NNJIL public schools put plan to secede on hold

Gail Lubin | By Gail Lubin | The Star-Ledger
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on January 04, 2008 at 8:38 AM, updated January 04, 2008 at 8:44 AM

The revolution is on hold.

A dozen public school athletic directors from the Northern New Jersey Interscholastic League yesterday tabled a radical plan to secede from their conference, choosing instead to wait for a state proposal for realignment.

The move came after the athletic directors, who no longer want to compete against private schools, heard details of the New Jersey State Interscholastic Athletic Association's initial plans for merging leagues and conferences for the 2009-10 school year.

Jack Dubois, assistant director at the NJSIAA, told the NNJIL athletic directors at their regularly monthly meeting in Paterson that his agency will announce next week a 30-member committee that will essentially redraw the state map for high school sports.

Dubois' goal yesterday was to put down a rebellion that threatened high school sports in the 21-school NNJIL, thought the state's long-term goal is to create more parity with larger conferences where the best teams mostly compete against one another.

"The NJSIAA has a plan, and we are moving forward with it," Dubois said after the NNJIL's meeting in Paterson. "I understand the concern here and the urgency these athletic directors have about the issue. We're taking proactive steps to address it."

The NJSIAA proposals are expected to be the most significant changes in high school sports competition since 1982, when the state mandated private schools get access to the state's athletic conferences.

Since then, competition between public and private schools has become the most controversial issue for the state's 243,000 scholastic athletes. Scores of public school officials claim it is unfair for them to have to play against private schools that can draw the best athletes from anywhere in the state while most public schools must compete with students who live within their districts.

The issue came to a head last month at the NJSIAA's annual membership meeting, where public school administrators came within eight votes of forcing public and private schools into separate leagues.

After the vote failed, 12 public schools in the NNJIL submitted letters to the conference stating their intention to secede and become independent, a move that surely would have resulted in a court fight if the schools continued to pursue it.

Nutley athletic director Joe Piro, who led the efforts to separate public and private schools and pushed to secede from the NNJIL, said yesterday the state deserved a chance to fix the problem, though he was less than optimistic.

"They are still skating around the issue," Piro said. "Regardless of how this process goes, there are still going to be some people who do not want their kids playing against non-public schools."

Dubois said the NJSIAA's realignment committee will address those concerns during a series of meetings during the next several months. The committee will produce a recommendation in September that would become the framework of a new conference alignment for the following school year.

Msgr. Michael Kelly, headmaster of Seton Hall Prep, who worked to keep private and public schools in the same leagues, said he was encouraged by the willingness of the public schools in the NNJIL to let the state try to fix the problem.

"It makes a lot more sense to do it peacefully and calmly and keep it out of the courts," Kelly said yesterday.

Dubois and other state officials have held up the 41-member Shore Conference as a model. There, schools play in divisions based on the strength of their individual sports programs.

However, Piro said such a system only works because the private schools in the Shore Conference haven't made a major commitment to athletics.

"All they have to do is make a commitment to dominate,'' Piro said. ''When a non-public makes that commitment, it has the tools in the box to make it happen."