By Amy Donaldson, Deseret News
Published: Wednesday, Sept. 29, 2010 10:14 p.m. MDT
MIDVALE — While there are many unknowns about next year's alignment, there is one fact of which the architects of the new plan are certain.
"We're on our way to a far better product," said Paul Shulte, Highland High principal who spearheaded the ad-hoc realignment committee that studied the issue for nearly six months before offering up a new way of assigning schools to regions and classifications. "I'm 100 percent confident with that."
With that optimism, the Board of Trustees for the Utah High School Activities Association approved — with just one no vote — a new classification model that will put 24 schools in 5A, 24 schools in 4A, 28 schools in 3A, 20 schools in 2A and 36 schools in 1A. The discussion about the numbers occurred after a public hearing in which athletic directors, superintendents, coaches and school board members praised the new system (which aligns schools every two years instead of every four) and offered suggestions about criteria that should be used to place schools in regions.
In the hearing, some of the issues that were raised were:
-Controlling the cost of travel.
-Limiting time out of school.
-Not making classifications so large student athletes didn't have a chance to be named to academic all-state teams or make the playoffs.
-Not making classifications so small that winless teams make the playoffs.
-Not putting too much stock in symmetry (having the same number of teams in each region).
-A number of people also spoke to trying to keep the ratios between the largest and smallest schools in smaller classifications lower than in 4A or 5A.. Many referred to it as a "critical mass" of students
"The biggest challenge is trying to balance 2A, 3A and 4A," said executive director Rob Cuff, as they ran through different scenarios posed by the audience in the hearing. "Then you throw geography in there ... We haven't even talked geography."
One of the difficulties is that the issues faced by larger schools are generally much different than those facing smaller, usually rural schools.
"Our state is unique," said Cuff.
After the public hearing, the BOT had it's meeting in which it discussed how many schools should be in each region.
They settled on changing 5A from 16 to 24 and 4A from 32 to 24, which means they'll likely be four six-team regions in each classification. Shulte said the feedback he'd had was almost universally in favor of expanding the number of teams in 5A.
As BOT members ran through the numbers one more time Wednesday night, some suggested that the task might be easier if they knew which schools they were talking about in each classification.
Craig Seegmiller, Region 9's representative, said every school and school district had to trust the process.
"If we see those names and start playing with what we've created then we've brought all the politics back into the process," he said. "We've all got to be willing to live with whatever those numbers are. We all hope it doesn't happen to us (that a school ends up in an undesired class or region), but we have to be willing to live with it."
Shulte echoed his sentiment saying that the committee studied six years of trends in coming up with the criteria for the new system.
"You've got to step out of the dark at some point," Shulte. "You have to have a little faith ... We studied six years of data."
The result of the vote means that next year there will be 24 teams in 5A. That's a ratio of 1.57 percent between the largest and smallest 5A schools. There will be 24 schools in 4A with a ratio of 1.39 percent. There will be 28 schools in 3A with a 2.4 percent ratio. There will be 20 schools in 2A with a 2.61 percent ratio. In 1A there will be 36 schools with a 14.91 percent ratio.
Cuff said traditionally the cutoff in ratios has been 3 to 1, meaning no school would be placed in a classification where any of the other schools were three times larger.
Once this year's population numbers are released on Friday, staff members will put names to the numbers being considered.
Then on Oct. 27 at 1 p.m. the BOT will consider the first placement of the schools into regions and classifications. On Nov. 17 at 5:30 p.m. there will be a public hearing on the first draft at the UHSAA offices, 199 E. 7200 South.
And finally, on Nov. 18, the BOT will vote on a final realignment for next year.
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