I was talking to the Athletic Director of Southwest Guilford at last Saturday night’s Guilford College football game and he told me we have some major changes coming soon for the Guilford County conferences.
Brindon Christman, Guilford College grad and the AD at SWG, said upcoming realignment is gonna change everything for his school and their 3-A conference. Christman said that SWG would lose High Point Andrews as the Red Raiders would drop to the 2-A ranks. Parkland and Glenn are at the 4-A enrollment levels and Carver is on the border line. Christman says the conference as whole would be gone.
I for one would like to see a Guilford County Conference with a 4-A and 3-A Division.
The Guilford County Conference 4-A Division:
Grimsley
Page
Smith
Dudley(They are going to have to move up, too many students for 3-A classification)
Northwest Guilford
High Point Central(Here’s hoping they can keep enough students to stay at the 4-A level)
The Guilford County Conference 3-A Division:
Northeast Guilford
Northern Guilford
Ragsdale
Southeast Guilford
Southwest Guilford
Western Guilford
*****High Point Andrews, Southern Guilford, and Eastern Guilford would fall into the 2-A classificaton but I hear that Eastern may be close to the 3-A enrollment level once the new school building is completed)
That’s all of the current 15 Guilford County Schools*****
that looks pretty good to me. I would love to see Ragsdale and Southwest Guilford in the same conference. Although I think Ragsdale has been getting pretty close to 4A size the last few years. Any idea when these realignments will be announced?
I think Western Guilford is the largest 3-A school in the state and they may also be 4-A. Correct me if I am wrong
According to Christman it will be at least another year and half before the new c0nferences will be in place and the schools are in the process of turning in their
Average Daily Attendances based on the first two months of this school year
and that will be the determiner of which way all the schools will go in the
future. These first two months will be crucial in letting us know what the future
holds. The Average Daily Attendance will be the key and current Guilford County Board of Education Chairman Alan Ducan agreed when I spoke with him today. He also said he is a big basketball fan and that he had coached Girls AAU hoops.
Wesley: After reading this thread, I took a look at some N.C. public school enrollment numbers from the end of the 06-07 school year. Glenn had slightly more students (like 13 more) than Western, but both are right there on what looks like the line between 3-A and 4-A. I’m not sure what data points the ADs and the NCHSAA will use.
My guess is that Andrews will fall to 2-A (it has only a few more students than Southern) and that Smith will come down to 3-A. Most everyone else should stay the same, though Western, Ragsdale and Dudley appear (to me, anyway) to be on the 3-A/4-A bubble. A lot depends on what enrollment is doing elsewhere – Wake and Meck keep opening very large high schools, for instance, and that will bump some schools from 4-A to 3-A.
From a purely selfish standpoint, I wish all of the Guilford schools would be in two instead of three classes. But that’s not going to happen – the enrollment range between the county’s high schools is still way too wide.
P.S. For the wonks out there, I was using 9th month ADM from this site: http://www.ncpublicschools.org/fbs/accounting/data/. End-of-the-year data tends to be more accurate because the dropouts are long gone by that point. A two-month average would work, too, because high school enrollment tends to fluctate during the early part of the school year. (Btw, I wrote about K12 schools for a long time before getting into the sports racket.)