Separate 9th Grade Facilities

[Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN)]

For a fairly large group of high schools, for whatever reason it is the district policy to keep 9th grade as part of Junior High, or to have a separate 9th grade building. In some of these instances, the 9th graders go to junior highs that feed into multiple high schools - to take the example of the schools near where I live, West Junior High School has 9th graders that both live in the districts for Hickman and Rock Bridge, the high schools in town. While it is certainly possible for quizbowl teams to get good without 9th graders, the more time teams get with their kids, the better, and it seems like this is a pretty major hamstring to teams in these sorts of schools that want to build consistent programs with lots of young players. I want to know how other schools with this setup handle it. I know some like Dorman and New Trier have separate freshman only campuses, and unless they are within walking distance, how do you recruit kids from those places and then physically transport them from their school to practice? For teams in areas that have 9th graders separate, and the 9th graders are at schools that feed to multiple places, how do you suggest going about recruiting players for your high school team who for sure are going to feed into your school?

[Stained Diviner]

Our recruitment has been down the last few years due to having a separate freshman campus, and it is harder to recruit students after they have become attached to other activities. Fortunately, we at least have an activities bus which makes it somewhat easy for students who want to come to our main campus for after school activities. I wish I had a good answer.

[Papa's in the House]

My high school had one campus for freshman and sophomore students and another campus for juniors/seniors. We always found that it was more efficient to try to hold practices at the frosh/soph campus than try to hold practices at night at the junior/senior campus. The students are more likely to attend practice when practice is held at their campus.

[dtaylor4]

A similar phenomenon I've seen cause problems is consolidated school districts. When you're having to travel significant distances just to get to school, and lack a car, making it to extracurriculars is that much harder.

[Eric Huff]

We have two separate facilities on the same property (about .75 miles apart). In years past, we have had a separate 9th grade team run by a teacher at our ninth grade campus. This year, we have combined the ninth and tenth grade teams into a "JV" team run by the freshman campus teacher who was working with 9th graders in years previous. There's a regular bus that runs between the main campus and the ninth grade campus that the freshmen can ride to make it to afternoon practices.

[Stained Diviner]

Last year, for the first time I know of, some of our feeder schools participated in a Scholastic Bowl Tournament. One or two of them went to Barrington, which generally followed the tenets of good quizbowl, and one or two of them went to IESA, which generally did not. Either way, the students did not get the full quizbowl experience, because they generally were selected a week or two before the one tournament their team attended and had maybe one practice probably without a buzzer system. It's not the same thing as being a part of a team that grows together and works on improving their knowledge base.

However, that little bit of participation has made recruiting freshmen much easier for me this year. There is a group of freshmen who know what quizbowl is and a few of them entered high school thinking that they wanted more of it.

My advice would be to encourage West Junior High School to form a team. I don't know how the bylaws would work--there might be rules against 8th graders competing against high school students or 9th graders competing against junior high students. A team of 9th graders competing against high school teams needs to have some very modest expectations. Perhaps the best possibility is that somebody could organize some intramural matches. However, just getting some basic exposure to those 9th graders (and/or the 7th and 8th graders) makes a difference.

[Jane Fairfax]

I went to a Freshman Campus, and basically they just had about 3-4 practice sessions for freshmen only at the Freshman Campus, before integrating us into the F/S team at the Main Campus. I guess that's the best way to do it. They made it optional for us to go to varsity practices, and the committed players on the team went.