Athletics could be devastated if Measure C fails
Davis schools administrators and trustees recently ran a red flag halfway up their mast when they drew up a proposed layoff list for 80 employees. The jobs would be eliminated if Measure C is turned down by local voters in March.
At the same time, a yellow flag has been thrown on the playing fields of the Davis High athletic programs.
“Anything that takes away from our program would be extremely devastating to our overall school experience,” DHS athletic director Dennis Foster told The Enterprise.
If passed, Measure C would replace two expiring taxes (Measures Q and W), continuing to provide $6.5 million annually for the schools over the next five years.
If it fails, cuts would affect not only athletics but also music, science, foreign language and advanced placement classes; library services; staff training; and materials.
But with a precarious $200,000 budget for Blue Devil athletics, the local prep sports world would, according to Foster, take a huge step backward with the cuts.
“Certainly, stipends for the coaches are in jeopardy,” the second-year AD explains. “Maintenance funding for fields and indoor facilities will take a hit …”
Foster’s voice trails off before coming back to: “… and certainly, my position could be eliminated.”
With 41 teams in 27 sports, DHS has employed a full-time athletic director for only the past four years.
District Superintendent Winfred Roberson says having a 24/7 AD is important to the success of the sports programs. He agrees with most coaches at the high school that losing the position would be a giant setback.
Every varsity athletic team already conducts fundraisers or asks parents and guardians for additional money to keep their high-quality instruction, competition and facilities intact.
Davis has won 114 Sac-Joaquin Section titles — more than any area school, and almost twice as many championships as the next public school. Twelve of its varsity coaches have more than five years of experience with the Blue Devils.
Of the $200,000 athletic budget, the lion’s share — more than $115,000 — is used to pay coaches of varsity, junior varsity and freshman-level squads.
Without the stipends — some amounting to almost $5,000 annually — Foster isn’t sure how many coaches would continue to volunteer their time.
He went on to say that it wouldn’t be fair to ask a football coach, for example, to volunteer, because of the amount of time involved. With many coaches already using part of those stipends to hire assistants or provide “normal” equipment, Foster believes any shortfall in the athletic department would have to be made up by parents and community contributors.
Over the past 20 years, DHS athletics already has seen major cutbacks. Bus service was eliminated (except for football and sometimes track and field), uniforms are not district purchases, and most of the equipment used is the responsibility of players or parents to buy. And one sport — boys lacrosse — pays for its own officials.
As much as $35,000 annually goes to pay referees. The remainder of the athletic money, according to Foster, can go quickly “when we’re replacing a rim in a gym and planing a field like in softball or at the JV (baseball) field.”
There are emergency moments, too, as when boys soccer on occasion moved off campus and played at Playfields Park because of rain during its CIF championship campaign last fall.
“We have to be ready to pay those (unexpected) fees, too,” Foster added.
With more than 1,200 DHS and Da Vinci High student-athletes, almost 60 percent of the secondary kids participate in a Blue Devil sport.
If Measure C is beaten at the buzzer, for several sports there may not be a rematch.
“A lot depends on how the parents, boosters or community would support a certain sport in a given year,” Foster continued, adding that without the parcel-tax safety net, he can see some sports getting “uneven” results or shut down altogether.
“That outlook is not pretty.”
Notes: The $320 assessment per single-family home ($150 a year for apartment dwellers) will be a vote-by-mail decision in which ballots are sent to the electorate in the first week of February. All ballots must be mailed back to the Yolo County Elections Office or dropped off in a secure box at the Stephens Branch Library in Davis by March 6. … “As an educator, I see athletics as an integral part of the overall high school experience,” Foster says. “Clearly, not on a par with academics, but certainly a close second. Athletics can be the face of a school. (Playing) for some … it’s the reason they go to school; do their work to try to stay eligible; or to stay out of trouble.” Foster went on to say some people would be “surprised to know how much just participating, without being a star, can change a person’s life for the better.”
– Reach Bruce Gallaudet at bgallaudet@davisenterprise.net or (530) 747-8047.
Short URL: http://www.davisenterprise.com/?p=130691
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Posted by Bruce Gallaudet
on Jan 26 2012.
Last Login: Tue 22 May 2012 11:46:20 PM PDT
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For more information, see http://www.yesforourstudents.org
Thanks so much to Mr. Gallaudet for this well-researched column. I did not know that almost 60 percent of secondary students participate in a Blue Devil sport but I daily see the benefits that participating in school sports bring to my kids and our family.
The best thing for athletics would be to eliminate sports from schools. The best sports programs are privately run clubs like Davis Diamonds & Davis AquaDarts, among others. The youth baseball programs develop kids, not the schools. The coaching at private clubs is superior to that of the schools. Eliminating sports at schools may eliminate the problem of teaches giving preferential treatment, passing an athlete that can’t read, just so the kid can play in Friday night’s football game.
I strongly disagree. Not all sports have private clubs backing them up. Not all private sports clubs align with school programs. Private clubs are wonderful, but they do not do a great job of being available to lower income families. In several sports the coaching staff is well integrated between the private and school programs. They talk to each other, and occasionally coaches may go back and forth between private and school programs. School programs are more bound by rules and regulations that govern when they can hold practices and training; private clubs are not bound in this way, typically.
Although many good student varsity sports stars have had outside enrichment, the school program has, in most sports, a no-cut JV team. There maybe a certain amount of community fundraising that goes on with those teams, but in being associated with the school district, those teams have an obligation to make a sports experience accessible to families who can’t otherwise afford it.
There is a certain kind of snobbery directed at sports programs because they aren’t of a more traditionally pure academic nature; that somehow the students are just exercising and having fun, and maybe they could do that on their own. That ignores plenty of fundamental experiences that all adolescents should have in some way:
1) the experience of working together as a team. Because of the nature of academic assessments today, especially standardized testing, students tend focus on individual effort over being able to work with others to get things done. This is a valuable trait in the 21st century work environment.
2) In working together as a team, students build relationships with other committed students. Having a good positive social structure often makes all the difference in whether a kid wants to go to school or not.
3) There is a practice/training/performance environment in which students are guided to perservere through practice and training in order to delay gratification and experience the benefits of a good performance in athletic competition. That kind of experience is less tangible to many in most other academic pursuits.
4) Student success in athetics is tied to the reputation of the school. Even if a student or team does not have a winning season, the athletes want to have a reputation for having a good, competitive performance. And when they buy in to the school’s reputation for their public performance, they also buy in to the value of the school in other ways.
Someone who has had experiences as a student athlete or parent of a student athlete will recognize these benefits right away.
It is ultimately cheaper to all of us to give students a well rounded education right now than to pay later for social interventions (welfare, prison/corrections, etc.) connected to dropping out, teen pregnancy, drug abuse, and/or poor performance in school.