Coaches, parents and former athletes made impassioned pleas Monday for the Franklin School Board to not ask students to pay for sports.
“It’s the glue that keeps these kids together,” said Mike Donnell, the Franklin varsity basketball coach.
All argued that a “pay to play” system, proposed as a way to ease some of the burden of an impending $1.4 million 2017-18 budget shortfall, would hurt struggling students.
Franklin JV softball and basketball Coach Kathleen Hawkins spoke through tears as she recounted her own high school sports experience.
“I would have been the kid that did not graduate because I had no structure,” she said. “In high school my grades were not important to me – they were to get me on that court, on that softball field.”
Hawkins attributed her college graduation, her role as a city parks and recreation employee, and her job as a coach all to having the chance to play school sports, for free.
“My parents wouldn’t have wanted to pay,” she said.
Franklin athletic director Dan Sylvester, at the school board’s request, presented exactly what “pay for play” would look like in the district.
By eliminating half the total district sports budget – $144,000, or 1 percent of the entire operating budget – Sylvester said that could be made up in full or in part by families paying for their children’s sports participation.
At the middle school, it would cost $157 per student, per sport. At the high school, it would cost $407, per student, per sport.
“Anyone that has more than one student athlete in the family, that’s an exorbitant amount,” Sylvester said. He admitted after, “That’s there to scare you.”
If the prices were more reasonable, Sylvester said – say, $25 per student per sport – it would cover very little of the overall cost. Just 16 percent of the student athletes in Franklin Middle School and 6 percent of those at Franklin High School would be paid for.
“So it’s pick your poison, I guess,” Sylvester said.
His statement could be generally applied to the predicament the Franklin School Board is in. After public outcry, numerous meetings with city officials and cutting 10 staff positions, the board managed to squeak out a budget following an almost $1 million shortfall.
As state adequacy aid continues to decline and retirement and health insurance costs generally rise, the board is now looking at a projected $1.4 million shortfall for next year.
To do what it can to address the issue, the Franklin School Board is scheduled to complete a budget proposal draft in April.
The “pay to play” idea, school board chair Tim Dow explained Monday, was just an idea – not a sure thing – that the board wanted to complete its due diligence on.
But meeting attendees said small cuts like that weren’t going to do the trick.
Some suggested engaging more with state legislators. Others, raising the city’s tax cap. One person thought Franklin should close down its schools and merge with Winnisquam School District.
Franklin native Tina Thurber said it could be anything, as long as it was different. As she was digging through her grandfather’s old stuff recently, Thurber said she found Franklin annual reports going back to 1958 – and they looked familiar.
“The sad part was in 1958, we were dealing with the same issues,” she said. “Because we always do what we’ve always done.”
(Elodie Reed can be reached at 369-3306, ereed@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @elodie_reed.)