You can note it all you want, but you’re still not explaining why you think competitive rules apply to an exhibition.
You do understand that cheer competitions don’t happen at football games, right? Is that what’s missing here? The competition and judging happens at a separate event, at a separate facility (usually indoors, daytime, and after football season). Totally unrelated to football or homecoming events.
Yeah - my Jewish single mother of 2 daughters friend who professed direct knowledge of same is the faculty advisor for the school’s PRISM organization - so I’m sure she’s just passing along conservative rage-bait. 
Why?
Nobody says “only so many students can participate in the reading classes”, or the math classes, or the history courses. Why should any particular sport be any different?
If larger groups don’t work, then have multiple groups.
When, whether, and how to sort the groups by skill can be a question, probably best settled in each school according to various factors including how many students overall want to participate and to what extent mixing skill levels improves and/or damages the learning experience (it may well do some of both).
What about the sport activities your son participated in? The ones you’ve described seem to be competitive, as one team will play against another. That’s a competition.
Did they have a fixed number of slots that they divvied out to only the best players? It doesn’t sound like it, since your son wasn’t the best in some of them.
There is this mindset that school sports should function like professional sports. But that’s not their intended purpose. They’re not supposed to be the schools competing against each other. They’re supposed to be for the students, with the competition only existing as motivation. A good coach balances the desire to win with the actual goals being taught, both physically and mentally.
They should more resemble intramural sports than professional ones.
My husband was a cross country runner in high school. He never made the Varsity team, but he was extremely well respected because he was consistent and dedicated on a level other kids weren’t. He won an award for running every day, not missing a single day, for two straight years. He was never going to be the fastest guy, but he got so much out of being able to participate, and his teammates loved him.
Before that question can be answered, we’d all need to agree on what the purpose of a cheer squad is. I’m not sure we’re there yet.
Not sure why you think a woman being Jewish or a single mother has any relevance to her being conservative or not.
Did she say that competitive rules apply to exhibition events? It’s still not clear whether or why you think that competition rules should be binding on a homecoming show.
Yes, i don’t understand the relevance of rules for this or that competition on who performs for the homecoming game.
We had something like that with my college ice hockey team. We had a “club” team, as opposed to a varsity or JV team. I’m not 100% sure of the distinction. Like we were affiliated with the school and had official uniforms but were self funded I suppose.
In any event, we had an A Team who were really good (like Division I level) who would travel and play other club teams at a similar level. We also had a B Team which was more casual, but was still competitive and played mostly local colleges and men’s bar league teams. There were formal tryouts for the A Team but pretty much anyone could join the B Team (presuming some minimal level of ability).
The B Team’s club league was probably more “inclusive” in the way the team from the movie Slapshot was inclusive - Mostly a motley collection of frat guys, stoners, community college students, 40 year old unemployed steelworkers, most teams has one or two women on them.
I suppose one of the underlying assumptions about all these extracurriculars is that there is not in fact an infinite supply of school resources to devote to each topic, be that football, band, choir, or cheer.
As with most things governmental, supply of resources may or may not be sufficient to demand. But shortfall is far more likely to be the case than is oversupply.
Which says rationing in some form often ends up happening. And this is where the tradeoff between “everybody gets to participate at their own level” vs. “we field competitive teams for competition’s” sake often comes in.
It’s not restricted to schools - it happens even in “everybody plays” situations like Little League that don’t have competitive try-outs . There is always the possibility of needing to ration in some way, and the question is really how to do it. Must it always be done the way “everybody participates” * situations handle it ? The way that usually works is if you have enough resources for X kids to participate and X+20 are interested, the first X kids get in and the other 20 get put on a waiting list. Can it ever be " We want a competitive team" ?
* And I say “everyone participates” rather than “everyone plays” because it doesn’t only apply to sports and other activities that can be competitive. You can’t have 50 Scouts if only two people are willing to be leaders.
But even in schools, there are costs associated with much special education. Which gets back to asking, what is the function of the public schools?
I’m not intending to push a particular agenda here. Just observing that many folk (not limited to special ed) seem to act as though there ought to be unlimited resources available for their preference, which ought to be funded either by taking from other preferences - or allocating unlimited resources to everyone.
I agree, if there are different divisions/leagues, then that’s the solution. But also that as several have noted, funding or available volunteers or whatever may mean that multiple divisions aren’t available.
In the OP’s case, it sounded like there was only one division, for which there was presumably some sort of threshold or requirement (which might be competitive but also might have been as simple as, “make sure you practice this routine” – I wasn’t totally sure from the OP). And in that case I would say that most kids have the capacity to understand that if you don’t meet the threshold/requirement that it won’t be meaningful or fun, and that there are lessons to be learned in working hard to get better.
If the kid doesn’t have the capacity to understand those sorts of things and does derive meaning and joy from it – and doesn’t detract from the experience of the other kids on the team by e.g. interfering with their routines or taking up the coach’s time any more than any other child – then I feel like it’s a kindness to let that kid have her meaning and joy. (If those conditions aren’t met, then it’s of course a more complex problem. One solution I’ve seen is to have a parent-organized aide come with the special needs child.)
Exactly. Most sports have pretty big kit/uniform expenses per participant, especially football. I don’t know what the breakdown is between school-provided and athlete (parent)-provide gear, but I think the big ticket items (jerseys, pants, shoulder pads, knee and thigh pads, helmet) are provided by the school, but you may be on your own for cleats, socks, gloves, mouth guards, and base layers. Baseball isn’t AS bad, but there’s still a lot to put together. Wrestling, swimming/diving, water polo, volleyball, basketball, gymnastics, soccer, tennis, track/field, and cross country can all have hundreds of dollars in direct cost per student. Yes a lot of gear does get reused year after year, and the cross country runner isn’t going to cost as much as the football player, but it’s not as easy as it sounds.
Then there’s actual equipment (balls, nets, racquets, tackle/grapple dummies, floats, mats, weights, bands, etc.). Facilities too. The swimming, diving, and water polo teams all want the pool, on top of PE classes and they need extra locker and shower facilities. My high school still had a synchronized swimming program in the late 1990s! It’s not so easy to just build more pools or gyms. The basketball gym is likely also the indoor volleyball gym and the indoor tennis court. The exercise facilities are fought over by all sports. So it’s not really possible to let everyone do every sport. That’s basically gym class, and they want those facilities too. I suspect that even now there’s not a lot of idle gym or field space that could be put to much more use.
That’s a fair point.
When I was in school high schools etc. usually offered a whole lot fewer sports. But that’s probably not a great solution either, as different students’ interests and abilities are less likely to fit into a smaller number of sports.
Are we still talking about an event where the potential overhead included one extra child walking onto a football field among a cast of hundreds?
Unless someone has better math, I’m pretty sure the cost was effectively zero.
In the OP’s case yes, but a handful of other posters were asking why not just let all sports/activities be no-cut.
To educate it’s students. There are a lot of skills to learn from competitive sports. There are a lot of similar, but slightly different skills to learn from Unified Champion sports. Which set of skills are more likely to be useful to an adult?
I think it’s likely that the students on the team are happy with the roster and that’s all that matters; none of our opinions count. Somewhere there’s a cheerleading team that wants to prioritize competition and that’s their totally valid choice.
Or the cost of a set of pom poms. But yeah, we aren’t talking big bucks.