Topeka ? As if the politics of deciding tax and budget issues weren’t tough enough, Kansas lawmakers may be asked this year to act as referee in another policy area: the cutthroat competition of high school athletics.

Specifically, coaches and athletics directors of medium-sized high schools say they’re growing weary of seeing state championship trophies going year after year to wealthy private schools that can offer scholarships and draw talent from a much larger population area.

And while they don’t like to point fingers at any one particular high school, it usually doesn’t take long before the name Bishop Miege High School comes up in conversation.

“What I’ve said from the get-go is, it’s not about one private school, but a whole group of private schools, but mainly those attached to large metropolitan areas,” said Jim Hines, athletics director at Paola High School in Miami County, and one of the leaders in the push to change the way high schools are classified.

But Bishop Miege is often mentioned because it has won the 4A-Division 1 football title three years in a row and is the current reigning champion in both boys and girls basketball.

In addition, its boys basketball team recently included a 7-foot, 213-pound player named Bol Bol, son of the late NBA star Manute Bol, who moved to Olathe after suffering career-ending injuries in a car crash in 2004.

Hines argues that the area within a 20-mile radius of Bishop Miege, located in Roeland Park, has a population of nearly 2 million people, and that Miege, with its highly regarded academic and athletic traditions, is free to choose from among the brightest and most talented students in that pool.

Public schools, by contrast, must accept any student who comes through the door, and they draw from a talent pool that is limited to their school district boundaries.

Hines said he is working with lawmakers to draft a bill to change a state law that currently says the Kansas State High School Activities Association may look only at enrollment numbers when determining how a high school is classified.

If that restriction is removed, he said, KSHSAA could consider other options. One would be to apply a multiplier for private schools, adding as much as 30 percent to their enrollment figures, to push them into the next highest competition class.

But Hines said that has been used in other states, including Missouri, without much success. He said his preference would be to apply a “success factor.” Under that, he said, any private school that finishes in the top eight of a class, meaning it qualified for the state tournament, three out of the last four years would be moved into the next higher class.

Mike Hukba, athletics director at Bishop Miege, said he would be willing to accept that, but only if it applied to private and public schools alike. But he sharply disputed the implication that Bishop Miege, or any other private school in Kansas, is actively recruiting athletes or offering athletic scholarships, which is prohibited under KSHSAA rules.

“The only thing we recruit is students,” he said. “We do not recruit athletes, we recruit students. A lot of factors go into that. We act within the laws and regulations of the Kansas State High School Athletics Association.”

Gary Musselman, KSHSAA executive director, said his organization is not taking sides on the issue, but he added that most private schools in Kansas use third-party contractors to review financial aid applications and make scholarship awards, specifically to avoid charges that they are violating the rules.

KSHSAA is currently in the process of overhauling its classification system, including making new determinations about how many schools will be placed in each class and what the enrollment cutoffs will be.

Much of that has to do with the 4A class itself, where there is a wide disparity between the smallest and largest high school in the class.

The KSHSAA board of directors will vote on that plan in April, he said, and if it is approved there, it will go to a vote of the 354 high schools that are part of the organization. There, it must be approved by majorities in at least four of the six competition classes.

Eric Nelson, athletics director at Bishop Seabury Academy in Lawrence, which competes in class 2A, said the proposals being discussed probably would not affect his teams.

“It’s mainly the larger classifications where the problem is,” he said. “At our level, I can’t think of anybody who’s dominating at the level of big schools like Miege.”

But Nelson said he agreed that if any kind of multiplier or success factor is used to bump powerhouse schools into higher competition classes, it should apply uniformly to both public and private schools.

Kansas State Board of Education member Jim McNiece, of Wichita, said he is aware of the current efforts underway to change the system, and he was aware of the controversy over how private schools are classified since he was a principal in both public and private high schools.

“That’s a question we have been asking in the Activities Association since I joined in 1976,” he said.

“Yeah, there are inherent advantages (for private schools),” McNiece said. “But on the other hand, they have some disadvantages too that other people don’t talk about. Lack of money. They charge tuition. I leave it up to the wisdom of the Activities Association to figure this one out. This is a Gordian knot.”