In an effort to give their students the best education possible, the McKinney (Texas) School District is building a $70 million football stadium.
OK, let me try to come up with an even more absurd statement.
In an effort to give his son a toy railroad, Peter ate a pretzel.
In an effort to finish her article, Martha burned down the library.
In an effort to comprehend this insane statement, I made some borscht.
No, I give up.
Whatever you think of school athletic teams, they bring in $$$ for the school.
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lol no. Only for maybe the top 4-5% schools, and even then, it’s not like the $$$ is used for general school expenses. It comes with strings attached and goes back into those athletic programs.
The majority of college sports run at a net loss for the schools. After all, someone has to pay for the NCAA administrative bureaucracy that has now entrenched itself firmly within the college administrative systems.
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Oh, and I’d love to hear from you how this High School is going to offset 70 fucking million dollars to magically bring in net $$.
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\Whatever you think of school athletic teams, they bring in $$$ for the school.
This article claims the opposite:
\By suspending sports, Singleton realized, he could save $150,000 in one year. A third of this amount was being paid to teachers as coaching stipends, on top of the smaller costs: $27,000 for athletic supplies, $15,000 for insurance, $13,000 for referees, $12,000 for bus drivers. “There are so many things people don’t think about when they think of sports,” Singleton told me.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/10/the-case-against-high-school-sports/309447/
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“This article claims the opposite”
Well, reality claims the opposite, too, but it’s not like it would ever stop college sports fans from believing their own bullshit.
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The worst part is that these ginormous stadiums are never filled. They are often built in areas where there isn’t nearly enough population to support them.
I visited one such stadium in a tiny town in Oklahoma. It was enormous, brand-new, and completely empty. It was a scary sight.
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In Israel there are no school athletic teams, btw.
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All you need to know is that the original statement comes from Texas. (Texas: the home of the state board mandating teaching creationism, where football is the state religion, where schools spend more time teaching state history than national or world history, and which the US obtained from Mexico in what President Grant referred to as a totally unholy war. The state has caused more problems for this country than it is worth and probably should be repatriated to Mexico along with the Bush family.)
Then read the lyrics to Springstein’s “Glory Days”.
This will all make sense.
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From comments – turns out more money has probably been wasted:
QUOTE
An interesting fact about Texas high school stadiums: The school is legally obligated to build another building of the same cost for educational purposes. So they’re getting a library or art complex or something else as well.
…
Has to be an actual other building (or, likely in this case, buildings)
Otherwise I can’t think of why we built a 25 million dollar theatre complex for a high school that is better than a lot of colleges.
TEACHER’S COMMENT
texas teacher here in a district with a multiple state championship winning football team. when we built our massive stadium it was the 4th most expensive stadium in the state. now it isn’t even in the top 20. anyway, our stadium is used to host playoff games in the post-season. it’s also used to host track meets. those uses of the stadium pay for the entire athletic budget for the district each year. ticket sales and concessions for the football games pay for our theater arts department, our band transportation, and 10% of our district technology budget. this only works because we tend to have a strong football team and get into the playoffs in most years. this wouldn’t work if we had a crap team.
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In building the stadium, the schools benefit from the increased property taxes the district can levy, thus raising money for education. Never let anyone tell you that throwing gobs of money at a problem isn’t the answer. Since education is a mainly a credentialing process, a shiny new stadium increases the perceived value of the credential on the marketplace as being in the “right part of town” and a place where your kid can go to school with the “right” people. Also a football team increases the civic pride and regional unity of the area providing a buffer to the swings of the real estate market. Students learn important lessons about crowd behavior, hierarchy, strategy and group think and the very smart ones who participate as players optimize their IQ as being too smart is detrimental to success in life.
–the argument for the football stadium :p
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Shakti, your resoning has only one weak point when you single out the benefits to players’ IQ: “the very smart ones who participate as players optimize their IQ as being too smart is detrimental to success in life.”
In fact, I learned from comments that the entire community may participate:
QUOTE
The football program at my kids high school is extremely well supported. Almost all of that support comes from the community though and so academics aren’t really in competition with athletics for funding.
I always thought the big football program was pretty stupid. The games at the high school almost feel like a big college game. Since then, my opinion has evolved a bit. They do a pretty good job of involving a lot of kids. The marching band is hundreds of kids, the national anthem is sung by choir kids, there are lots of different cheer squads, and kids running booths and managing things. On football day, there’s definitely a lot of energy and excitement at the school and tickets for the game raise quite a bit of money. I don’t quite understand why so many people are so crazy for football (I’m a baseball guy myself), but the community aspect of it is pretty nice.
In the end, it’s up to that community. If they are willing to pay more taxes for the next 20 years or so, good for them. In my community, I think it would be a pretty easy sell.
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Clarissa, have you changed something in the blog? Dreidel’s picture is the same, but mine turned ugly. 😦
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It will go back to normal soon. I haven’t done anything, it’s just WordPress being its unpredictable self.
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It’s disconcerting when you nice familiar monster changes, isn’t it? Mine changed for a while too and I missed my cute little red girl. But then it flipped back and all was well. 😉
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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