By Kevin Posival
Killeen Daily Herald

Harker Heights High School is the largest of the Killeen Independent School District's four high schools. Not as troublesome as the congestion currently in the hallways could be the wide open road in front of Knights' and Lady Knights sports teams.

This week, at a coaching clinic sponsored by the Texas High School Coaches Association in San Antonio, University Interscholastic League executive director Charles Breithaupt said "it's more likely than ever" that the state's athletic governing body will add a sixth classification to more equally distribute the state's more than 1,200 public high schools.

"It would be difficult — because they've discussed this in the past — but anything they want to do to equalize everything, I'd be in favor of," said Ellison head football coach Buddy McBryde. "The trouble in the past is what you do with the far east Texas and far west Texas teams."

McBryde's Eagles and Mike Mullins' Knights would be candidates for joining the proposed 6A classification if the current talks turn the corner into reality.

With enrollment numbers of 2,605 at Harker Heights and 2,572 at Ellison for the UIL's last reclassification in February, the two aren't even the two largest schools in eight-team District 12-5A, but they are among the largest 130 teams in the state's current largest classification, Class 5A.

"We're obviously growing, or seem to be anyway," said Mullins. "... When you're on the bubble, you just don't know where they're going to take you."

The only two schools in District 12-5A larger than either Harker Heights or Ellison are Bryan and College Station A&M Consolidated, which reported 2,713 and 2,693, respectively.

Shoemaker, which reported 2,230 to the UIL last October, is among the smallest 50 schools in the 246-school 5A and could literally be a bubble team, teetering between being a large 'new' 5A school, which would more than likely also include Killeen High, Copperas Cove and Temple, locally, or being a small 6A team.

"I know that we have some schools (in the state) with about 4,000 kids, but I don't know how they would play or who they would play — the logistics," said Killeen High head football coach Sam Jones. "If two our of schools go 6A, they could play teams from Dallas or Houston. I think the cost of it would be unreal."

Killeen High, currently a member of Class 4A, is expected to jump above the 5A cut-off in the next UIL reclassification in 2012 after Killeen ISD opted to rezone in order to alleviate some of the overcrowding at Harker Heights and Ellison. But the rezoning plan has slow-moving parts, shifting more and more students away from one high school and into another. Most of the movement aims to shuffle students into Killeen High to ultimately even out the populations at each of the city's four high schools.

"I think we're going the right direction (in KISD), trying to get all the Killeen schools to go 5A or 4A, but then if you add another division and that could cause problems," Jones said.

Contact Kevin Posival at kposival@kdhnews.com or (254) 501-7562.

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