Freshmen Athletics on chopping block (photo courtesy of Belmont Patch)
The School Committee has tacked on an extra meeting onto its calendar to address the pressing issue of funding Freshman Athletics at Belmont High School. The meeting will be held on Monday, July 12, 2010 between 6:00pm and 10:00pm in the Community Room at Chenery. Belmont Patch has the details here.
What’s this all about? Well…we all knew that the fallout from the failure of the Prop 2 1/2 override vote in June would be swift and painful. And so it is.
In a message to the Belmont listserv at the time, I predicted that one of the early flash points with the administration would be over the cancellation of Freshmen athletics at the High School, and that the School Committee would feel pressure from parents who sought to privately fund that program. This prediction (which wasn’t so much soothsaying as connecting the dots) has proven accurate.
If you checked out the June 23, 2010 School Committee meeting (click this link to the fun on Blip.TV ) and you’ll know what I mean. This was technically the last SC meeting of the year but…wait…there’s something going on. What are all those PEOPLE doing sitting in the audience?!?!
You guessed it: they’re parents of CMS students (mostly) who are concerned that Freshmen athletics will be cancelled for the 2010-2011 school year because of lack of funds. Frankly, I was amazed throughout the campaign at the lack of interest or concern about that proposed change – especially by parents with kids at the Middle School, who would be directly affected and who would be forced with the unpleasant reality of fit, athletic and motivated kids being sidelined for an entire school year. As our BHS Principal Mike Harvey and our coaches made clear throughout the budget season – Freshmen athletics are critical to helping many students adjust socially to life at the High School, find their bearings and, heck, keep out of trouble. As the cops like to say: “Sports not Courts!”
I’m not sure why the warnings about that cut didn’t sink in – its probable that the YES campaign (of which I was a part) didn’t do a good job getting the message across to the right constituencies in town, or perhaps that residents and parents had a naive faith that the override would pass, even without their interest or vote. Or maybe they just weren’t paying attention. No longer. Now that the axe is falling, folks are trying to figure out a way to raise funds for athletics privately and shield Freshmen sports from it.
This is a noble effort and, certainly, neighboring towns like Arlington are going even further to bridge that town’s $3.9m budget deficit with its Bridge the Gap program. I have no doubt that concerned parents could raise the $40,000 or so necessary to save Freshmen sports this year, but that just raises more questions than it answers.
- Where will funding come from next year?
- What happens when the cuts extend beyond freshmen athletics to all athletics and extracurriculars?
- How will children from families of limited means take part in fee-based athletics? Does this create a two tiered district of active, wealthy kids and less affluent, idled kids?
- Is there a quid pro quo – do parents get a say in how the program is run? Do kids of parents who donate automatically “make the team”? or is it still a matter of picking the best kids for the team, contribution or no? Do families that donate whose kids don’t make the team get a refund, and how do you sustain the program that way?
These aren’t just a hypothetical questions. The Schools have already been steadily shifting costs from the operational budget to fees. Belmont families with kids in the public schools already pay $1 million in fees to support everything from athletics to elementary instrumental music.
The fact is clear and history is our guide: union negotiations and regionalization aside, educating our kids will cost more money five years from now than it does today, and even more 10 years from now. Unless the town radically changes the way it runs its schools, or finds a way to reallocate or increase revenues, cuts to school programs will have to go deeper to live within level budgets. Those cuts will eventually touch everything that isn’t mandated by the State or the Federal government or funded by external sources.
Of course, as Rahm Emmanuel famously said: “You should never let a good crisis go to waste.” In the chaos of the failed override may lie the seeds of truly meaningful change in our view of what a good public school system should and shouldn’t spend its resources on.
What other sources of private funding can Belmont tap and to what ends?
Perhaps, as one parent at the School Committee meeting suggested, parents could step up to fill the void left by salaried coaches: taking ownership of the athletics program directly and leaving the school administration to focus resources on, well, school.
If applied to freshman sports, why not JV and Varsity? Theater, government and other extracurriculars? This, of course, would de-professionalize big chunks of the instructional staff, and there are sure to be issues of quality and professionalism that will pop up, but more direct involvement of parents in the schools would, I imagine, also make them feel more like stakeholders and less like subjects of a (mostly) faceless bureaucracy? These are big, hairy questions and go directly against the status quo of U.S. public education over the last half century or so and, without both policy and structural changes, not much of importance is really going to be different in our public schools. But, once again, crises like the one we’re experiencing now force folks to think creatively and that, in the long term, often ends up being a good thing.