The IHSA announced some changes that recently occurred regarding the enrollments of IHSA member high schools on the IHSA website.

A quick summary per the IHSA:

1) IHSA Policy requires that the IHSA use the “Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) enrollment report from September 30, 2024” to determine classifications for the 2025-26 school year.

2) During the 2024-25 school year, the IHSA was workshopping potential changes to its classification process for the 2025-26 school year, which ended up being passed in March. In order to workshop those potential changes last year, we needed up-to-date enrollment figures and collected enrollments from our schools via our website, with the stipulation that the enrollments were not official, and that ISBE enrollments would still be collected and audited against the school-submitted enrollments per IHSA Policy. Due to delays in retrieving the enrollment data from ISBE, we posted those unofficial numbers on our website in June to better help schools predict their classifications based on the changes passed in March.

3) The process of retrieving the ISBE enrollments was significantly delayed and did not get updated on the IHSA website and shared with member schools until mid-August.

4) After the mid-August update outlined in #3 above, several schools questioned their enrollment figures. Those schools were directed to ISBE, and after meeting with ISBE, the schools verified that the enrollment on the IHSA website did not align with the enrollment report they submitted to ISBE for September 30, 2024.

5) Upon further inquisition by the IHSA to ISBE, it was determined that the enrollment figures that ISBE had provided IHSA were from not from the September 30, 2024, report. The correct enrollment data from September 30, 2024, was then provided by ISBE to IHSA last week and the correct enrollments are now posted for all schools. Based on the new data, nearly every public school changed enrollment by at least a handful of students, give or take.  

6) The IHSA School Directory now lists all schools with the correct enrollment and list their correct classifications by sport. The fall sports that were impacted by school class changes below. Note that changes in girls volleyball are applicable to all four-class sports, so they are also applicable in basketball, baseball, and softball.

Local schools affected:

Full list of other schools affected: