The Pennsylvania Athletic Oversight Committee will hold a hearing today in Harrisburg to examine the issue of competition between public and private schools. Specifically, the committee will look at whether there should be separate state championships for what are now known as “boundary” and “non-boundary” schools.
Non-boundary schools include private and charter schools, which can admit students without geographic consideration, while boundary schools are limited to admitting students within their geographic attendance area.
It’s an open secret that the private schools recruit students, and the issue has been exacerbated by the advent of charter schools that siphon students from public schools, and from outside the state. One example of their athletic advantage…69 percent of the state’s high school boys and girls basketball champions in the last three years are non-boundary schools, where the teams get to compete in smaller classifications because their overall enrollment is low. Kennedy Catholic won the Class A basketball championship this year, starting the title game with a 30-0 run using students from Africa, Italy, and elsewhere. It’s been so easy for them to win championships that the school is voluntarily moving up to Class 6A next year just to get some competition.
The Pennsylvania Athletic Oversight Committee was established in 2004 but has no direct authority to order the PIAA to fix the decades-long problem, which dates back to a 1972 state law that permitted private schools to compete with public schools in state championships. What the committee can do is craft laws that would restrict the participation of public schools, which would be a back-door method of separating the championships.
The committee is made up of three members each from the House and Senate. The hearing today is at 1 o’clock.
