GHSA board supports reduction to six classes

The Georgia High School Association’s board of trustees voted 13-0 on Wednesday to support reducing the number of classifications to six beginning in 2024-25 and to put the proposal on the executive committee’s agenda for April 11, when the plan could be adopted.

The goal is to reduce schools’ travel to competitions and to appease state lawmakers who have crafted a bill that would burden the GHSA with paying for schools’ travel that exceeds 75 miles.

A school’s classification is determined by enrollment. With fewer classes, regions would have more schools in them, and those schools more likely would be closer geographically. Smaller regions are more likely to isolate schools geographically.

The six-class plan comes with a caveat: The board still wants to retain separate divisions in Class A, the classification for smaller schools, those with around 600 students or fewer. Doing so effectively would mean seven classifications and 56 regions, not actually six with 48. There have been 64 regions since 2020 and eight champions in most sports since 2016.

GHSA executive director Robin Hines said Wednesday that 56 regions would address travel effectively while maintaining competitive integrity.

“What you’ve got to do is create a balance between trying to solve travel issues while maintaining a legitimate competitive balance that can be skewed by one school being so much larger than another that it creates a big advantage, which is the point of having classifications in the first place,” Hines said.

The GHSA currently has public and private divisions of Class A, each with eight regions. For the next two academic years starting this fall, the GHSA has abolished the public-private split and created a Class A with Division 1 for larger Class A schools and Division 2 for smaller schools. Wednesday’s board proposal to maintain those divisions shows their popularity with smaller schools, some with around 200 students that now won’t compete for championships against schools twice their size.

The six-class plan can’t go into effect until 2024-25, as the GHSA ratified reclassification for the next two academic years in January, but the board’s plan sends a message to the legislature. SB 328′s travel requirements would’ve been impossible financially for the GHSA, according to Hines and GHSA president Glenn White, who presides over the board.

“I want good communication with our legislative bodies and our senators and representatives, and what the board of trustees has done today is demonstrated that they (lawmakers) are being heard,” Hines said. “Unless we want to go to four classes, we can’t solve everybody’s travel issue, but this goes a long way toward addressing it.”

The board also voted to support a proposal to change the definition of an out-of-district student as it pertains to determining a school’s enrollment and classification. It would allow any student entering a feeder school of a high school in grades kindergarten through fifth grade not be counted as an out-of-district student. The GHSA places a 3.0 multiplier on out-of-zone students as a way to mitigate perceived competitive advantages of schools that get a significant number of schools outside their school zones.

“The argument is that if children come to you in elementary school, or some maybe in pre-K or kindergarten, they’re really your kids,” White said earlier this week.

The board also supported allowing public and private schools to select any one public-school service area within their county to count as their attendance zones for purposes of reclassification. This wouldn’t apply to athlete eligibility.

The board has the power to make bylaw changes, including one to reduce the number of classes, without executive-committee approval, but chose against it Wednesday.

“The board doesn’t need to vote on something with this much gravity by themselves,” Hines said. “They feel the entire committee needs to chime in, but I stress this: The Board of Trustees strongly recommends these proposals and is unanimously behind them as I am as executive director.”