Time To Rethink Pay-To-Play Sports

Rising costs, wavering state aid, and growing resistance to property tax increases have pressured local boards and commissions to innovate when it comes time to make ends meet in the context of Newtown’s municipal budget. Nowhere is that pressure more keenly felt than on the Board of Education, which has done its best to protect the core educational resources and programs in our schools, often at the expense of capital projects, supplies, and some nonacademic programs. High school athletic programs, in particular, have been the focus of much of the sacrifice, and for several years, parents of athletes have been asked to subsidize the high school athletic program through pay-to-play fees.

For most sports, the fee is $125, though for some with fewer expenses, like cheerleading and cross-country, the fee drops to $50. For most families in town, the fee does not deter participation even for those with two or three student athletes on NHS teams. Most parents are not going to quibble over cost if it means their kids will have the proper equipment to safely play a sport. The fees they pay, however, are not taxes in the traditional sense. They are not assessed to all taxpayers, and most parents understand the arrangement to be a direct subsidy to their children’s participation in the scholastic sports program.

The pay-to-play fees, however, flow into the overall pool of revenue budgeted for sports programs by the Board of Education so that in a year like 2005-2006, when sports programs came in under budget by $6,356 and parents paid $21,701 more than had been budgeted as their share that year, none of the fees were returned to parents; they were realized as savings by the school board in the overall sports budget. Technically, the school board can claim that there were no “surplus” fees to return to parents since all their money was spent on sports — it’s just that the school board didn’t spend as much as it expected on sports, thanks in large part to the extra unanticipated revenues paid by parents.

Some may think this unfair. At least one other town does. Last month, the superintendent of schools in Monroe announced that as many as 900 parents of athletes at Masuk High School would be getting rebate checks for revenue collected above and beyond what had been budgeted for pay-to-play fees. It was a way for the high school to show its appreciation for the extra parental support to keep the sports program alive in a challenging fiscal environment.

Now, a month after the end of the fiscal year in Newtown, the Board of Education is still winding up its accounting of the 2006-2007 budget. If the final budget figures for scholastic sports look anything like they did in 2005-2006, it would be nice if the parents of Newtown High School’s student athletes could get the same show of appreciation. If parents choose to return the money to the sports program through the Blue and Gold Booster Club, that would be their choice — and their tax deduction.

Better yet, pay-to-play fees should be eliminated altogether. They represent less than three tenths of one percent of the school budget. Their significance seems to be more political than financial, since they annually remind parents of how depleted the school’s resources are at budget time. We see no evidence that Newtown taxpayers won’t support sports programs both in the schools and through the Parks and Recreation Department. Let’s stop pretending that they don’t by singling out just one set of parents each year for this ritual sacrifice.