SAD 3 can’t afford varsity football

On Monday night SAD 3’s school board is going to vote, again, on whether to adopt football as a varsity sport at Mount View High School.

Football is a great American sport. It would be great to have a school-sponsored football team in Waldo County. But in fact, SAD 3 has more serious problems to solve.

Two years ago, the district cut hundreds of thousands of dollars out of its secondary instruction budget. These cuts resulted in the loss of more than 15 instructional staff, including teachers. The junior high’s industrial arts program was eliminated. The library budget was reduced by tens of thousands of dollars. Computer resources were sharply diminished, including staff reduction. Some classes have not had textbooks for all students. Last year, special programs were reduced, forcing more students into classrooms that were already crowded and difficult to manage.

Most of these positions, resources and programs have not been restored.

SAD 3’s finances have been so tight that the school board has consistently denied contributing money to the state-funded project to build a new school. There is escalating anxiety about the cost of fuel to heat buildings and run buses. A salary rise was recently approved for teachers, but because of a huge increase in the cost of health insurance, many of them will end up with smaller paychecks.

In addition to the complications of building a new school, the process of applying for re-accreditation is under way this year, and amid all this, SAD 3’s leadership is not settled. The superintendent and high school principal were new last year. In the past 12 months Mount View has had three athletic directors; at present it has none at all.

The main argument for adopting football in SAD 3 is that it might help prevent students from dropping out of school. This might be true. But no board member or school official I asked has offered any figure for how many students might be retained. Since the proponents did not know the details of their own argument, I tried to find out myself.

According to state statistics, Mount View High School’s dropout rate in 2004-05 was 4.46 percent. With about 492 students, this means about 22 students dropped out. Among those dropouts, how many might have played football? Even if it were as many as 15, and even if football prevented all 15 from quitting school – these are very generous assumptions – is a program that will cost a hyperoptimistic minimum of $25,000 a year justifiable to prop up, at most, 15 students?

The money SAD 3 spent on football could restore lost instructional resources that benefit virtually every student in some direct way.

One school board member wrote me saying that in SAD 3, “we are doing as well in delivering academics as many other high schools in similar circumstances.” But even if this is true, it’s no comfort to hear we are the same as everyone else: It is widely recognized that U.S. public education is in a serious academic crisis, and “similar circumstances” is a euphemism for “impoverished.” Like in other impoverished places, SAD 3’s academics are crippled.

Starting a varsity football program is not going to solve, or even address, any of these problems. A football team cannot replace a lost shop program. It cannot replace lost teaching staff. It cannot substitute for lost special programs. Because of its costs, it can only force painful choices between buses and heat.

Sports are important to schools. They complement academics. But sports cannot replace academic resources, as everyone who thinks maturely knows.

SAD 3’s board first voted on making football a school sport at the end of May, and narrowly rejected it. In April, football was being described as a “pilot” program, which the district would test for its viability. But the May vote came suddenly after a lawyer advised the board that a $17,000 donation from the school district to the private football club would be illegal. Almost overnight, football went from “pilot” program to varsity sport candidate.

Now, somehow, the decision is suddenly before the board again.

How one of the poorest school districts in Maine, in the middle of creating a new school, with instructional resources already severely reduced, with unsettled leadership, with fuel costs skyrocketing, and with no more financial resources than it ever had, can be thinking of starting a new, expensive varsity sport, is impossible to understand in any civically responsible way.

On Monday night, the board needs to hear some reasonable voices, and come back into the real world where all the kids, not just 40 football players, need the best shot we can give them at a decent education.

Dana Wilde lives in Troy.