Georgia’s largest private high schools won’t be playing for their own championships separate from public schools next year, after all, it appears.
Now, the trending idea within the GHSA’s reclassification committee is to increase the current enrollment multiplier 25% to 2.5, which would bump private and city schools even higher in classification.
The reclass committee met Thursday in Thomaston, and the only certainty is that the group will meet again ahead of the Oct. 3-4 executive committee meeting, where proposals must be approved. No decisions have been made, and the private schools remain unhappy.
Most significant Thursday was reclass committee chairman Curt Miller’s decision to drop his support of the proposal he initiated last month, which was to have the GHSA’s nine largest private schools compete for their own championships independent of public schools.
Those private schools are Benedictine, Blessed Trinity, Greater Atlanta Christian, Marist, Pace Academy, Lovett, St. Pius, Westminster and Woodward Academy. Miller asked for a show of hands in support of that idea, and he got none among the 19-member committee, including his own.
Miller then suggested bumping the out-of-zone multiplier to 3.0, a move that private schools strongly rejected, according to minutes of Tuesday’s meeting.
Several ideas were discussed, but the most popular came from committee member Randy McPherson, the Lowndes athletic director and former football coach. McPherson suggested a 2.5 multiplier with no cap on the number of classes that the multiplier might catapult a school.
That proposal would mean city schools such as Buford and Valdosta could wind up in Class 7A and private schools such as St. Pius and Blessed Trinity could move up into 6A or higher.
A multiplier counts out-of-zone students more than once when determining enrollment. For example, a school with 1,000 students overall, and 500 from outside the school’s zone, would be counted as having 1,500 students using a 2.0 multiplier and 1,750 students using a 2.5 multiplier.
The 2.5-multiplier plan found favor Thursday by an unofficial vote of 11-5 with three abstentions. No committee member representing private schools supported the idea. They instead are pushing for a competitive balance model that would classify individual sports teams based on their track record, meaning football and baseball teams from the same school might be in different classes based on how they perform.
Nothing discussed or voted upon Thursday was binding. The reclass committee will make an official proposal next month. Any changes to the reclassification format must be approved by the GHSA’s executive committee, which includes voting members from each of the GHSA’s 64 regions. The current classification cycle runs through this academic year.
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