In Monday’s Guthrie Center School Board meeting, Adair-Casey / Guthrie Center Superintendent Josh Rasmussen let the Board know that he’d received an email about an idea making its way towards the Iowa Department of Education.

Rasmussen says that the email was sent out by the Iowa High School Athletic Association to superintendents across the state looking at a new way to do athletics classifications going into the future, and that they are asking schools what they think about the idea.

“One of the things they’re going to look at is free and reduced lunch counts and allowing that free and reduced lunch count to bring some equity to the classification systems. There’s a vote on that. They’re going to see if they can get 60 percent of the schools to move this idea forward. And the idea being your free and reduced lunch rates, 40 percent of that number in grades nine, ten, eleven can be used to reduce that bench enrollment for the grade levels. That would reduce your bench enrollment, and then they would pull their classes from that number.”

Rasmussen points out that football is the only sport currently being considered to implement this idea, since the state sets football schedules instead of the school districts.