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Never More Valuable
(October 2004)

As school districts debate the terrible choices before them to make up for a host of broken promises from state government (e.g., lottery and sales tax revenue) and from the federal government (e.g., No Child Left Behind), consider the following:

After location (proximity to home or work), the extracurricular activities program (especially interscholastic athletics) is a school's most valuable tool for attracting and holding students which, under the current system, is a school's best hope for weathering the harsh and long financial storm that buffets us.

The fundamental approach to educational reform by those in power at the state and federal levels of government for the past decade has been competition: school of choice, and vouchers to assist those choices.
At the same time that they are decreasing services and increasing class size, school districts are spending money on advertising campaigns in order to compete in this new environment - brochures, billboards, commercials on radio and television.

The advantage that traditional public schools have in student recruitment and retention is a broad and deep extracurricular program. Add participation fees to the privilege of participation, and families start looking around. Cut sports or levels of teams within a sport, and students start moving elsewhere.

Always valuable for generating community support for schools, always valuable for reaching and motivating students to stay in school, like school and do well in school, always important for teaching life skills such as teamwork and hard work, discipline and dedication, sportsmanship and leadership, school sports have never been more valuable than they are today. They are the competitive edge in school marketing.

I will never say that sports are more important than classroom curriculum. However, in the current environment where the number of students enrolled is the key to financial health, these valuable tools for assisting in the education of students are now also the most valuable tools for schools in the fight for students and the fiscal fitness of the school district.

These hard times will be weathered best by those school districts that maintain extracurricular programs – both athletic and non-athletic – that are broad and deep and available without charge to their constituents.

MHSAA Executive Director
John E. "Jack" Roberts