Ohio’s seven state championship games will remain in Columbus at Ohio Stadium through 2016, the Ohio High School Athletic Association announced on August. 4. It also means enrollment counts will have to be reposted, and division and district assignments could change, beginning with the fall season.
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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.
OHSAA said it would remove all students who attend community and STEM schools from its enrollment counts.
The OHSAA uses enrollment to place schools in divisions for postseason play and the impact in football, where a team’s division assignment plays a role in the computer points it can generate, could be significant for several schools and opponents.
The move comes after administrators around the state contended the policy unfairly bumped the divisional ranks of city schools sports teams, even though numerous charter and community school students don’t participate in athletics.
“This is a new issue we now have to address and has many ramifications”.
“I give extreme credit to our board for recognizing that and changing the course in this particular area”, OHSAA Commissioner Dr. Dan Ross said in a statement.
On Thursday, after studying the situation and weighing negative feedback, mostly from multiple-school public school districts in the state’s larger cities, the OHSAA board voted to return to the practice of just counting the actual number of boys and girls attending those traditional public schools.
The OHSAA made its initial ruling to include those students to enrollment figures in June.
East Liverpool is by far the most affected school district as 47 male and 52 females attending community or STEM schools were counted toward the school’s total. 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, according to the news release.
– The board reviewed the member high school list for 2015-16. Ohio has the third-most member schools in the country behind California and Texas. The association will then proceed to do the same for winter and spring sports. The boys basketball regional and state tournaments resulted in net profit of $1,100,391. The girls basketball regional and state tournaments resulted in proceeds of $134,935. The ice hockey district and state tournaments ($31,061) and individual wrestling state tournament ($247,653) also turned a profit.
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Thursday’s OHSAA decision eliminated those additions.
