Sports fees climb in latest budget for Bend schools

Published 5:00 am Wednesday, May 27, 2009

The Bend-La Pine Schools budget committee on Tuesday recommended a spending plan that, in addition to eliminating 48 teaching positions and 16 support and administrative positions, will include an increase in pay-to-participate fees for middle school and high school athletics.

Although the district faces about $10 million in cuts, the budget does include some good news: If approved, it will allow Bend-La Pine Schools to keep its ending fund balance — a reserve held for emergencies — at about $4 million. Officials said the budget also will enable the district to add back as many as five full-time teachers, if needed, in the fall.

“We would delay filling those positions as long as we can,” said Superintendent Ron Wilkinson. “We’re still trying to avoid layoffs of teachers if at all possible. This gives us a cushion.”

In previous discussions, district officials had suggested cutting the ending fund balance by about $700,000. The changes reflect the Oregon Legislature’s proposed budget of $6 billion for K-12 schools for the 2009-11 biennium.

The budget was helped along by Bend-La Pine Schools’ employee groups, including two unions and other administrative employees, who agreed Tuesday to delay their cost-of-living increases and decrease some benefits, such as tuition reimbursement, for the 2009-10 school year. The agreements were ratified at Tuesday’s school board meeting.

The agreement with the district’s 1,800 employees will save about $2.8 million. Currently, the district is planning about $10 million in cuts; the agreement with employees will help the district avoid cutting school days.

For teachers, that means deferring their cost-of-living increases for six months, then cutting 2.5 workdays in the second six months. The other employee groups have deferred those increases for an entire school year.

On Tuesday, the most heated discussion among budget committee and board members came over the increase to pay-to-participate fees. Those fees were halved at the start of the 2007-08 school year. Since then, high school students have paid $65 to participate in each sport, and middle school students have paid $28. Families have a cap of $455 each school year. School board members said they’d be interested in changing the family cap in the near future.

That fee will increase to $100 for high school students and $40 for middle school students beginning this fall.

Proponents of the increase said the move would keep the district from shrinking schedules and eliminating lower-level programs. They said increasing the fee would help maintain strong athletic programs.

“If we let our athletic programs falter or become less than what they can be, then we’ll be doing worse by all our students,” said Jay Mathisen, La Pine High principal, suggesting students might abandon an athletic program with shortened schedules and other funding cuts. Mathisen and H.D. Weddel, who will take over as Bend High principal on June 30, spoke on behalf of all high school principals at the meeting. They suggested a fee as high as $130 for high school athletic participation.

The pair argued that the district hadn’t seen a significant increase in athletic participation since slashing the pay-to-participate fees in half. And they pointed to other school districts, like those in Beaverton and Eugene, with athletic fees as high as $150 per sport.

The Bend-La Pine Schools Foundation provides scholarships to athletes who can’t afford the fees, and President Lisa Zimmerman said she worried that if the fees increased significantly, the foundation might not be able to provide full scholarships to every student in need.

“I don’t have a crystal ball in front of me, but I think if they rise significantly we’ll see a rise in scholarship requests, based on the economy and families kind of struggling,” Zimmerman said. She noted the foundation had budgeted to fundraise at the $100 and $40 fee levels for the coming school year.

The budget now goes to the Bend-La Pine School Board, which will hold a hearing before voting on it. The district must have a budget in place for the 2009-10 school year by June 30.