Sports funding challenges schools, parents

It will likely cost more for Sisters youth to participate in sports next year.

Funding Sisters High School athletics for 2011-2012 will face substantial shortfalls due to major cuts to public school funding coming down from the state.

Responding to the budget cuts and the coaches' fundraising concerns, Superintendent Jim Golden presented a draft sports funding proposal to the school board last Wednesday night. Golden based his proposal on recommendations from a committee of two board members and selected district sports staff and coaches. He also talked to other superintendents, principals and athletic directors around the state about how they were handling their athletics funding challenges.

Per Golden's proposal, the "pay-to-play" fee for high school sports would be $150 per sport. There would be a $400 per-student per-year cap, and an $800 per-family per-year cap. All students on free lunch would get a full scholarship, and those on reduced lunch would get a proportional scholarship.

"This (fee schedule) will force some brutal decisions on families," Golden said.

Golden's proposal includes nearly $100,000 from the district's budget to be divided between the high school ($84,000) and the middle school ($14,000). This is $50,000 less than allocated last year, but the percentage split is the same.

The district will take the gate receipts from all sports to fund the athletic programs and maintain the sports facilities. Each sport will receive the pay-to-play money collected for that sport, plus a portion of the district's contribution based directly and solely on the last year's number of participants in that sport. Transportation costs accrued by each sport will be billed monthly.

Pay for coaches is also addressed in the draft.

"The important thing is the communication piece to coaches," said Golden. "Sorry folks, (these are) tough times... we can no longer sign coaching contracts at the beginning of the season unless you have the money; it will be based on revenue available. We are not going to give you any more than that because we can't deficit spend. We can't use general-fund dollars that are unappropriated. It will be pay-as-you-go."

The district wants to avoid being caught short on fundraising, as happened last year.

"I know that the board was, to a person, not pleased with the fact that they thought more money would be raised (last year), and in fact only one half (of what was promised) was raised," said Golden. "About $70,000 was promised, and a little over $30,000 was actually raised. The board had to make up the difference."

The board must approve the draft plan before it goes into action.

"It is important that we get a plan out as soon as the board approves it," Golden said. "We will have coaches sign (an) acknowledgement of how they will be doing business at the beginning of the season. We want to be certain that we don't have any misunderstandings."

The austerity measures raise concerns about participation for financially strapped members of the

community.

Board member Cheryl Stewart said, "There must be some discussion about the mechanism to make sure that all of our kids will get to participate. How do we get the word out quietly and discretely that the kids that aren't able to pay this, there is a way to get them in these sports? We are going to have to be very intentional about that."

Golden indicated that he will be talking to the Hillsboro district administrators about their very successful scholarship program.

There is a great deal of optimism about the potential funding solutions being developed by the Sisters Activities Cooperative, but that is a longer-term solution, and the cooperative will not have sufficient structure in place by the August 3 deadline that the district sports program requires. The cooperative is a joint venture that is striving to come up with a sustainable program that would use combination of school district, SPRD and private citizen funds and labor to support youth athletics.