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OHSAA to Revise
School Enrollment Counts for 2015-16
Board of Directors votes to withdraw community school and STEM school
students and reconfigure tournament divisional assignments
COLUMBUS, Ohio – The Ohio High School Athletic Association board of
directors deliberated Thursday and voted to remove students who attend
community schools and STEM (science, technology, engineering and
mathematics) schools from their local public school enrollment counts.
This decision changes the OHSAA’s previous policy and will result in
the OHSAA revising and reposting the enrollment counts for each school
and the divisional alignments that will be used for the upcoming fall
tournaments. Winter and spring sports divisional alignments will follow
in the near future.’
The passage of Ohio House Bill 487 in July of 2014 now gives those
students the opportunity to participate in extracurricular activities
at their local public school. Since data from the Ohio Department of
Education included the public school district where those students
reside, the OHSAA decided to include those community school and STEM
school students in the enrollment counts of their local public school.
For districts with multiple high schools, those students were divided
evenly among that district’s schools. However, today’s action by the
board in their first meeting of the 2015-16 school year reversed that
decision.
“Simply put, the decision to include charter school students was based
on our longstanding past practice of counting kids who had
participation opportunities," OHSAA Commissioner Dr. Dan Ross said. “We
were not wrong to make that decision at the time, but the feedback
we’ve received from many member schools across the state about the
negative impact this had on tournament 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 is
best for us to study this issue further. This is a new issue we now
have to address and has many ramifications. I give extreme credit to
our board, which is comprised of elected school administrators from
around the state, for recognizing that and changing the course in this
particular area.”
As soon as possible, the OHSAA will configure the new divisional
assignments for fall sports, including new regional assignments in
football, and will post the updated information at:
http://www.ohsaa.org/members/sptdivis15.htm
The OHSAA had already begun the process of forming a committee to study
the issue. The committee will still meet this fall to determine the
best way to include community school and STEM school students in
enrollment counts in the future.
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