Uncle Luke: Florida High School Football's New Reclassification Is a "Segregation Plan"

The same good ol’ boy mentality plaguing the Republican-led Florida legislature to pass racist laws like the Stop WOKE Act (HB 7), which prohibits teaching critical race theory in schools, is also plaguing the organization that oversees high school athletics in the Sunshine State.

Last month, the Florida High School Athletic Association (FHSAA) board of directors voted to authorize a major overhaul of how high school football teams compete for state titles. The FHSAA will no longer group schools in districts based on the number of students at the schools. Instead, the board voted to break up the state’s public, private, and charter schools into three categories: "Metro," "Suburban," and "Rural."

As head football coach of Miami Edison Senior High, I know firsthand this change, which passed in late February, will make it even harder for predominantly African-American high schools to compete against ultra-rich private schools, especially in South Florida, a region known for producing the most talented players in the nation who grow up to dominate the NFL.

Now that the new districts and region assignments have been announced, it's clear FHSAA is pitting all the Black public schools in South Florida against each other in the same Metro region, while the private and charter schools will compete in different Metro regions. This gives athletes at private schools a significant advantage because they can transfer to different schools during the season. Essentially, a great player on a losing team can switch to a private school with a playoff-bound team — assuming they have the means to afford private-school tuition. This segregation plan creates an unhealthy situation for South Florida’s high school football community.

For example, in the season that preceded the pandemic, South Florida public schools won seven out of nine state football championships. Last season, only one team — Miami Central Senior High School (79.4 percent Black) — won a state title. But that team didn't have to defeat any other Miami-Dade inner-city or "Metro" schools, including the outstanding teams at Booker T. Washington Senior High (38 percent Black) and Miami Northwestern Senior High (90 percent Black). Those other schools made the playoffs in different divisions. Miami Northwestern lost the state title game in its division, and Booker T. Washington lost in a regional semifinal in its division.

Now that schools aren't grouped by the population size of the school, Central High has been assigned to District 2M-13, which includes almost all predominantly Black public high schools — Miami Carol City Senior High (86 percent Black), Miami Norland Senior High (95 percent Black), and North Miami Beach Senior High School (72 percent Black) — with the exception of Monsignor Edward Pace High School, a private school in Miami Gardens with a 32 percent Black student body.

The same goes for District 2M-14, which includes Northwestern Senior High, Booker T. Washington Senior High, Miami Edison Senior High (82.8 percent Black), and Miami Jackson Senior High (32 percent Black) — all of which are public schools with a predominantly minority student body population except for Immaculata-LaSalle High School, a private school near Coconut Grove with 0.8 percent Black student body.

The FHSAA board passed these new district categories in a 9-7 vote during a controversial February 28 Zoom call. Ralph Arza, disgraced former Miami state legislator who was appointed to the board by Florida education commissioner Richard Corcoran, delivered the death blow by voting "yes" even though most Miami-Dade public high school coaches are against this reclassification.

In 2006, Arza was a state representative whose district encompassed North Miami-Dade and South Broward counties. He resigned amid a criminal investigation into threats he made against a fellow Republican state politician, then-Florida Sen. Gus Barreiro. In a voicemail that was publicly circulated, Arza called Barreiro a "bitch" and "my nigger." Arza pleaded guilty to misdemeanor witness tampering and was sentenced to 18 months' probation.

Now Arza, a former Miami Senior High football head coach in the 1980s, has ignored opposition to the Metro/Suburban/Rural plan from current public school head coaches who played for him, including Tim "Ice" Harris. Even Arza’s brother, former Booker T. Washington assistant coach Eddy Arza, is against it.

As the governmental affairs director for the Florida Charter School Alliance, Arza could fix everything by requesting an emergency meeting to change his vote. He’s refusing to do so. Arza told me he’s not changing his mind even after the Miami-Dade high school football coaches he’s supposed to represent told him the reclassification plan is horrible for local public schools.

The FHSAA board has put Miami-Dade County and our kids in a losing situation. Considering that every local coach and athletic director that I’ve spoken to has a problem with this plan, it’s time for Miami-Dade County Public Schools to leave the FHSAA for good.

This reclassification plan creates an unfair playing field for our kids, effectively designing rules to hurt us and profit off us. It's demoralizing, and the nation’s fourth-largest school district cannot stand for this segregation effort that further hurts public school student-athletes.