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Four new schools were admitted into the Ohio High School Athletic Association this year — St. Clairsville East Richland Christian, Granville Christian, Cincinnati Oyler and Cincinnati Riverview East Academy.
Every year, it seems more and more Christian schools are joining the OHSAA. However, Oyler and Riverview East are charter schools.
An administrator with Toledo Technology Academy once told me that students at his school are not interested in playing athletics. Sounded like the reasoning was they were either too smart or overly interested in academics to play sports.
While that may be true for some, a number of those students have sought opportunities to play at other schools while attending TTA.
If you provide them the opportunity to represent their own school, I believe you will find these students to be even more interested in athletics. “Build it and they will come,” I say.
Toledo Tech is a public high school operated by TPS offering an intense integrated academic and technical education preparing students for a career in manufacturing technologies. It is not a charter school. I have been in the hallways between classes at the DeVilbiss building in West Toledo, and it seems to me there are enough students to field athletic teams.
The Ohio Department of Education reports that entering the 2009 school year TTA had 173 students. That would break down to 86½ students per gender, although TTA likely has more males than females. Either way, it is more than enough to field athletics. Toledo Early College High School had 224 students, and theoretically the same could be said.
I was also told that sports would not be allowed at Toledo Tech because the area’s top athletes would enroll giving the school’s teams a competitive edge. That was what happened at the former Macomber High School, I was told, and that cannot happen again.
But isn’t that what is happening at other public and private schools? Athletics are all about creating opportunities for more students and not about finding a reason to eliminate opportunities.
If there is enough enrollment, Toledo Tech and other area charter high schools, public or private, should consider fielding teams — acknowledging, that right now funding would be a problem for TPS schools.
The OHSAA lost member schools this year, too. Two schools consolidated into one (Lorain Admiral King and Lorain Southview consolidated into Lorain) and five other schools closed (Cleveland East, Toledo Libbey, Perrysville Louis Bromfield, South Euclid Regina, and Cleveland South). The OHSAA’s total number of member high schools for the 2010-11 year is 828.
The closing of Libbey and the formation of a new league by Clay, Whitmer, St. John’s Jesuit, Central Catholic, St. Francis de Sales, Notre Dame Academy, St. Ursula Academy, Lima Senior, Findlay, and Fremont Ross will leave only six schools in the City League starting in 2011-12.
By allowing Toledo Tech, Early College, or one of the larger charter high schools to have athletics that number could be brought back to eight. That is where much of the lost enrollment has gone, anyways.
Toledo Tech students have proven they yearn for competition. TTA students are already involved in seeking state, regional, and national championships — but it is a different type of competition.
TTA has won state and national championships in robotics competition. There is also a bowling team, alternative energies team, and a science Olympiad.
“We are probably one of the better kept secrets of Toledo Public Schools,” TTA Director Gary L. Thompson once told The Press. Thompson, a long-time consultant for General Motors, said his position at TTA could be compared to that of the principal at another high school.
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