Legislative or legal action is likely after the Alabama High School Athletic Association (AHSAA) denied Scottsboro High School's appeal of its recent reclassification from 4A to 5A.
Scottsboro City Schools superintendent Jennifer Williams has said in multiple recent statements that the AHSAA double-counted 11 students in their Average Daily Membership (ADM), a measure of school attendance, resulting in the school being classified as 5A. The school's flag football program also wasn't initially listed in the AHSAA's data. The AHSAA corrected the flag football mistake, but the ADM error wasn't corrected despite appeals by Williams to AHSAA executive director Heath Harmon and the Central Board of Control.
"We're committed to advocating for our student-athletes to be placed in the appropriate classification," Williams told 1819 News in an interview on Monday. "We feel like that aligns directly with the AHSAA mission to ensure fair and equitable competitive play. We are looking into any kind of legislative action or legal action that we might pursue at this point."
Williams continued, "There are a lot of people on the committee and even statewide that have really been very supportive because you know this could happen to any school at any moment. We've even had some of our rivals reach out that say they're in support of us because they sure wouldn't want to be in the same spot that we're in."
"The dispute is over 11 students that were counted twice is what it's about. Right now, they have us classified as 5A. If you take out the 11 students that were counted twice, that would put us in a 4A classification," Williams said. "We're a very small 5A. That would be a drastic difference in size of school if we stay in that 5A classification. One of my big questions is: why did they make one correction and not both corrections? That's kind of where I just can't wrap my mind around why they quickly made the one change but they didn't change the ADM. It makes me wonder, okay, did you already have classifications built internally? Did you already have regions set and you didn't want to go back and change it? They didn't give me a reason so I've just got a lot of wonders still."
Williams said she hopes to know exactly what avenue the school will pursue against the AHSAA's decision by the end of the week.
"There's a lot of people that get caught up in, 'Oh, you want to be 4A. You don't want to be 5A.' I just want accurate numbers to be used no matter what those numbers are," Williams said. "At the end of the day, our coaches and our student-athletes they're going to put in the work and work hard regardless of what classification we fall in. I just want to put them in the best possible avenue we can. If our numbers say we'll be 4A, we'll be 4A. If our numbers say we should be 5A, then we'll be 5A. Right now, the way it stands our number is at 511.4 (and) we could've been a 4A classification."
Senate Majority Leader Steve Livingston (R-Scottsboro) told 1819 News he wants the AHSAA to "correct this mistake."
"Our students work hard and play by the rules. The responsibility to do what is right rests with adults," Livingston said. "We are pursuing every available avenue to protect our students and make sure the AHSAA corrects this mistake and makes it right for our student athletes."
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