers indicate lower enrollment unless otherwise indicated):
- Fine arts and academic competitions: Standard classifications, except that Classes 1A and 2A are split into one subgroup for music and another for other arts and academics
- Football: Divisions I and II for six-man football; Divisions I, II, III, and IV for the 11-man game
- Soccer: Divisions I and II
- Swimming: Divisions I (Class 6A schools), II (Class 5A and 4A schools), and III (all smaller schools)
- Wrestling: A single classification, as only 13 TAPPS schools (as of 2005) sponsor that sport
[edit] Controversy
Though most of its members are Christian schools, TAPPS is open to schools of all faiths. However, recently some Jewish and Islamic schools have faced barriers in joining.
When an Islamic school in Houston applied for membership in 2004, Edd Burleson, TAPPS' executive director, discouraged the school in a letter suggesting that its students would not fit in with non-Muslims. The school stopped pursuing membership, and a national Islamic organization demanded an apology from TAPPS. But Burleson, who said he formed his opinion after reading the Quran, hasn't changed his opinion.
"The Quran preaches if you're not a Muslim, you're an infidel," Burleson said recently. "It teaches death to all infidels."
A representative of a local Islamic group called Burleson's interpretation "nonsense." "That's a totally untrue statement that the Quran teaches to kill infidels," said Iyas Maleh, the president of the Council on American-Islamic Relations D-FW chapter. "'Infidel' is not used in the Quran. A Muslim would never use that word. It hurts to hear something like that."
