MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — The West Virginia Board of Education has given the green light for the new classification setup that will be used by the West Virginia Secondary School Activities Commission. The State BOE gave final approval to the recently-passed enrollment-based system that was unanimously approved by the WVSSAC Board of Control in April.
The emergency rule was requested that allows the new setup to be put in place in time for the 2025-2026 academic year.
“We have requested that this be an emergency rule and the reason we want that is that we want this to be in place for the ’25-’26 school year so that we don’t have to enter into the school year under the same classification model that we are currently under for the ’24-’25 year,” said WVSSAC Executive Director David Price on Wednesday. “To get that in place, we need to be moving on that so that we can get the regional and sectional alignments together before the end of the school year.”
Schools with an enrollment of 1,050 or more will be Class AAAA; schools with enrollment of 625-1,049 will be Class AAA; schools with an enrollment of 351-624 will be Class AA; and schools with an enrollment of 350 or less will be Class A.
“We’re still working on that. But it looks like at the AAAA level there would be twenty,” Price said. “Then it would balance out to the upper-20’s to 30’s. And then single-A as always will be larger. But it is always larger because all of the single-A schools don’t always offer all of the sports that we have available.”
A four-class structure will be utilized for cheer, football, volleyball, boys and girls basketball, baseball and softball.