Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, April 6, 1993 TAG: 9304060208
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BY PAUL DELLINGER SOUTHWEST BUREAU
DATELINE: FORT CHISWELL LENGTH: Medium
DECISION NEAR ON CANCELING ACADEMIC MEET
A decision will be made by the middle of this week on whether to cancel the Mountain Academic Competition Conference tournament this year, due to problems that include the weather and the competition questions.Ten of the participating 18 schools favored cancellation in an earlier vote.
"It's still a little bit up in the air," Fort Chiswell High School Principal Joe Bean, chairman for this year's competition program, said Monday.
Bean sent fax messages to principals at all schools involved, asking them to let him know by today how they wanted to proceed. "I've probably gotten responses at this point from, I'm going to say, about half of the schools with very diverse sentiments," he said.
Some have recommended a playoff among the top scorers. Some want a division-wide tournament. Others want to cancel until next year. Bean said a decision needs to be made before the Easter holiday.
The competition was established in 1985 by nine high schools. The number has doubled since then.
The high schools are Auburn, Blacksburg, Bland, Carroll County, Christiansburg, Craig County, Floyd County, Fort Chiswell, Galax, George Wythe, Giles, Grayson County, Narrows, Pulaski County, Radford, Rocky Gap, Rural Retreat and Shawsville.
The academic competition pits four-member teams from each school in English, math, science, social studies and all-around against one another in regular season matches.
The questions are a key element of the competition and, this year, generated complaints from students and coaches who said some questions had been repeated from one match to the next. The same questions are not supposed to be asked during the year.
Wayne Booth, the man hired for getting the questions together for the matches, resigned without having prepared any questions for tournament competition.
Principals from Auburn, Bland, Carroll, Christiansburg, Craig, Floyd, Giles, Grayson, Pulaski and Radford originally voted to cancel the tournament, and two abstained - Bean, the competition chairman, and Rural Retreat High School Principal Gary Houseman, its secretary-treasurer. But that was before Bean recontacted them.
The tournament was to have been held this week at Grayson County High School, where 1,500 programs for it had been printed.
Weather caused some matches to be canceled but, Bean said, "we could have rescheduled that." The main problem was the questions.
"If it was basketball, no one would stand for this," said Rocky Gap teacher John Dodson, an academic competition team coach. "They're cheating the kids who have been working from the beginning of the year toward this, just because it's inconvenient for a few people to rearrange things."
Some academic teams are undefeated, and senior students on them are upset at losing their last chance to win a trophy for their schools.
But Bean said the competition is more complicated than rearranging a basketball tournament.
"We've taken some heat, and probably deservedly so," he said. But, in a comparison with preparing for an athletic competition, he said, "I'm not sure we're not comparing apples and oranges."
A total of 640 questions would have to be generated to cover all the teams from all the schools in a tournament, Bean said, and they would all have to be questions not used before. "That's an extremely difficult thing to do in a very short period of time."
The concern, he said, is that there would not be time to prepare a tournament up to previous standards, and that would hurt the entire program. It has never had problems like this in the past and lacked the resources to correct them quickly, he said.
A few schools very much want to complete the competition, he said.