New schools to be 5A, 3A

By Bill Donovan
Staff writer

GALLUP — Athletic decisions have been made concerning Gallup High School and the new school on the block, Miyamura High School.

Gallup High will continue to be a 5A school, at least for the next two years, and Miyamura will start its first athletic season next year as a 3A school.

"The athletic issue has been of great concern to many parents and community members," said Esther Macias, the district's interim superintendent.

The New Mexico Activities Association has given its approval to the plan and both schools are now in the process of implementing an athletic program for next year.

At Gallup High School, not much will change. The students there will continue to participate in all varsity sports as they have in the past.

At Miyamura, the school next year will consist of an enrollment of 634 students in the ninth and 10th grades.

Linda Anderson, the athletic director at the school, said the school will not field a varsity football team but it will have a junior varsity team made up of between 30 and 40 players.

In basketball, it will field four teams, a boys and girls varsity basketball program and two junior varsity teams. In baseball, there will two teams, a boys varsity baseball team and a girls varsity softball team. This will be the same in soccer and volleyball.

The track, cross country, wrestling, swimming, golf and tennis will sponsor varsity teams.

The following year, when Miyamura adds an 11th grade, Miyamura will have a varsity football program and the two schools will field comparative teams in all sports.

It's still up in the air what will happen in the 2010-11 school year. In that year, Miyamura will go from 858 students to 1,140 and Gallup High will shrink from its present enrollment of 1,600 to about 1,160.

Current standards say that in order to stay at 5A, a school must have an enrollment of 1,522 students or more, a level Gallup High will be nowhere near in 2010-11. Anderson said the school can petition to stay in 5A but its enrollment figures should bring it to a 4A level, which is for schools with an enrollment of 818 to 1,356. Miyamura should also go up from 3A to 4A that year.

Even if both schools are in 4A, Anderson said they probably won't be in the same region with Gallup probably being in the same region at the Farmington-area 4A teams and Miyamura being placed in the same region at the ones in the Grants area.

As Macias said, the possibility of Gallup High going down from a 5A school, where it can be a powerhouse in the state in girls' basketball, to a lower division has a lot of parents upset.

But on the other hand, it will provide city residents with a lot more sports activities since the two Gallup schools will probably share the same football field, meaning that there will be a high school game almost every week during the football season.

While there are no plans to have the two high schools compete against each other in immediate future, Anderson said she can see a time when in a few years the two schools will compete with each other on a regular basis.
It's going to be rough for some people during the first few years, she said, but eventually it will all settle down and sports fans will see the benefits of having two high school teams, Anderson said.

This happened a while back when Farmington split up into two high schools, with Farmington High fielding a team and Piedra Vista fielding a team. After not being well received, the Farmington community is now embracing both teams.

Another question that is asked is whether efforts will be made to have a good team at one school, probably Gallup High, by having all the better players in town attend one school.

Anderson said this isn't going to happen since which school a student attends will be based on where they live.

County school officials this week issued a new set of boundaries for the two schools as well as a list of which schools will feel into which mid-school and which high school.

Efforts have been made so that students who attend elementary school will be going to the same schools throughout mid-school and high school. The only exception to this is at Red Rock Elementary, where half the students will go to one high school and the other half the other high school in order to keep the student populations at each school about the same.

This has already caused a lot of criticism from parents who are sending their children to Red Rock but Macias said that parents have the option of sending their children to the other high school if that high school has room for them and if the parents make arrangements to get their children to school.

This option is available to any parent in the school district, said Macias, which brings up the possibility that some parents who have children good in sports will want them to go to the school with the best team.

Anderson said the state has rules that will prevent this from happening.

Students can go to a school that is outside their boundaries but if they do, they have to stay out of sports for 365 days — a full year.