Photo by Slowking4

It’s final: Wilson High School won’t be playing in the annual Thanksgiving Day Turkey Bowl.

The D.C. State Athletic Association’s Athletic Appeals panel ruled yesterday that despite protests to the contrary from Wilson administrators, one of the students that played for the school’s football team was in fact a Maryland resident and thus ineligible to compete:

There was sufficient proof that the ineligible non-District DCPS student lived in Maryland and commuted via metro to school every day. The decision was based according to the parent’s and student’s driver’s Maryland licenses, the Maryland lease, and the Prince Georges County police report which listed a week’s worth of monitored activity.

As a consequence, the team—which racked up an 8-3 record this year—will have part of its season’s record erased from the books and won’t be able to play in the Turkey Bowl, which pits the two best D.C. public high school football teams against each other. This year would have been Wilson’s first appearance since 1991. Instead, Anacostia Senior High School will face off against Dunbar in tomorrow’s game.

After Wilson learned over the weekend that it was being disqualified from the game, Principal Peter Cahall appealed the decision, saying that he believed the player, Nico Jaleel Robinson, lived in D.C. Additionally, Wilson supporters complained that the residency requirements had been violated in years past, to no consequence. Still, in 2010 Ballou was dropped from the game after it was revealed that one of its students wasn’t a D.C. resident.

Questions regarding Robinson’s eligibility were raised after he was arrested in Greenbelt in October in connection to a number of armed robberies on the University of Maryland campus in College Park.

D.C. has recently started cracking down on out-of-state students who attend D.C. public schools but do not pay tuition as they are supposed to. Last month, D.C. Attorney General filed a suit against a charter school employee who allegedly helped a Maryland student attend DCPS’ McKinley Technology High School without paying tuition.

According to an audit performed by the D.C. Office of the State Superintendent for Education, of the 45,191 students in D.C. public schools, only 198 are non-residents. Of the 31,562 students enrolled in public charter schools, 38 were from outside D.C. The audit found that 126 of the 198 non-resident students in DCPS avoided paying their way; in charter schools, it was 32 of the 38.