Scrambling To Save Middle School Sports
Eliminating middle school athletics has become a nearly perennial threat used by Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools to help rally support for more local funding come budget season. Usually it works and somehow a last-minute, Hail Mary pass comes through to save sports, along with band, arts, and music programs.
But this year, with CMS facing upwards of an $80-million budget shortfall, even typically cynical politicos concede that middle school sports might be in actual danger of being sacked. That possibility has some school board members scrambling for solutions and calling audibles on the fly.
While a majority of school board members, including erstwhile “Coach” Joe White, last week gave Superintendent Peter Gorman a green light to continue crafting budget scenarios that include a $1.2-million cut that would sack all middle school athletic programs, they’re vowing to not sit idle on the sideline.
“I’m not fighting to get middle school athletics back in the budget,” White said, “but I will fight for us to find some way to at least keep them alive next year.”
One of those power-sweep options, however, has already fallen short of the goal. A plan to raise additional revenue through gate receipts, by tacking a $1 surcharge on tickets to all CMS high school sporting events, would yield $263,000. A nice pile of cash, but well shy of the $1.2 million needed to save middle school athletics.
“Gate receipts don’t provide enough money to put in place a substantive program, without something else to raise more revenue,” Gorman said.
That “something else” might come at the expense of eliminating targeted athletic programs, allowing the more popular sports to take the field (or court, as the case might be), while others receive an indefinite time-out, providing for what Gorman called “modified sports offerings”.
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