“You know what Coxy let me ask you a question. Why'd you wanna play college hockey? Isn't it obvious? For the girls.” -Miracle
This past Monday, Megan and Morgan talked about sports being cut out from high school budgets. Megan gave an example of her high school near home. Megan was telling the class about how the high school completely cut sports from their budget and effects this decision had on the community. I personally went through this situation and it is not a fun one. The community really becomes too paranoid. My parents were looking into other private schools for me. Then they would fight over whether paying for school was in their budget. Luckily, in my case, I played hockey and Illinois High Schools Association did not support my sport due to insurance reasons. In other words, I did not have to go to a private school. However, there may be teacher and class cuts at my high school. This situation quickly became a mess.
Interestingly enough, there was one solution to stop this problem that my high school district did not consider. Sometime after 2000, Pepsi had come to our school district with an offer. My teacher, who taught my business law class, was telling our class Pepsi Co. wanted to end the Coke line products in our district area. Pepsi was willing to offer around $7 million dollars to the district under certain circumstances. One of the requirements for this deal was each high school within the district had to put in special field turf with Pepsi logos in each endzone. Another requirement was Pepsi Co. products are the only products allowed in the school.
Now I am sure there were other details. According to my teacher, she was saying the district was afraid the community would not like the Pepsi logo around the school. In fact, our vote did pass and taxes were raised around the area. Then again, last year, the high school changed their field to the special field turf even though money was tight. The district simply could have considered the offer and had a couple of Pepsi logos. Plus, the community would not have to raise taxes and elderly people would not have to complain. There would have been enough money for improvement in both sports and education. Our district would have been put on the map, as well.
Maybe its time high school districts should look into sponsorships!
Nice post on an interesting topic.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure why more school districts have not looked into securing sponsorship money to use towards athletics instead of initiating a "pay-to-play" program or cutting athletic funding altogether.
As we've discussed in class, and also read about in the textbook, participation in sport helps to bulid character in young men and women. If athletics are cut from district budgets across the country, that eliminates a positive outlet for kids to exert their energy and utilize their talents.
I think it would be a dangerous step to have corporate sponsors of high school programs. It is true that it happens in the Olympics and in professional sports, but I would hate to see the kind of ramifications that could ensue if that happened.
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