Court Case In Ohio Worth Watching HereWe don’t talk much about Ohio sports in this column, except to take a fun poke at the Reds and their fans and when the Cubs beat the Indians in the World Series in 2016.
But something is going on right now with our neighbors to the east that is worth our attention.
In the summer of 2017, the Ohio High School Association voted to implement a creative way of improving the competitive balance between private and public schools in their state. There, like in Indiana and most other states, private schools have a distinct advantage in the fact that they do not have boundaries which define where their students come from.
Because of that, private and parochial schools (particularly ones in bigger cities) are openly able to talk with athletes and their families about attending and, oh by the way, playing on the sports teams there. And with that system in place, private and parochial schools have taken over the podiums at state championships all over the country.
The National Federation of High Schools and its member state associations have been searching for a way to level the playing field for private and public schools.
The concept of making schools moving up a class due to their dominance in a certain sport is one way states are trying, but it’s fairly new and the sample size on judging its impact is too small.
The newest thing is called “competitive balance.”
Under this plan, how a state association splits its schools into classes is done differently than it was before. As it stands, schools are assigned a class based on the number of students in their school and each student counts as one unit.
Under the competitive balance concept passed by Ohio and used over the last two school years, students at private and parochial schools would be counted using a formula that is based on school size, number of players on a team’s roster and the education offerings of the school.
Here is an example: Fictional Jones High School has 200 student in grades 9-11 that could play high school football, 50 of them do play and they offer unique courses compared to other schools in their geographical area. Those factors are punched into a computer program, which then calculates what their student rate would be valued at.
Instead of 1 student = 1 unit, Fictional Jones HS may be assigned based on 1 student = 1.3 points. The result would be that our Fictional Jones Dragons would be ranked and classified as if they had 260 students instead of 200. That could bump them up a class.
The private and parochial schools of Ohio took it to court last summer and lost based on the fact that they had representation on the OHSA board, and its membership voted in favor it.
Last week, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled that a judge in Cincinnati can hear the challenge in court, giving life to the hopes of non-public schools efforts to keep in place what others see as a monopoly.
Talk of a “multiplier” have come up with our own Indiana High School Athletic Association in the last year, but the plans I have seen included a much simpler system of classifying schools.
The IHSAA has been hearing about this issue for a long time. People have been adamant that the commissioners do something to level the playing field between public and private schools. The problem is that they really have to walk a tightrope on this subject. Going too far in an effort to “level” could be seen as discriminating against a school based on their religious affiliation—which the IHSAA does not want.
But you can bet that our state association officials are watching this case in Ohio very closely, as are private schools and state associations around the country.
If the modifier concept gets upheld in Ohio, I would expect to see it implemented here in the Hoosier State at the next possible opportunity.
I’ve told you before that I would like to see all parochial and private schools in large geographic areas like South Bend, Fort Wayne and Indianapolis or above a certain enrollment like Culver Academy would be automatically placed in the largest class in their sport. You have to restrict it to large cities, because schools like Lakeland Christian Academy and Bethany Christian School in Goshen are not the problem.
But that would never hold up in court, I know.
I’ll keep an eye on Ohio and let you know how it turns out.
