NEW ORLEANS (AP) — The University of New Orleans may become Louisiana’s second school to begin a move from the NCAA’s Division I to Division III.

UNO, the city’s largest public university at 11,800 students and only about 100 students smaller than Tulane, announced Wednesday that it is considering such a drop.

The board of trustees for Centenary, a Methodist school in Shreveport with fewer than 900 undergraduate students, voted in July to make the switch, which requires approval by the NCAA.

Only five other schools have done so since 1981. Birmingham-Southern, which began the process in 2006, was the first in this decade.

On Tuesday, Mike Bujol told his staff that he had retired after less than four months as UNO’s interim athletic director.

The two announcements were not “directly related,” UNO spokesman Mike Rivault said. The division switch “is something that has been in discussion for some time.”

He said that if UNO applies for Division III — the deadline is May 15, 2010 — the process would take about four years, but travel expenses and Sun Belt Conference fees could drop immediately.

He said the biggest reason to consider dropping two divisions is that enrollment plummeted from 17,000 before Hurricane Katrina struck on Aug. 29, 2005, cutting more than $1 million a year from the student fees collected for the Athletic Department.

In May, UNO students rejected a proposal to double their athletic fees to nearly $200 a year. The increase was proposed to make up for a department deficit running $600,000 a year even before state budget cuts sliced off nearly $1 million for the 2009-10 fiscal year.

Athletic cutbacks — including cuts in administrative staff, leaving assistant coach jobs unfilled and cutting travel expenses — plus outside fundraising and a “windfall donation” from a supporter’s estate seemed to be enough to shore up athletics, Chancellor Tim Ryan said.

“Unfortunately, the private fundraising efforts did not materialize and the … estate is far less than anticipated and may take years to complete its distribution,” he said.

New Orleans Hornets owner George Shinn announced after the student vote that he was leading a task force to save Division I sports at UNO.

Hornets spokesman Harold Kaufman said Shinn and the organization “remain committed to using our resources to help UNO reach their goal. We have future promotional nights planned in the New Orleans Arena and in their venues.”

He said Shinn recently sent out a letter asking community leaders for specific commitments, but his illness — Shinn was recently diagnosed with prostate cancer — delayed follow-up.

A statement from the university’s athletic department read, “Coaches and staff are excited about the 2009-10 season.”

“We strongly urge UNO alumni, Privateer fans and the city of New Orleans to continue its loyal support of this great program,” the statement read.

Sun Belt Conference spokesman John McElwain said UNO “has been a great member of this league for 23 years.”

“We’re certainly understanding of the position they were put in following Katrina and the national economic downturn,” McElwain said. “These kinds of decisions need to be made by the university administration and we need to respect what they wish to do.”

Since Katrina, UNO has had an NCAA waiver allowing it to participate in Division I as a non-football school even though its nine league teams put it six below the minimum. Two years remain on that waiver, Rivault said.

Savings — including coaches’ salaries and the fact that Division III teams don’t have athletic scholarships — would let the school move its club football and soccer teams into NCAA sports, he said.

The NCAA now requires five sports for men and five for women in Division III, but that will be rising to six each.

“UNO feels confident it could easily field the required number of sports if not more under the reduced costs of Division III programs,” a university news release said.

NCAA spokeswoman Jennifer Kearns said in an e-mail that other moves from Division I to Division III were: Brooklyn College in 1998, Utica in 1988; New York University in 1984, and Catholic in 1981.

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AP Sports Writer Brett Martel contributed to this report.