COLUMBUS – After an outcry by urban school administrators across the state, who argued that their sports teams were unfairly and arbitrarily being placed in a competitive disadvantage under a new policy counting charter school and STEM school students toward enrollment numbers, the governing body for high school sports in Ohio decided to reverse that decision.
READ MORE: In the Columbus Dispatch
The Ohio High School Athletic Association board of directors voted Thursday to return to the former system used for classifying teams into divisions for state tournaments, at least for the upcoming school year.
Within the next 10 days, the OHSAA will revise and re-post its enrollment figures and divisional alignments for fall sports, minus thousands of community or charter school students who, according to House Bill 487, are afforded the right participate in extracurricular activities at the district school in which he or she otherwise would be assigned.
“Simply put, the decision to include charter school students was based on our longstanding past practice of counting kids who had participation opportunities,” commissioner Dan Ross said. “We were not wrong to make the decision at the time, but the feedback we’ve received from many member schools across the state about the negative impact this had on divisional movement for schools, combined with the belief that so few of these students currently take advantage of these participation opportunities, made us realize it was best to study this issue further.”
The previous policy added some 4,027 community students attending 50 community, charter and Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics schools within the Columbus district boundaries to the enrollment of the 16 City League high schools, dramatically impacting their divisional placements in tournaments.
The kicker: Roughly one-third of one percent of those community students participated in athletics.
After a heated Columbus Board of Education meeting Tuesday, superintendent Dan Good spoke of possible suing the OHSAA for adversely affecting the district’s teams.