Morning Read 2: In Glens Falls, fewer kids, fewer sports?
The Glens Falls Post Star is reporting this morning that the city’s school district is considering trimming the numbers of sports offerings.
According to Omar Ricardo Aquije’s report, the Glens Falls City School District has 600 fewer kids than in 1994, but offers the same sports choices.
Committee members said the district offeres too many sports for too few students.
“Our population is getting to the point where our pool of athletes is being spread too thin,” Herrick-Agnew said.
Committee members, though, disagreed on how sports should be adjusted to meet current enrollment.
One committee member said sport programs should be cut when the number of participants reaches a certain low. But other members said the committee should make recommendations now to phase out certain sports.
These are the kinds of conversations that nearly every school district in the North Country is having. Fewer dollars and fewer kids mean more tough choices. What are you seeing in your kids’ school district?
Tags: school sports
Beyond normal phys. ed. sports have nothing to do with education. It’s a money pit for what amounts to a special interest. Sad, but true. The same goes for music and art. Basic courses make sense, but these things are going to have to fund themselves somehow if they are to be retained.
It makes far more sense to be offering Vo-tech courses and teaching our kids to read and think than to be spending gobs of scarce cash to benefit the relative few that actually get a scholarship through sports, art or music.
A little off subject here but not all that much.
Why are we still funding education as though we have moved past 1820?
We are one of the few countries in the world that fund education through a local property tax.
You constantly hear from state and federal elected officials how important education is and how we need to compete with other countries, especially Indian and China.
That’s what they say.
So they should put their money where their mouths are and fully fund education with dollars from the state and federal budgets, and do away with the local property tax to pay for our schools.
Meant to say “haven’t moved past 1820.”
And if you think about it, in many areas we haven’t moved past the ideas and methods of 1820.
Bret’t opinion is wrong about sports, and especially wrong about music and art. While there are drawbacks to interscholastic sports (I think we all know of situations where sports become in fact, more important than school for some students, staff and parents)this is not the norm. Sports do instill qualities like discipline and cooperation that many kids would not pick up otherwise. In a sports program that is appropriately supervised will also have eligibility requirements that encourage athlete’s to meet academic goals they might otherwise ignore. As a (non-coaching) teacher, I saw the benefits of sports programs to student development all the time.
The idea of dropping music and art would be laughable, were it not happening so many places. I guess the main point is that student success in not gained simply by sitting in a classroom or a tech building, rather it should allow the student to succeed in an area in which he or she has an interest. The experience of mastery through study and practice is the best guarantor of later success, even if it does not turn out to be in the area originally studied. Saranac Lake’s outstanding Art program has produced a number of students who have achieved national success in their fields.
Bret is right about more Voc-Ed being needed. I could go on at some length about the tragedy of attempting to force-feed pre-college math to kids who would make excellent mechanics, carpenters, or health care workers.
Shop class for all, and only shop, so we can fix the old cars, because we can’t afford the new ones, because we have no money, because no business wants to move here, because the executives don’t like the schools, because there’s no sports or music in them. That would be my perfect world.
Bret: Just to probe your argument a little, why is normal phys ed a worthy part of a kid’s overall education but interscholastic sports are not?
I can’t speak for “my” upstate school district, having long ago left Saranac. But, in following college basketball as I do, I must note that Glens Falls High product Jimmer Fredette is currently leading the country in scoring while playing at Brigham Young. So the Glens Falls Fathers (and Mothers) are probably at their proudest with respect to what the Glens Falls school district has produced in the sports dept–a collegiate superstar and probable first-round NBA draft pick. Some day soon, the third child of Al and Kay Fredette will be a very rich fellow.
I would also add that “coaches” can be very good teachers; it is physical education, don’t forget, and such coaches often had the advantage of a unique access to kids who might otherwise be less reachable in traditional classroom settings. Controlling agression, fostering teamwork, and striving to achieve are all things effectively taught in sports–not so much in, say, calculus.
In regard to the comments about Career and Technical Education (formerly known as Vocational Education), I couldn’t agree more that there’s tremendous benefits to both students and, in fact, school districts from students attending CTE programs. Not to mention the benefit to some employers in our communities.
One thing the public should understand, however, is that CTE programs also stand to lose significant funding as a result of not only the decrease in direct state aide to school districts (which pay tuition for CTE programs that their students attend), but also the proposed cut and possible elimination of the percentage of what is called “aideable” services purchased via BOCES. For example, a district may pay tuition or fees to BOCES for various services (CTE program tuition being only one of many possible services purchased from a local BOCES) which they typically get back a large percentage of the following school year. This percentage varies from district to district. The Governor has proposed completely eliminating these “aideable” services as well as direct state aide to districts. Add to that the proposed property tax cap, and you suddenly have some districts and some local BOCES regions sinking in a perfect storm. The fallout from all this is unprecedented.
Better than cutting sports, why not eliminate Special Ed and the NYS Education Department.
Brian, I can see normal phys ed courses as a part of education, that is teaching the little darlings about nutrition, conditioning, why being a couch potato ends up catching up with you later in life. I can also see the teamwork and competitive education involved in it, and of course it gets the kids blood pumping a bit after sitting for several hours.
Where the interscholastic sports fail to meet educational status, at least in my opinion, is that they serve a tiny minority of the more athletically gifted students and that’s about all. In times of plenty it’s great to have a vibrant sports system, it’s a treat for those who participate and their families, and for those in the community that are interested. But it serves a tiny minority of the student population, serves in almost every case I’ve ever seen to create a hierarchy and resultant bullying/popularity above all else system and is really awfully expensive for the returns to the population as a whole. The system benefits those that excel, which is fine in one sense, but what does it do for EDUCATION?
The same can be said to a lessor extent for music and art. Those who excel benefit a great deal more than those who simply take the courses, get good grades and move on. Music and art tend to be far less a clique creating mechanism than sports, but I’m sure many of us have seen some pretty extravagant funds laid out to benefit a select few students…and the faculty of course.
Don’t get me wrong, I loved soccer, wrestling, chorus and still pay my guitar. I hated shop oddly enough, and yet here I am engaged in “shop” work every single day. If the choice comes down to loosing sports, art and music programs or math, reading, english and other more “pure” educational elements, I think the choice is both obvious and simple. You want to play football? There used to be Pop Warner Leagues all over the place. Soccer? AYSO. Baseball? Same thing, and for the other sports too. Music? What ever happened to the garage bands we used to have? Art? Those with talent can pursue it out of school too.
Hey, look, times are getting tough and they don’t look to be getting better anytime soon. Readin’, writin’ and ‘rithmatic are still the building blocks that the rest of our system depends on. Effective communication and good writing skills are the two educational deficiencies most noted by todays employers. Seems logical to me that more emphasis needs to go towards those issues than making sure Junior makes the 1st string team and Britny gets to be on the cheerleading squad and thereby gets the status they deserve, even if neither of them can string 6 words together coherently.
“If the choice comes down to loosing [sic] sports, art and music programs or math, reading, english and other more “pure” educational elements, I think the choice is both obvious and simple.”
Of course, outside the world of rhetoric, that is NOT the choice. Although I suppose the grammar and spelling on some of the above comments do illustrate your point about effective communication.
“they serve a tiny minority of the more athletically gifted students and that’s about all”
I doubt that’s accurate. At our local middle school, I believe around half of the 7th and 8th graders played a fall sport… and that’s not counting those who didn’t but play a winter or spring sport. I’m sure the percentage is higher at the smaller schools in the Adirondacks where they need every “warm body” they can get, Michael Jordan-esque or not.
The problem with phys ed is that most students treat it as a joke. Most kids, at least in middle and high school, don’t actually exercise hard because they don’t want to get sweaty for the rest of the day. The main exception is the hypercompetitive kids, who tend to be interscholastic athletes anyways.
Most parents of athletes will tell you their kids do BETTER during their sports season than in the off season… they certainly tell me that. I coach a sport and 88% of my kids this year made honor or merit roll during that season. That percentage is always much higher for the semester during the season than the others. If interscholastic sports are no longer affordable or should be transformed into intramurals instead, that’s up for debate. And you can certainly argue that there’s too much pressure by adults on student-athletes in small towns with not much else to do other than go to the basketball/football game.
But I don’t accept that it offers no benefits to kids or that it serves only a tiny elite. Lazy perception may bear that out but the reality as I’ve experienced it does not.
Just as you have advanced and AP classes for academic subjects as well as gifted and talented programs for exceptional students, aren’t interscholastic sports the advanced class of physical education?
My apologies for my grammar and spelling, but you do get the idea. Snide comments aside, I think you’re too close to the issue to see things clearly. You state you are invested in school athletics. You can’t possibly be unbiased anymore than the kid in his freshman year with a good shot at the varsity team can be. It’s JUST sports. GAMES. That’s NOT education.
Ahh so you can’t respond to my actual argument so you avoid it.
I’m speaking from personal experience. So yes that first-hand experience does color my perception. I’m presuming you’re not a school coach. That colors your perception too.
But who is unbiased? Your writings hint at something in your past that seems to make you resent what you see as special treatment or unearned social status given to athletes. As someone who was a bookworm (and probably the clumsiest, most unathletic person in my class) in school, I certainly understand why you see things that way and think that, in many places, it’s more than a little accurate. But doesn’t that color your perception as well?
Your contention is that interscholastic sports should not be part of school districts. I’m not sure I agree but it’s a fair question to have a fair discussion about
But you don’t have a fair discussion by excluding people with first hand experience. You don’t let them have a veto over the decision but you don’t exclude them either. I pay taxes; why should my voice not be heard? You include everyone in the discussion, even “biased” people like me as well as the mythical “unbiased” people.
The truth of the matter is that I think sports, arts, music and other extracurricular activities are a very important part of the educational system. Not essential that they must be provided by the public schools under any circumstance, but important enough that they should not be discarded casually and without serious reflection. I felt that way before I was a school coach and I feel that way now. If sports get cut and I go back to being an unpaid coach (which I still am in other areas), I will still feel that way.
I lived and taught in two countries where schools provided ONLY academic instruction. No school sports, arts, music or anything else. What you found were students who were not very well rounded and with a very narrow base of knowledge.
Sports and physical activity, arts and music are part of the economy and they should thus be part of public education.
And just for context, Bret, when I was in school, I participated in just about every extracurricular activity EXCEPT as an interscholastic athlete. And I did pretty well academically too. I don’t fit the big dumb jock stereotype, if that’s the image you have in your head.
Not at all Brian. My image of you is someone who can’t or won’t deal with the realities of today- we can’t afford to fund EVERYTHING anymore. Those days may well be gone for the foreseeable future. We need to cut and trim across the board. We need to concentrate on those things for which we have the most need and get us the most return. That’s not lacrosse, modern dance and interpretive art. It’s the 3 r’s, tech skills, and communication. Manners, character and and an additional language would also be nice.
I’d love to see our schools be able to fund all sorts of stuff- riding lessons, shooting teams, fencing, aircraft clubs and black and white smithing courses. Those would give additional opportunities to kids that maybe are looking for a different challenge. But we can’t do it, so we deal with it and move on.
BTW- yeah, I’ve had my fill of the celebrity status of student athletes while academics are pretty much ignored. Not because of anything that happened to me, I was a run of the mill jock as were my kids, but rather because of what I saw happen to other people kids. It’s just games man, nothing more, nothing less. That people get so bent over funding games, as though they really were part of education, is a pretty good reflection of our society- the fun is more important than the work.
Every school has to make choices. Sure I would like to have a full range of all sports offered to my children but understand that is not the case. Some sports are much more cost effective than others. What is the cost per student of particular sport? Does the sport generate revenue for the school? How about the intangibles like school pride, which are important.
The bottom line is that education happens in the classroom, this is where the most resources need to go, and everything else may be important but is secondary to the classroom and what is happening there.