We appreciate the connection that Clayton folks feel to their community and their high school. We say this after hearing parents lobby to keep their children within the Clayton High School attendance boundaries.

But while we admire the ties that bind, we can't help but think that a high school can get too big to best serve its students.

It's not that we fear the quality of learning suffers in a big school. We think high school kids are far enough along in their learning to handle large class sizes, for example. And bigger schools tend to have more course offerings than smaller ones. It's just that high school is more than book learning, and the larger a school gets, the harder it becomes for students to get the most out of school.

We're talking particularly about sports and other extracurricular activities. The evidence says that kids who play sports and belong to clubs tend to stay in school and make better grades than kids who don't.

But the basketball team can take only so many players, and the drama club has only so many roles. Which is to say that a student who wants to play basketball has a better chance at a smaller school than a bigger one. Ditto for the kid who wants to play Hamlet.

Clayton High School has much to recommend it, including a supportive and generous community. But the larger the school gets, the harder it becomes for young people to find their niche outside of the classroom.

We've never been uprooted from a school in a community we called home, so we don't mean to downplay the reservations that parents have about sending their children to Corinth-Holders. But the young people who go to Corinth-Holders High School will have chances they might not have had in Clayton. And that's got to be worth something.