NO SPORTS MERGER THIS YEAR FOR CLARION-LIMESTONE -CLARION

CLARION – The Clarion-Limestone School District is no longer seeking a sports cooperative with neighboring Clarion according to a story in Friday’s Oil City Derrick.

C-L school board president Robert Sawyer told the Derrick that the district’s athletic boosters are interested in coming up with most of the sports budget.

“We have great athletic boosters,” Sawyer told the Derrick. “They want to step up to the plate.”

According to the Derrick, C-L superintendent Ted Pappas informed his Clarion counterpart George White Thursday that C-L wasn’t pursing the sports cooperative anymore this year. White told the Derrick that the District 9 committee has been notified of the change.

The proposed cooperative agreement, which originally surfaced a couple of weeks ago, would have had C-L’s student-athletes playing at Clarion under the “Bobcat” moniker. The cooperative agreement proposal, though, met mixed reaction from members of both communities.

The cooperative agreement was anything but a sure thing even if both school district’s were still committed to it. The District 9 committee had scheduled a May 6 meeting to vote on the proposal, and if District 9 would have approved it, the PIAA would still have had to give its OK. None of that was a given considering PIAA by-laws say that any proposed cooperative agreement that would change the school’s classification level (in most sports Clarion would have gone from Class A to Class AA) has to be sent to the district committee level by Oct. 1 of an odd-numbered year. C-L and Clarion didn’t send their idea to the district level until April of this year but were hoping the PIAA would take the unique economic “hardship” into consideration and would waiver that requirement.  

White told the Derrick that any further discussion about any further sports cooperative between the schools (the schools already coop in wrestling and boys’ and girls’ soccer) will be put on hold until at least the fall of 2009.

NOTES – According to the Derrick story, White has said the two districts remain interested in a possible future consolation of the two school systems and could schedule a meeting that would include representation from the state education department as early as June … Many of the budgetary problems facing C-L and other rural school districts throughout District 9 can be traced to the state education budgetary formula which as currently constructed gives less money to rural school districts this year. C-L officials met with Howard Brush, a regional representative for Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell last week. Local legislative leaders in both parties have stayed fairly quit, at least publically, on those funding issues so far.

“Everyone is aware of the problems rural schools are facing,” Sawyer told the Derrick.