The main purpose of schools is the formal education of our kids. Curricula, lessons, libraries, books, and teachers are the main tools that are part of that formal education. We know that these differ significantly across the hundreds of New Hampshire public schools.

But schools are also the place where informal learning takes place. Informal learning activities include robotics club, international night, school plays, the student newspaper, model United Nations, comic book club, and many, many others. Among the most common of these co-curricular activities are organized school sports.

It is not now possible to conduct an analysis of how all co-curricular activities vary among our schools. The NH Department of Education does not seem to collect data in this regard from the schools.

The only source of some centrally organized data is related to high school sports. The NH Interscholastic Athletic Association (NHIAA) helps organize competitive sports: establishing rules, setting schedules, and providing game officials. Lacking any source of data on other co-curricular activities, this paper uses data from the NHIAA website to see how sports vary across our public high schools.

For the 2020-21 school year, NHIAA’s website listed 33 sports and identified which of the 79 high schools participated in each.[i]

As shown in Table 1, the only teams fielded by all high schools were boys’ basketball and baseball. Only one high school lacked a girls’ basketball team and two lacked softball teams.

Most people know and understand that sports, like other co-curricular activities, are more likely to be available in high schools with higher enrollments. In fact, for many sports, the NHIAA organizes schools into divisions so that schools of differing size compete primarily among comparable schools.

How Did the Number of Sports Relate to School Size?

Figure 1 displays one dot for each of New Hampshire’s 79 high schools. The horizontal axis is the fall 2019 enrollment for each high school and the vertical axis is the number of NHIAA sports in which that school participated during the 2020-21 school year. A logarithmic trend line is displayed. A linear regression is not appropriate because there is a fixed maximum of 33 sports.

Figure 1 clearly shows the fewer number of sports available in small high schools.

Nevertheless, there are some differences not correlated with school size. For example, Pittsfield High School, with 147 students, had only 5 team sports, while Moultonborough Academy, with 20 more students, had 16 sports available. Hollis-Brookline High School, with 858 students, had 29 of the 33 sports, while Nashua North High School with 1,682 students, almost twice the size, had only 26 sports. Bow High School and Nashua South High School both had 25 sports available to their students. Bow had only 634 students, while Nashua South had 1,842, nearly three times as many.

How many sports are available depends largely on school size. Which sports are available depends on a number of factors. The availability of necessary facilities at the school or in the community is among them.

For example, golf, ten-pin bowling, ice hockey, ski-jumping, indoor track, and swimming and diving are not possible if there are no appropriate local facilities where these teams can practice and compete.

When available facilities are not a limiting factor, student enrollment definitely limits which sports may be available. Sports that take place during the same season may not be possible if too many students would rather participate in more popular sports. Examples are lacrosse and tennis.

Twenty-four high schools lacked both lacrosse and tennis during the 2020-21 school year, as shown in Table 5. Fall Mountain High School, with enrollment of 465 students, was the largest of the high schools to lack all four teams. In other words, all high schools with more than 465 students had at least one of the four teams during that school year.

The dependence on school size is also clear in the list of high schools that lacked boys’ and girls’ cross-country teams, as seen in Table 6. Only two schools with more than 300 students lacked such teams.

On the other hand, as shown in Table 7, many high schools lacked Nordic skiing as a sport and that does not appear to be related to school size.

Implications

High school sports are only one aspect of co-curricular activities. Unfortunately, data on non-sports activities are not readily available. It is logical to assume, however, that the way in which the variety of high school sports are largely dependent on school size also holds true for other co-curricular activities.

In a small high school there may be only one winter sport, typically basketball. In larger schools there might also be indoor track, Nordic skiing, gymnastics, and/or wrestling. This gives students in larger schools more choices. Not all students have the ability, body type, or interest to play on a basketball team. In a larger high school, those students will have other opportunities to excel at another activity and to learn to work as part of a team by other means.

Without proof, it seems logical to assume that this is also true for non-sports co-curricular activities. Larger schools provide a wider range of activities to meet the diverse interests of students.

The effect of co-curricular activities on students learning is not measured by any of the typical “outcome” measures used to evaluate school performance: graduation rates, test scores in math, etc.

School Size and School Funding

While larger schools generally have a greater diversity of opportunity in sports and other co-curricular activities, data show that larger districts and schools are also less costly on a per student basis because of efficiencies of scale.

New Hampshire’s 2020 Commission to Study School Funding reported on a possible new formula for calculating the cost of providing an “adequate” education that includes consideration of school district size.

The Commission discussed whether smaller districts should be provided more state aid per student than larger districts to reflect their economies of scale. Doing so, however, could provide an incentive for districts to stay small and even an incentive for larger cooperative districts to splinter into smaller ones in order to gain more state aid.

 

 

 

[i] Bud Carlson Academy, Manchester School of Technology, and Rivendell Academy do not appear in the NHIAA list of schools either because they do not have teams or because they do not participate in the NHIAA.